Inna Shukshina

Recently, in one Orthodox community, I saw a long discussion prompted by my book “5 steps to loving yourself”. In fact it was not the book itself that started the discussion (the participants do not seem even to have read it, they were only guessing at its contents 🙂 ), but the concepts themselves. One side argued that loving yourself is a sin and that a Christian should practise self-abasement, as the Holy Fathers commanded us, while the other side spoke of how much good a psychologist had done them and how they had literally been saved and had their faith strengthened.

Let me start by saying that the furious opponents of the notion of “love for yourself” are usually men 🙂 In my experience I have come across such persecutors several times — people who simply hated the notion of “love for yourself”. Most likely it is a matter of misunderstanding this notion, or of the differences between women’s and men’s psychology.

What does a woman have in Russia today? Exhausting daily chores, an unending stream of tasks, constant care of the children, a job with a heavy workload and by no means astronomical sums of money. And if you add to that things to do at church and at school, it turns out there is simply no time for herself. Taking up a hobby is shameful, taking care of your appearance is a sin, travel or a holiday is an unreasonable waste of money. Dejection and feelings are to be crushed. And so the only pleasures left are sweets and the internet.

And in such conditions — when no one has actually lifted the main workload, however much you love yourself — everything that could help you see new opportunities, grow in your career, learn to set aside time to care for yourself (and this by no means includes only sitting in front of a mirror, as everyone immediately imagines, although that matters too — both for a husband and for children), but also study, creativity, development, rest — in short, the normal needs of a mature person. For whom, in order to be harmonious, eating well and paying the utility bills on time is nowhere near enough.

And what about our feelings? What do you do with them? Simply crush them inside yourself? But that is the path to disorders and depression — and, by the way, it has already been proved. Living them through also requires setting aside time! In order to listen to yourself and understand something important. And where is my boat actually going along the river of life? What am I missing in the succession of identical days? What is happening with my relationships? With my sense of myself? With my plans and dreams? I cannot simply take myself as a person and throw myself away!

And on this subject I came across an interesting article

“When contrition over sins… does no good

It happens that a person sees some sin of theirs, recognises their passion and comes to deep contrition, sometimes even feeling disgust towards themselves. But then a natural question arises: can such contrition be hidden pride? The thing is that all the trees growing in the soil of our heart, like any tree, the Lord commands us to know by their fruit. If the fruit of this contrition, this penitent frame of mind and even, at certain times, disgust towards what is hidden in our heart, is a change of life, if this state brings with it a zeal for self-correction, then it is undoubtedly a genuine tree of repentance, bearing the fruit that corresponds to it. But if the result of such contrition is slackness, dejection reaching as far as despair, or the state usually called self-eating or rumination, then it is not genuine repentance but precisely a manifestation of the pride living in our heart.

Godly sorrow, in fact, never brings a person into a state of slackness, but makes them stronger, more zealous, gives them the resolve to fight sin. Everything else is a person’s sorrow that they are not as good as they would like to be.

It is important to remember here that even sincere and healthy contrition over one’s sins can grow into self-abasement, which is worse than pride.”  Hegumen Nektary (Morozov) 

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/90954.html

An interesting point, by the way. There is the Russian phrase “humility is ‘pache’ pride”, which we understand to mean that humility will defeat pride. But here it sounds different: “self-abasement is ‘pache’ pride” — and the sense is exactly the opposite, namely that self-abasement is worse than pride, which is generally considered the root of all sins 🙂 In other sources an equals sign was placed between “humility” and “self-abasement”. To me the version “self-abasement is worse than pride” seems closer to the truth.

How did it come about that an Orthodox person on a forum, absolutely certain that they are right, argues that self-abasement is good and beneficial?

Let us look at the continuation of Hegumen Nektary’s thought:

“Of course, there are moments when even genuine repentance is very painful in character, since for a person who has done something bad it is quite natural to ache over it in their heart, and sometimes even physically. But this period is, as a rule, not a long one. And it is unlikely that the joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents applies to those who waste away from their repentance instead of beginning to change. The most vivid and well-known image of such repentance, which does not lead to salvation, is Judas. He repented of betraying his Teacher, went out and hanged himself.”

And it is precisely people who have had thoughts of suicide, or who were on the brink of it, who know that what leads to it is exactly hatred of oneself, the sense of one’s own complete worthlessness.

So it turns out that our love of self-eating is nothing other than an unwillingness to act, to change in an active way. Instead we want to reason a bit more… think a bit more… read a bit more…

“We are all very different. The venerable elder Paisios of Mount Athos said that there are people who are just like an oak log — insensitive — and there are hypersensitive people. And whereas the enemy tries to plunge an insensitive person into even greater insensitivity, so that they do not even realise what they are doing, a hypersensitive person the enemy will, on the contrary, drive to despair. And so it turns out that one person needs to focus attention on their mistakes, stumblings and falls into sin, so that by looking closely at them they experience the pain which in the end should draw a tear of repentance from their eyes; while another, on the contrary, needs to distance themselves a little from the sin they have committed, because otherwise they will simply not survive and will perish.” (quoted from Hegumen Nektary).

There you have it — that is exactly how it is. Most likely it is precisely such slightly oaken 🙂 people who criticise love for yourself. Whereas we, who can spend a whole evening tormented by someone’s sideways glance 🙂 — we, on the contrary, are in vital need of kind, supportive soil, like a fragile but beautiful plant. On the contrary, we scarcely believe kind words and praise, and the belief that I am, in fact, not a bad person and have a right to human dignity, to feelings and desires, has to be cultivated in ourselves. Otherwise it will be constant codependent relationships, dejection, and any job will drive us to emotional burnout and exhaustion and health problems…

So go ahead and learn to love yourself! The Holy Fathers support you in this 🙂

And if you already want to start taking practical steps towards this, then sign up for a personal consultation on the topic of love for yourself over Skype or by phone — write to inly@list.ru!

With love, Inna Shukshina, inspiring coach, psychologist