proud. What is self-love and self-respect? How to get rid of self-love

a moral feeling, in which a person expresses respect for himself as a person, based on the recognition of his dignity. Like pride, S. is an expression of a person's self-consciousness and in a certain way directs his actions, but, unlike her, is more personal, belongs entirely to the area of ​​\u200b\u200bindividual consciousness and is connected in the main. with an assessment of their own abilities and capabilities. In those cases when the feeling of S. becomes a stable distinguishing feature of the character of one or another person, it acquires the value of a moral quality. S. is a positive motive for behavior (and, accordingly, a quality) insofar as it helps a person in overcoming difficulties and his own weaknesses in order to achieve the results that he expects from him, and because it encourages a person to legitimately defend his dignity. But although S. often plays a positive role in people's behavior, it still does not make a person a conscious bearer of the ideas of communist morality, since in this case he performs actions for his own sake, in order to gain respect from those around him. S. becomes a negative quality when it turns from a demanding attitude towards oneself into unreasonable pride, into self-deception, which prevents a person from listening to comradely criticism, soberly assessing his actions and opportunities, and correcting his behavior. Such a sick S. plays the opposite role, paralyzing the activity of the individual, and ultimately humiliates human dignity.

Some qualities inherent in people initially have a lot in common, so it is not surprising that they are confused. For example, not everyone succeeds in distinguishing self-esteem from self-respect. In addition, it is possible to mistakenly endow traits with negative connotations without realizing their significance.

What is self-love?

Self-love is a feeling inherent in any person; full acceptance of one's own strengths and weaknesses. It is mistakenly equated with selfishness. In fact, it is it that helps to achieve success, to fence off the unnecessary, to avoid dangerous situations, not to suffer because of the progressive ones.

There are many myths around self-esteem that do not seek to debunk. Such an attitude towards oneself is often condemned, it is considered almost indecent. In society, they are more loyal to the notorious than to. Causes - or the belief that confident individuals are fixated on their own desires, ignoring others, and unable to have strong feelings for others. The latter is characteristic of people, but the roots of such behavior lie not in relation to oneself.

Wounded selfishness.

Both notorious teenagers and adult respectable men and women suffer from it. The syndrome is inherent in those who have problems with the ego. It is easy to offend such people by inadvertently dropping a sharp joke, criticizing their activities / appearance / choice, even looking “wrong”. Wounded pride is a strong reaction to external stimuli, which manifests itself almost instantly.

How to fight?

Stop getting angry in response to jokes; do not pay attention to phrases spoken specifically in order to hook pride. A person does not become ugly or untalented because someone voiced an insult out loud - his personality does not change in any way. Words, in fact, are not offensive: resentment is just a reaction to something.

It should be easier to relate to what others say. Someone's words do not affect the internal state. But anger, self-winding, resentment from scratch - they influence, and tangibly. Those who specifically say offensive things are trying to throw out the accumulated negativity, and almost any reaction of the respondent brings him a fair dose of negative. Ignoring or neutral attitude is a proven defense that saves nerves and composure.

What is self respect?

What is the difference between self-love and self-respect?

The concepts seem similar, but there is still a difference between them. The second is not able to exist without the first - without accepting itself externally and internally as a whole. But individual manifestations of self-esteem do not imply self-respect - for example, wounded. This is due to egoism, repressed complexes and other problems.

The difference is that respect by all means. At the same time, each person has pride, sometimes manifested in not the best forms. In general (not to be confused with) - a much more important quality, because it implies the complete acceptance of all negative and positive, work on oneself, ignoring the unnecessary.

The confusion between the terms is a completely understandable phenomenon, because they are considered adjacent. However, there are more differences between wounded self-esteem and self-respect than there are commonalities. The first quality should be eradicated, while the second, on the contrary, should be “nourished”. This implies not only the elimination of destructive traits, but also the development of the best ones. Helping others, respecting them and yourself is the key to a harmonious happy life.

Each of us is a person - this is an undeniable and absolute fact. Each of us represents something, has a unique set of traits and characteristics of character, a unique psychology and worldview, which makes us so different from each other. And yet in human psychology there are several common points that unite all people on Earth, several psychological characteristics that are observed in each person. One of these characteristics of human nature is pride. But what is self-love and how useful is it in the conditions of modern life?

Basic definition

Different psychological Talmuds define self-love in different ways. But in general, they all agree that pride is nothing more than a defense of one's social value and relevance. In other words, self-love can be defined as a trait due to which a person constantly grows above himself, becomes better, smarter, more attractive and maintains his value in society. Relative value, of course. But is this really a good incentive to improve your life? Everyone will find the answer for himself, because for each of us there is a personal motivation. However, let's just say: without love and self-respect, further spiritual, physical and intellectual growth is impossible.

Pros and cons

But self-esteem is good - many psychologists will say. And others will answer the opposite, they say, to exalt oneself extremely is akin to moral degradation. And by the way, they would be right too. After all, a proud person, as a rule, tries not only to inform others about the constant growth above himself, but also in every possible way to maintain the illusion of his own superiority. Of course, this is true in the case when a person is too fixated on himself, but, as practice shows, even the most modest people are prone to exaggeration of their own "I".

human praise

From the point of view of practical psychology, pride is the time when a person is actively fueled by various manifestations of social approval. In other words, when we are praised, we grow in our own eyes, and vice versa. A proud person, as a rule, builds in his head a certain scale of values ​​​​and goals that must be achieved by all means, and for this it is necessary to constantly strive somewhere and do something. Of course, this is good, especially in those cases when a person strives for goals that are useful for him and society. But when a person intentionally follows the path of self-destruction and degradation, pride here plays a somewhat perverted role. It is always important to remember that this quality in itself is a catalyst for desires and actions, but by no means the main reason.

selfishness

“Nobody loves self-loving people,” many people say so. But in fact, people definitely like it, especially those whose psychotype is characterized by pride. It is sometimes very easy to offend such a person - just say one word. Here, there is already a heightened self-esteem, in which a person focuses exclusively on satisfying his desires and needs, he is indifferent to those around him, by and large. We can say that too strong a manifestation of this quality leads to egocentrism, that is, to an extreme degree of egoism.

Striving to be the first

But if we talk about the normal, then this, of course, is good. A mentally and physically healthy person is always distinguished by self-esteem, and a fair amount. This is not a vice and not a reason for condemnation - such is the nature of people. After all, pride is nothing more than a motivation for personal and professional success. Young people are always proud, even those who are considered an example of modesty. This entails high ambition and the desire to succeed in whatever field. So you should always respect and love yourself - it's better to go too far than to underestimate yourself and your strengths.

hurt feeling

Of course, you should not intentionally hurt anyone's feelings, especially women's pride. Indeed, in this case, not only will you just offend a person, but you can also permanently lose a good relationship with him. For this, this is especially true, because, despite the uniqueness of each girl, they still, like men, have something in common. Women, especially in adulthood, are very sensitive to compliments and words of flattery, so it is better to remain silent than to tell a lie. And, of course, the fair sex is more sensitive to comments about the appearance, behavior and way of thinking from the people around them. For a lady of any age, it is important to feel comfortable and calm, so you should not point out any shortcomings in a straightforward, public way - just keep silent, but if it is so necessary to draw a woman's attention to this nuance, it is better to tell her this aside, in private. And hurt pride will not suffer much, and you will remain in a normal relationship.

Passion "self-love" in Greek - philautia. The word “philautia” indicates the essence of this passion, and our task is to look at this phenomenon, this phenomenon, in order to see the action of this passion in ourselves.

Literally, “philautia” is love for oneself. A proud person is fixated on himself, he loves himself, listens to himself and pleases himself. Philautia is pride, self-indulgence, love for one's body, self-pity, blind fear for oneself, self-preoccupation. This obsession with oneself is finite, oneself transient, loving one's desires, whims, so that it is in my opinion. Self-love is the opposite of what God wants from us. God wants us to love Him—God, and God wants us to love our neighbor. And a proud person is directed at himself - he does not love God, he cannot love God, he loves himself, his body, his will, his desires, his "I". God is eternal, I am finite. Self-love is the love of one's self, one's false self. When a person is directed towards God and fulfills the will of God, his egoistic "I", his imaginary self disappears, it does not exist. And when a person is not directed at God, but is directed at himself, his self, his “I” imaginary “exists”. This “I”, this selfhood does not really exist, this is something false, invented, this is self-will from which sin began, this is something damaged in a person, which the apostle Paul called the body of death, this is what he wants his own, to be in my opinion, according to my selfish desires, this is an old, passionately sinful person. Nicodemus the Holy Mountaineer says that pride is an old man. The Holy Fathers say that self-love is the main passion, from which three passions first emerge - love of glory, love of money, voluptuousness, and then all other passions.

In order to please God, to love God, in order to know Jesus Christ, you need to learn to look at what hinders this - self-love. Jesus Christ, by his life, gives an example of overcoming oneself and tells us: “If anyone wants to follow Me, deny himself, and take up your cross, and follow Me” [Mt 16:24]. But this passion acts in us independently of us - pride, philautia, and if we do not look at it, do not see its signs, it interferes in our life, in our doing according to God, and a crafty substitution occurs when it seems to us that we do the right thing - according to God, pleasing to God, we please God, but in fact we please ourselves if we do not see this enemy acting within us - self-love. The apostle Paul described this as “the good that I want I do not, but the evil that I do not want I do” [Rom 7:19]. Self-love is when we want to do according to God, but we fail, because we are used to doing it in our own way, according to our own self-pleasing. Self-love is the basis of all passions, and it is a habit, a passion, to please oneself. To realize that the fight against it is a hard and long business, you need to understand that passion is a sinful habit, it is a habit to follow not God, but dark forces. And in order to overcome this habit, you need, firstly, to see it in yourself, its signs, and secondly, to create a counter-habit, that is, slowly, in small steps, patiently and steadily do something according to God, overcoming your self-indulgence. You can’t overcome self-love right away, in a short time, because we are used to loving ourselves and pleasing ourselves. We need to realize the following fact: we often indulged ourselves, did what pleased ourselves, worried and cared only about ourselves, and if about others, then so that they indulge our pride. Man-pleasing is connected with self-pleasing, when a person flatters another, pleases him so that he takes care of him, pretends to love his neighbor, while he himself seeks only attention and love for himself.

In order to fight self-love in smart deeds, to resist this passion, you should turn your attention to yourself, to your mind and heart, in order to track the thoughts that kindle, give rise to the passion of self-love. How do passions ignite and form in us? We first accept thoughts, attachments that come from demons. Then we talk with them, the heart delights in them, then the will is connected and passion is created - a sinful habit of acting at the behest of the evil forces. In the fight against self-love, there should be a twofold work. First you need to track the thoughts of self-love, which the evil one throws into our minds, and then cast them out. We must clearly realize that these thoughts of self-pleasing are not ours. The cunning of the devil is that he deceives us in such a way that he makes us follow his will, but at the same time he makes us think that we are following ourselves, doing our own will. This is a cunning trap, a trick of the evil one to deceive us and enslave us. If we observe our heart in sobriety - attention to thoughts, then we see how thoughts of self-love have a destructive effect on the soul, on the heart, we notice that they are alien, hostile to us. We see how thoughts of self-pleasing (self-will) enter our heart, infect it with vanity, how we are captured by something alien, restless, evil and deadly. We realize with obviousness that this depresses us, it is harmful to us, bad for our heart, this is a disease that destroys health. Signs of thoughts of self-love, when we accept them, vanity and confusion appear in the heart. This is some kind of anxious self-preoccupation, preoccupied fussiness, a desire for things to be the way I want, and at the same time, irritable impatience arises. The main thing here is to catch in attention, in observing oneself, one’s heart, how the heart reacts to these enemy thoughts, attachments, how it is captured by preoccupied anxiety about oneself, how it is captured by something (someone) other - alien, dead and terrible . The criterion here is this - when we are with God, when we fulfill the will of God, we have peace and grace in our hearts, we feel good, our hearts feel good. We can observe this state in ourselves after attentive prayer, after Liturgy, participation in the Sacraments. We are with God, and we feel good, calm, peaceful and gracious. The Lord is eternal and gives absolute reliable eternal support. Self-love, on the other hand, is directed at the temporary, not eternal, finite, transient, and hence the fussiness and painful anxiety, uncertainty in the soul, in the heart from the thoughts of self-love, because it is impossible to rely on the transient, which is, and it no longer exists - this is a false support. It is easier to track the thoughts of self-love from a state of grace, calm, then the anxiety and fuss that they bring are most noticeable and conscious. For example, we leave the church after confession, communion, or get up after an attentive, calm prayer - and then thoughts appear. Thoughts that we would like something, we need to do something, evil thoughts against people who have infringed on our pride, etc. These thoughts enter our heart, and anxiety appears in it, something is felt , something is wrong, the peace that was from communion with God is disturbed. We observe signs of the impact of thoughts of self-love on the heart - this is restlessness, vanity, anxiety, trouble, torment. You need to be clearly aware that these are hostile and painful thoughts - “I want it to be in my opinion, according to my pride, so that it is good for me, but I want impatiently, irritably, that it be here and now the way I want”, and I suffer from these thoughts. And if, in my opinion, it doesn’t work out, then immediately anger and fear. Dostoevsky called it "to live according to one's stupid will." This is an abnormal action of the desirable and irritable forces of the soul.

If we trace in ourselves that these tormenting thoughts of self-love, self-pleasing (to be my way, how I love, how I want) - this is something alien in me and I get sick from it, I feel bad about it, then this awareness a very good start for the fight against self-esteem. If we saw this in ourselves, if we saw the thoughts that enter into us, into our hearts and begin to torment us, excite and disturb us, if we track these thoughts in sobriety (attention to the heart), recognize them as alien, as enemy, then we can resist them, tell them “no!”, reject them from ourselves, from our heart. Hesychius of Jerusalem calls this operation of cutting off enemy thoughts from the heart "contradiction of thoughts." We say to thoughts and passions - no, because it is not mine, it is someone else's and hostile, and we cut off, we drive them away from ourselves.

And when I see that these thoughts are not mine and I reject them, then I create counter-thoughts, i.e., I intensify thoughts in myself that are opposite to self-loving ones. This is the second operation in the fight against thoughts - the creation of a counter-thought, the creation of a thought opposite to a self-loving thought, the creation of a god-pleasing thought, so that a god-pleasing thought opposes a self-pleasing thought. The Word of God is a source for charitable thoughts.

The third operation is to fight, to drive away from oneself, to drive out thoughts and passions from the heart with the Jesus Prayer or any other prayer. If we inadvertently let an enemy thought into our hearts, self-loving thoughts multiply, and passion begins to ignite - here you need to pray intensely, better than Jesus, in order to defeat and drive away enemies in the Name of Jesus, to stop passion, sinful spiritual movement.

Here are three operations to combat the thoughts of self-love (and in general all enemy thoughts). To see the thought of pride and tell him - no, this is not mine in me, this is a deception that my thought is an enemy, who wants to kill me, destroy me, I feel bad from him. Realizing this, I cut it off from myself and create a counter-thought, I begin to think according to God (and not in my own way), and the common feature of all counter-thoughts is that they are based on the Word of God and, unlike the thoughts of self-love, which inspire to fulfill one’s will, one’s desires aimed at doing the will of God. Next, I say the Jesus Prayer so that the spiritual fire of prayer drives away thoughts and calms the passions driven by the forces of darkness.

An example - the thought of self-pleasing came, which inspires me to do something in my own way, as I want, to do something unreal, unreasonable, inappropriate, inconsistent with the real situation. It kind of blinds, darkens the mind, pushes me to the wrong action, it excites me with the desire to do it according to my own will. And in myself I say to this thought - “no”, and then I say to myself - “As the Lord gives, as he manages, as he instructs, so it will be.” And this thought calms me down. I really calm down. Impatience, anxiety, doubt, self-willed greedy desire, confusion, embarrassment are overcome by calm faith-confidence in God, in His love and providential care. Self-indulgence, self-love is - "like it, don't like it." It pisses me off, upsets me - there is discord in my heart, desires are torn apart. If I stop all this in myself, create a counter-thought - I think “As the Lord gives, so it will be”, create a thought of faith, a thought of relying on the will of God, on his commandments, then I will see that my heart calms down, some kind of stability appears, because I leave my will and accept the will of God, I accept His commandments in thought and heart, I trust in the will of God, and the Lord gives comfort and strength. But since the confusion from the chaos of selfish thoughts and passions does not immediately go away, I begin to methodically strike the enemy like a sword with the Jesus Prayer until the enemy runs away, then the thoughts of self-indulgence will dissipate, the passions will calm down and grace-filled peace will appear in the heart, peace in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Why is it important to gain experience in dealing with yourself - with pride. An ordinary person feels his helplessness in front of the enemy's evil thoughts. He is in a confused state from the attack of thoughts and passions and does not know what is happening to him and what to do with it. But if he has ascetic skills and has experience of internal warfare in his heart, then he begins to feel that he is not so helpless. Even if there are strong shocks, unrest and attacks, but a person sees that he can at least a little resist mental enemies, passions, fight them with the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, then there appears a calm confidence that the Lord Jesus Christ is with you, he will protect you and will not leave you. . This faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, love for the Lord Jesus Christ, prayerful striving for the Lord Jesus overcomes self-love, leads out of the blind lost state of self-loving obsession with oneself, out of the horror and anxiety of self-willed God-forsakenness, gives peace, peace and grace.

Lord help us!

emotional attitude, reflecting a person's assessment of himself. Sharp explosive manifestations of S. are inherent in boys and girls during puberty. It is important for each person to have a certain measure of S. and self-respect. Without it, there is no individuality. However, excessive S. harms both others and the individual himself. In this case, it interferes with the correct assessment of positive traits in other people, and can also lead to an increase in egoism. Painful S. is a sign of a person's own inferiority complex and the cause of conflicts.

pride

predilection for oneself, vanity, resentment, the desire to have better personal qualities than others, to be above others.

In the underworld, behind the scenes, self-esteem knows no gender: the success of an artist - whether a man or a woman is indifferent - restores the entire troupe against him (O. Balzac, Eve's Daughter).

"Grushnitsky! - I said. – There is still time; give up your slander, and I will forgive you everything. You failed to fool me, and my pride is satisfied ”(M. Lermontov, Hero of Our Time).

Self-love accompanies all other types of love (Voltaire).

I will not let her boast that she was the first to leave me (J.-B. Moliere, Philistine in the nobility).

Wed honor.

A girl in adolescence wants as many hearts to be broken because of her in order to satisfy her pride (H. Deutsch, Psychology of a Woman).

Women commit suicide when their narcissistic ego is damaged. In general, they can be offended precisely by this (ibid.).

Above all passions - pride (Isaac the Sirin). Wed narcissism.