“To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question - whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.”
— Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1473
We’re told to love ourselves like it’s a spa day we forgot to schedule.
Like if we just believed hard enough in our inherent worthiness, lit the right candle, or repeated the right affirmation in the mirror, we’d finally feel whole.
But we have known for a long time that isn’t the way the human experience works. Jung knew better as did many writers who came before him. Jung knew that loving yourself isn’t new nails or an upgraded set of air pods - it’s a glowing, red-hot iron that burns into you.
It’s uncomfortable.
And he knew something else too: that loving someone else is the escape we’re all hoping for.
I see this in my work constantly. The brilliant, self-aware person who can articulate exactly what their wounds are, exactly where their patterns come from, exactly what they need to heal - and then they fall in love.
And suddenly, all that clarity gets channeled into understanding them. Fixing them. Being there for them. It feels like progress. It feels like love. It feels like anything but what it actually is: an escape from the experiment of whether you can actually love yourself.
And it works. For a while.
Until the day you have to love something in them that you’re deeply ashamed of in yourself.
When the Escape Stops Working
Here’s what I’ve come to understand, both in my own life and through working with others: most of our insecurity in relationship doesn’t come from the other person at all.
It comes from the places where we’re scared of ourselves.
The things that trigger you most in your partner? Look closer. They’re usually the exact things you’re in judgment about in yourself. The patterns you attract in others - the struggles, the complications, the unhealed parts - those are often the very things you haven’t been willing to embrace in your own body, your own history, your own way of being.
We find each other to solve it together. To hold up mirrors. To give each other one more chance to practice the love we’ve been withholding from ourselves.
That’s not toxic, it’s human.
The beginning is easy because you are loving a projection. You are able to show such limited parts of who you are. There’s a veil.
But you can’t stay lost in loving the possibility of someone else forever. Eventually, they need you to love them in a way that requires you to love yourself first. They need you to accept something ugly and inconvenient in them that you’ve been running from in yourself.
They need you to stay present with a complication that makes you want to bolt - not from them, but from the glowing red-hot iron of your own unlovable parts.
That’s when the test actually begins. The relationship becomes a jail or something completely new based wholly on your ability to love yourself.
What Self-Love Actually Requires
So how do we do it? How do we embrace the iron?
Not through affirmations. Not through positive self-talk. Not through convincing ourselves we’re worthy. Not through distilling emotion into repeatable phrases.
Through self-trust.
Self-love is built through the practice of listening to yourself - to your intuitions, your desires, the things that are really important to you - and not gaslighting yourself into silence.
It’s built through the slow, uncomfortable work of taking yourself seriously when the world is asking you to be smaller, quieter, optimized.
And I know what you’re thinking: But I have bills to pay. I have responsibilities. I can’t just follow every whim and desire.
You’re right. This isn’t about blowing up your life in the name of authenticity. It’s not about pretending constraints don’t exist.
It’s about building trust with yourself within those constraints. It’s about the small moments when you have an intuition - about a relationship, about a decision, about what you need - and instead of immediately overriding it with logic or fear or what you “should” do, you pause. You listen. You let yourself matter. You take yourself seriously.
Because here’s the thing: you know when you’re betraying yourself. Your body knows. And every time you override that knowing, every time you gaslight yourself into compliance, you’re proving to yourself that you can’t be trusted. That your inner voice doesn’t matter. That loving yourself is conditional on being acceptable to everyone else first.
The Intimacy of Complication
Real self-love - the kind Jung is talking about, the kind that burns - is intimacy with yourself. Not the polished, curated version. Not the version that’s easy to adore. The messy version. The complicated version. The version with edges and triggers and parts that make other people wildly uncomfortable.
It’s loving the thing about you that’s too much. Too intense. Too sensitive. Too demanding. Too weird. Too angry. Too needy. Too ambitious. Too sexual. Too spiritual. Too whatever-it-is that you’ve spent years trying to sand down or hide or constantly apologize for.
This is the iron. This is what burns.
Because to really love these parts means to stop waiting for permission to exist as you are. It means embracing the things about yourself that aren’t acceptable, that don’t fit, that complicate your relationships and make your life harder. It means staying when you want to run. It means looking directly at the parts of yourself you’ve been using other people to escape from.
And yes, it’s painful. Jung was right about that too.
But here’s what happens on the other side of the burning: you become free.
Not free from constraint or responsibility or the reality of living in the world. Free from the exhausting work of abandoning yourself. Free from the cycle of seeking love outside yourself to avoid the love you’re withholding from within.
You learn that you can be trusted. That your desires matter. That the complicated, triggering, unacceptable parts of you aren’t problems to be solved - they’re aspects of yourself waiting to be embraced. Embraced by you.
And then - only then - you can actually love someone else.
Not as an escape. Not as a mirror to avoid looking at yourself. Not as a portal to an upgraded life where you won’t exist as you really are. But as a full person who’s done the experiment, who’s embraced the iron, who knows what it means to stay.
And the only way through it is to stop running from yourself and come home.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.
such a good post. and while I did, quote "blow up my life", I agree with so much of what you are sharing here.