Dear Dr. Reality,
There’s a phrase I hear so often, and I’m not sure if it’s true. “You can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself.” Do you think this is true? I’ve been grappling with this one for a while, and haven’t been able to decide whether it’s just annoying psychobabble, or if there’s validity to it. Being more compassionate toward myself has enhanced my intimate relationships immeasurably, but I’m not willing to accept that I’ve been unloving during periods of self-loathing.
Signed, Skeptical
Dear Skeptical,
Love is an emotion and a definition of a relationship. As an emotion, you can love your partner, the Red Sox, or chocolate; as the definition of a relationship, it means that the other person’s happiness or well-being is a reinforcer of your own behavior. Abusive parents are always going on about how much they love their children, and if they mean how they feel about them, then I have no dispute (or basis of disagreement), but if they mean the definition of the relationship, I have to point out sometimes that their behavior more closely aligns with the idea that they hate their children.
It takes a tremendous amount of vulnerability to allow someone else’s well-being to be a reward. There’s a risk that the other person will decide that their happiness doesn’t include you as much as you want to be included—this is almost bound to happen if the other person is your own child. There’s a risk that we all adjust to the love we think we deserve, so if you love someone else, the other person might start to think better of herself and conclude that she can do better than us. There’s a risk that the other person will screw things up and wreck our source of reinforcement. These are just some of the risks, as I’m sure you know. Think city of Cleveland and LeBron James: they felt the emotion of love, but they didn’t really want what was best for him.
It seems pretty obvious that you can feel the emotion of love regardless of how healthy you are. The emotion of love is what we feel about an intermittent reinforcer. (Do Hawaiians love a nice day as much as New Englanders? I doubt it.) No doubt Hitler loved his dog—and the German Army until Stalingrad.
What relation to ourselves is necessary to support a loving relationship with another person? We’d have to be resilient and generally optimistic about our potential, or else the risks and vulnerabilities would be too powerful. We’d have to have an array of available social reinforcers and skills to obtain them, because we would respond to our lover by trying to control her if she was the only important source of reinforcement. In fact, if she were our only source of reinforcement and she had any autonomy at all, we would hate her. And how do we become people who are resilient, generally optimistic, open, and socially skilled? We get this way if we have been the object of other people’s love.
So the answer to your question is not, yes, “You can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself.” The answer is yes, “You can’t love someone else if you haven’t been loved.”
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
Nice behavioral response. And go Sox.
You highlighted an important distinction- love as an emotion, and love as a behavior. A person of my persuasion tends to instinctually think of it as the former, though lately I’ve been trying to retrain myself to think of it as the latter. I see no reason why they can’t be thought of distinct but both valid. Regarding your example, the parent who abuses their child often claims that they love their child. I suppose you’re right in that I have no way to disprove this, but the parents’ actions clearly state otherwise. After all, it’s what a person does, not what they say, that define them. Verbal behavior symbolically represents outward observable behavior, though it is mostly an inaccurate account for a variety of reasons that Skinner and Hayes can write about better than I can.
It’s your last point that I’ve read and re-read a few times. I think I’m coming to understand it as in order to be in a stable, loving relationship, one must be able to handle the natural ebbs and flows, and one can do this if one has learned that that is a natural part of intimate relationships. Or, if you’ve been through a crappy time in a close relationship and still managed to be reciprocally loved, then you can probably do it again. If you haven’t learned this in your interpersonal history, then it’ll be an uphill climb. That climb will consist of risks, peaks and valleys, but if you can sustain loving and being loved, then it can be a new valuable experience. IMO, this is what Functional Analytic Psychotherapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy are all about.
I agree with all of Dave’s comments, and yours of course Michael. Hey Dave, go Sox!
But to throw my usual wrench in the system 🙂 How about those who have been loved and have the frame and roadmap of love in place, yet still choose otherwise? Also, how about the psychopaths and sociopaths of the world? The Harvey Cleckley types in particular, who mimic love (in the absence or presence of the frame) to wreak havoc. The movie “We need to talk about Kevin,” comes to mind.
Thanks for your comments, Dave and Ioannis. I just ad a plug for the novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin, the single smartest thing I’ve ever read about attachment. It doesn’t wreck your point, Ioannis, but in the book you would hardly describe Kevin as being loved in the usual sense of the word.