When we haven't learned how to love ourselves well, we keep getting stuck on the simple first rung of the ladder. We don't know how or how well to treat others and we have problems with what we call boundaries. We stumble through the swamps of low self-esteem and thickets of self-loathing that derail us in our efforts to "love others as ourselves." . . .
In order to walk this path we must first understand that self-love is not narcissism. Nor is it egotism, greed, self-righteousness, self-involvement, stubbornness, or conceit, all of which have given real self-love a bad name. Rather, it is the singing spring from which each of us can become our most authentic self.
— Daphne Rose Kingma, Loving Yourself