Loving Ourselves and Others Part 7

September 21, 2026

Loving those we consider “unlovable” can be a tremendous spiritual challenge. We may think of ourselves as loving and accepting people, but then someone comes along who gets under our skin—and suddenly our love reaches its limit. We pull away. We close our hearts.

You and I know the people I am talking about. They may manipulate the generosity of others, ask for money while struggling with an addiction, make harsh judgments without knowing the circumstances, or use a position of authority to feather their own nest. The list of troubling behaviors, attitudes, and words goes on and on.

Why is it so difficult to love these people? One possible answer is unsettling: they may remind us of ourselves. All of us have been undesirable in someone else’s eyes. More importantly, some aspects of ourselves are undesirable even to us. Sometimes we react strongly to another person’s behavior because, at some level, we recognize something of ourselves in it.

Perhaps that quality surfaced in us sometime in the past, and we quickly repressed it. Perhaps we expressed it openly and still carry guilt or shame about what we did. Or perhaps we know that the potential for such behavior exists within us, even though we have never acted upon it. Whatever the reason, when we see something openly displayed in another person something we have rejected within ourselves, we may react with discomfort. We condemn it in them partly because we are afraid of it in ourselves. We distance ourselves from the person, and love can no longer pass between us.

Of course, not every strong reaction is a projection. Some behaviors are genuinely destructive and must be confronted. Loving people does not require approving their actions, enabling their addictions, submitting to their abuse, or remaining in unsafe situations. Love sometimes requires truth, firm boundaries, accountability, and distance. But even a necessary boundary does not require hatred. The deeper question is whether we can oppose harmful behavior without denying the humanity—and the soul—of the person behaving harmfully.

Often, we reject an unwanted aspect of our nature and bury it under the stairs or lock it in the basement and throw away the key. But the rejected part does not disappear. It keeps banging on the basement door. It escapes from beneath the stairs—or threatens to. What we refuse to acknowledge keeps seeking our attention, because what is buried alive within us does not remain silent.

This inner rejection may turn inward and become self-loathing. We can come to believe that we are despicable, unworthy, or beyond redemption, and we live beneath the weight of shame. At other times, we project our self-loathing outward. The quality we cannot bear in ourselves becomes the very quality we despise in someone else. Neither path brings healing.

The way toward freedom is to turn compassionately toward the aspect of ourselves we have rejected. We face it honestly. We come to understand how it came to be. We accept responsibility for any harm it may have caused. We seek forgiveness, make amends where possible, and ask for healing. Healing does not necessarily eliminate every shadow within us. It changes our relationship to the shadow. We learn that acknowledging a part of ourselves is not the same as allowing it to rule us. We can hold it in the light of consciousness, where it can be understood, transformed, and placed in service to the soul.

In true healing, we no longer despise ourselves—not even the shadowed aspects of our humanity. We come to understand that every energy within us, once made conscious and surrendered to the Divine, can be redirected toward the fulfillment of our destiny. Aggression may become courage. Judgment may become discernment. Neediness may become the humility to receive. Even our deepest wounds may become openings through which compassion enters the world.

As we learn to hold our own humanity with truth and mercy, something remarkable happens— we become freer to extend that same mercy to others. We no longer require them to meet the ego’s standards of lovableness before we recognize their sacred worth. I believe that within every human being is a seed planted by the Divine at the moment of our making. That seed may be buried beneath addiction, selfishness, cruelty, fear, or years of unconscious living—but it is still there. Loving another person means looking deeply enough to remember that the seed exists, even when we cannot yet see it.

Spiritual Practice

“Those people”. Can we love them without approving of what they do? Can we protect ourselves without despising them? Can we look beyond the behavior and remember the sacred seed within? And can we offer that same merciful vision to the parts of ourselves we have kept locked away? Do we accept that we are sometimes “those people? 

Inquiry

What aspect of your shadow self must be loved today? 

Prayer

Dear God, 

You and I both know what must be healed deep inside me today. I pray for it now.

Amen