“Is it bad to be selfish?” People often ask this question, seeking reassurance that they are not selfish – as if being selfish is unloving and being loving means being selfless.
It’s helpful to consider what we mean by selfishness. Is it being irresponsible, narcissistic, or bad? Choosing to hurt someone? How has selfishness come to mean something harmful?
We may have grown up learning that meeting our parents needs instead of our own was necessary for safety, or to keep the peace. We may have learned that saying what we want and that we matter might cause a relationship to end. We may have been taught that we were “too much” because we wanted to be treated like we mattered. Religious organizations may have taught us that sharing and self sacrifice are loving, and selfishness is sinful. We might have learned that if we are nice and unselfish toward others, they will treat us the same way.
We learn to please people and neglect our own wants, needs, and wishes. We might be worried about something bad happening if we treat ourselves as if we matter. But in the long term it’s tiring and it’s a lot of effort to anticipate another’s needs, to try to please, to avoid conflict, and to neglect ourselves. We eventually learn that being nice to others does not guarantee that others will be nice to us. True selfishness occurs when someone says they matter more and tries to get their needs and wants met regardless of how it affects others.
A helpful definition of selfishness might be: treating myself as if I matter to me, or considering that my wants, needs and preferences are at least as important as other people whom we care about or are caring for. If we can do this, we may be more likely to learn to love ourselves, as defined in the blog Feb. 7, 2025: Self-love is the ability to appreciate, accept, and care for oneself regardless of external achievements or validation (Comeau, 2025). If we can practice treating ourselves as if we matter, and question whether being selfish in this way is bad; we might learn to enjoy it. We may come to trust that what we want, and need is legitimate, regardless of how others treat us or what we have accomplished. When we are honest in a relationship about what we want and need, everyone benefits – and there is more security – not less – in the relationship.
To help practice we can ask ourselves: “why do I think this is selfish? What am I worried will happen? Is this true? Maybe we can trust that we don’t want to hurt someone and that relationships might last or improve if we consider our wants and needs.
If we are with people who have the willingness and ability to disagree and problem solve, and to consider everyone’s wants and needs as much as possible, we can learn to practice this kind of “selfishness” without criticizing ourselves for being bad or mean or all the other labels that might keep us neglecting ourselves. We can strive for honesty and acceptance in relationships about what we each want and need. Everyone benefits and there is more security – not less. We are seeking in therapy to learn to be the authority in our own lives: to make our own preferences, wants and needs known to others and to have the freedom to choose how we can get those wants and needs met and which ones we can compromise on. It’s when we feel we can’t choose because of fear of being “selfish”, that fear takes away our choices. Instead of selfish, how about treating ourselves as if we matter?
Author: Jodey Sharman, Reg. Psychologist
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