My previous article, Loving yourself. What it is. addressed the grey area of what it means to love yourself. I encourage you to read it. There's a flip side to this. It's not only possible to over-love yourself. It's possible to be incredibly attracted to who you are without ever actually loving yourself. This article addresses what loving yourself isn't.

Putting your needs before others all the time is not loving yourself. If your family needs food but you need a new pair of shoes, opting for the shoes is not a sign of loving yourself. This is a sign of self-absorption. Yes, you are important. You, however, aren't more important than everyone else. As a matter of fact, aside from a child in need, you aren't more important that anyone else on this planet.

Being disrespectful to others does not mean you love yourself. If someone addresses you and you chose to ignore them or huff how you don't have time for their pitiful discussions, you aren't someone who has a grasp on self-love. How you act toward others shows to a high degree how much self-loathing you truly possess. While loving yourself discusses how to embrace the self-love concept,

Pushing away your feelings and denying that there are aspects of your life that are painful is not self love. Even if they are painful, acknowledging the pain is better than allowing it to bottle up. Talk about it. Work through your anxiousness, rage and irritation. You can work out, sleep more, or talk to someone. Figure out how to deal with the difficult times in your past before you explode.

Being arrogant or believing you are better because you "love yourself" is not an expression of self love. Don't use the excuse of "loving yourself" as a reason to set yourself on a higher pedestal than others. You need to love others first in order to love yourself. And the best way to love other people is react toward them in a positive and considerate way.

Don't diss them. Don't talk about the lines on their face or the bumps on their thighs, their dark roots or their family's questionable background. Finding faults in others doesn't make you feel better, it makes you feel insecure. The more you pick someone apart, the more you are sure others are doing the same to you.

Lying about yourself in order to make oneself feel better is not a course to discovering self love. Instead of evading a confrontation or just looking for the positive, there are people who stick to lying about everything. It's the liar who is sure everyone else is lying too. Likewise, it's the fashionista who talks about someone's crow's feet in the ladies room at a PR event who is sure the crow-feet encrusted woman is talking about the bags under her eyes and how awful that shade of beige washes out her skin. Suddenly the back stabbing insecure bitch who is dishing dirt in the ladies room is convinced she has no friends. Not because that is the truth, but because she knows she doesn't deserve those friends.

Rather than believing you are better than others, being hurtful to the point of bullying, putting your needs above everyone else's, burying your feelings or lying about how you feel, try truth, kindness and consideration - not just for other people, but for yourself as well. As you trade in arrogance for empathy and bragging for complimenting, you'll discover a cathartic realization that you aren't a bad person and neither are the people around you.