Selfish. Good or Bad?

What we refer to as Recovery is in large part the recovery of the authentic self. That is: outside of living in recovery, our sense of self is both fake and fragile (our adaptive, constructed ego-self).

Ego-self is selfish: it is afraid of annihilation and is motivated to prevail, even if at the expense of violating our own authentic values and other people’s too. It is self-seeking.

Anything that is self-seeking is literally in search of the (real) self. So we have not found our authentic self and we desperately defend the fake self for fear of discovering a “nothing”, “nobody”, “no-one” or “no-self”.

Indeed, how do we discern between selfishness as self-seeking versus self-caring, which we know is vital to recovery? I think it comes back to the values that are motivating our choices: authentic, or adapted?

It is a logical necessity for humans to hold the authentic value that all humans matter. Only the ego can believe the fallacy that it matters but not others. I can’t recognize my own intrinsic value unless I experience it as universally unconditional. If I matter but someone else doesn’t, it means I matter conditionally: I matter if I am me, but not if I am you. Well, how do I know then that it’s not the other way around: you matter and I don’t?

So the authentic self does care about others without abandoning itself. That is not the same as codependence. The codependent says “I don’t matter unless I make you matter first”. The authentic self says “I matter and so do you.”

If selflessness is a spiritual virtue, it only has meaning if I have a self to begin with. How can I choose to set my self aside when I haven’t owned it yet? Not possible. And setting my self aside as an intentional choice is very different from self-abandonment.

So I would say that “selfish behaviors” are recognizable by the following attributes: they please or reassure the false and fragile self (adapted ego), they somehow make the statement that someone else doesn’t matter as much as I do, and they ultimately obscure my authentic self and violate my authentic values.

If I matter and so do others, there will be situations in which I’m faced with competing authentic values. This forces a decision. The self-seeking person always preserves the ego so there is no real decision-making. The self-ful person weighs the situation and makes a decision and then grieves the loss of setting the other value aside.

The self-seeking person ignores or avoids experiencing loss. The self-ful person understands and accepts that losses are as fundamental to life as are gains: (s)he chooses the losses that hold more meaning and knows how to grieve them.

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