There are two kinds of selfishness. Negative selfishness is self-centered and harmful. Positive selfishness is healthy boundary-setting and self-care, even if it upsets others. When you take care of yourself, you generate positive energy that benefits the people around you.
Chapters
Selfishness gets a bad rep. We're told a lot not to be selfish, and then we think that it's a bad thing to think about what you want for yourself. And I would like to describe selfishness in 2 different ways. There's positive selfishness and negative selfishness. So negative selfishness is when you never put the needs of others before your own and you intentionally go out to harm or to hurt because all you're worried about is yourself. And that also might fall into the idea that when we spoke about the window of comfort before, when we are trying to get ourselves into our window of comfort, we will do whatever we can to get it there. And that's quite a selfish thing to do because all we're thinking about is what we need. And again, those, generally those needs then are quite maladaptive and come from a negative space. And then positive selfishness is actually, you know what, I need to do the best thing for me. I know other people might not like it, but they need to deal with their emotions for themselves because it's okay and it's really vital that you do things that are gonna make you happy regardless of the impact that they might have on other people. And people need to deal with their things for themselves. And what we want in our lives is for people that go, you know what, I understand that. I understand that you need to do this for you, and I'm happy that you're going to do this for you, even though that may not really suit what I want. So that's what I would describe as positive selfishness and self-care. You need to look after yourself, because if you're healthy, if you are the most emotionally healthy person you can be, everybody will benefit. Because they will feed off of your positive energy. You'll be able to give more to them. You'll be able to be there more for them. And if people don't support you in that, then again, they're not looking after your needs. They're not going to be able to be there for you. So they're the ones that are actually being quite selfish because they're not able to say, I know that you need this. I know that this is good for you. And actually, I'm going to probably benefit from the fact that you're feeling really good about yourself. If someone tries to stop you from doing that, Then they've got some kind of issue going on, which means that they need you to be in a negative space. They need you to be in a space where you're there just for them.
