Love Yourself™: The Self-Love Industry’s Toxic Positivity Problem

I sit across from a woman who paid nearly $2,000 for an online “self-love bootcamp.” She’s desperately clinging to a mantra she learned: “I am worthy, I am enough,” repeated with a strained smile. Her eyes tell a different story. Tears well up as she confesses that after weeks of forcing herself to “stay positive” and banish all “negative” thoughts, she feels more broken than ever. The promise was that loving herself unapologetically would unlock a life of bliss. Instead, she’s exhausted, disillusioned, and ashamed—convinced that she somehow failed at self-love. In that moment, watching her wrestle with the dissonance between a plastered-on grin and the pain beneath, I can’t help but think: Something is deeply wrong with the way we’re teaching people to love themselves.

Welcome to the booming self-love industry, where the simple and profound idea of embracing oneself has been packaged into expensive courses, slick social media campaigns, and glossy weekend workshops. Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’ll be bombarded with pastel-colored affirmations and #SelfLove hashtags (the tag has over 30 billion views on TikTok). Pop culture reverberates with the command to “love yourself first,” from RuPaul’s famous line to viral TED talks. What was once a counter-cultural call for self-acceptance has been co-opted and commodified. In today’s marketplace, self-love isn’t a journey of the soul—it’s a product you can buy on a website, a slogan on a T-shirt, an online challenge to complete.

The Shiny World of Self-Love Gurus

Not long ago, the idea of “loving yourself” was relegated to hippie philosophy and the footnotes of psychology. Now it’s a global enterprise. There are $300 online courses promising to make you fall in love with your own life, complete with guided meditations and printable workbooks. (One course, blatantly titled “Radical Self-Love,” offers 17 video lessons, an e-book and even a $500 retreat voucher, all for the special price of $297.) There are life coaches on YouTube and Instagram with millions of followers, each branding themselves as experts in self-worth and confidence. They post impeccably filtered images of themselves doing yoga on the beach or grinning in mirror selfies, captioned with upbeat platitudes about how you, too, can be this happy once you learn to love yourself.

Some of the biggest names in the self-improvement world have pivoted to this self-love zeitgeist. In glossy arenas and convention centers, motivational gurus lead thousands in chanting self-affirmations. Their methods vary—some lean on pop psychology, others on spiritual Law of Attraction lore—but the underlying sales pitch is strikingly similar: You can positive-think your way to a better you. For example, the Tony Robbins school of thought (echoed by countless coaching programs) insists that if he could overcome his hardships, anyone can; you just need to banish victimhood and embrace constant improvement​.

It’s a message that sells well: who wouldn’t want to hear that success and happiness are simply a mindset hack away? The self-love gurus promise that through sheer mindset mastery – through visualizations, affirmations, and relentless positivity – you can transform your reality.

On the surface, these ideas appear empowering. Certainly, practices like meditation, journaling, or setting boundaries can be healthy tools for self-care. The problem is how they’re being framed and sold. The path to self-love has been simplified into catch-all actions – take a bubble bath, say ten nice things to yourself in the mirror, repeat every day – as if loving yourself is a checklist to complete. The term “self-love” itself has been commodified, turned into a glossy ideal rather than a messy personal process. As one commentator observed,“I really think that the term ‘self love’ has been commodified in a lot of ways”, reduced to meditation apps and spa products.

Behind many of these programs are self-styled coaches and influencers who often blur the line between genuine guidance and salesmanship. Take, for instance, a prominent blogger-turned-guru who built a brand around “Radical Self-Love.” Young women adored her glittery positivity—until she started charging hefty prices for exclusive content that was little more than rehashed motivational quotes. 

Even traditional self-help titans have jumped on the self-love bandwagon. Publishing houses churn out books teaching you to be your own best friend. Celebrity coaches talk about the importance of mirror work—Louise Hay’s famous exercise of looking into your eyes and saying “I love you” daily—or tell you to give yourself a high-five every morning (a trend popularized by another coach). These rituals can indeed spark a momentary feel-good boost. But lurking in the background is often a misleading narrative: that if you just try hard enough, if you stay positive enough, you’ll silence all inner demons. And if you can’t manage that? Well, maybe you just didn’t believe in yourself quite enough. It’s a seductive promise, and a perilous one.

When Self-Love Becomes Toxic Positivity

The darker side of this industry reveals itself in the fine print of these shiny promises. What happens when the affirmations and positive vibes don’t work as advertised? Here is where self-love, as sold by these gurus, can slide into what psychologists now call toxic positivity. This is the insistence on being optimistic and “high-vibe” at all times, to the point of denying reality. In the context of self-love courses, toxic positivity manifests as an almost militant cheerfulness: you’re encouraged to “focus only on the good,” to treat any natural negative emotion as an enemy to be eliminated. One popular mantra says, “Don’t feed your fears, starve them with love.” Translation: if you feel afraid, sad, or angry, just smother it in more positivity.

I’ve seen clients who come from these programs practically brainwashed into smiling through their pain. They’ve been taught that a negative thought isn’t just uncomfortable – it’s wrong. One woman showed me a journal from her self-love seminar where the coach had everyone write down their three most painful beliefs, then cross them out in thick marker and overwrite them with affirmations like “I am powerful and happy.” When she admitted she still felt insecure the next week, the coach scolded her for “holding onto negativity” and instructed her to double down on those affirmations. What positive thinking actually did was teach her to ignore her true feelings, to effectively hypnotize herself into denial. The result was not empowerment, but a profound self-alienation. As I’ve written before, “every time you force yourself to be positive, negativity grows within”. You might manage to paste a smile on your face for a while, but inside, the unacknowledged pain only festers.

Psychologists echo this concern. Harriet Frew, an eating disorder therapist, has seen firsthand how pressuring oneself to “love your body!” or “think happy thoughts!” can backfire. Forcing self-loving thoughts or feelings when you’re “feeling kind of crap” can be “super harmful,” Frew says, because it glosses over deeper emotions and needs, often causing isolation and disconnection. In other words, telling someone who is struggling with self-worth to “just love yourself more” is a bit like handing a drowning person a bouquet of roses. It not only misses the point; it adds a layer of shame. Now, in addition to whatever suffering they had, they feel guilty for not being positive enough. The internal monologue goes: “Everyone else can love themselves, what’s wrong with me?” The irony is cruel: a movement ostensibly about compassion for oneself ends up breeding self-judgment for anyone who can’t achieve permanent bliss.

This toxic positivity is more than just a personal issue—it’s cultural. The self-love industry often pushes a narrative that if you aren’t happy, if you don’t love yourself, the fault lies entirely within you. Never mind the very real external challenges people face—poverty, discrimination, trauma, illness. As a biting analysis in The Face put it, today’s self-love messaging reframes structural problems as individual mindset failures. Society’s pressures and injustices get recast as simply negativity you haven’t “risen above.” I’ve met people who were told that their depression or anxiety could be vanquished if only they spoke kindly enough to their mirror reflection – effectively implying that their clinical condition was a spiritual failure or lack of willpower. It’s a convenient storyline for the gurus: it absolves the program of blame (“If you didn’t get results, you weren’t positive enough!”) and it aligns with a very American ethic of individualism. But it victim-blames those who are suffering, and worse, it detaches us from reality. By this logic, if a person is marginalized or struggling, it’s because they haven’t learned to love themselves properly, not because the world might be harsh or unjust.

The more I investigated, the more I saw how positivity culture has become a polished three-card trick. First, shame people for any negative feelings (“stop being so pessimistic, it’s bad energy”). Second, sell them the solution of personal responsibility (“you alone are responsible for fixing your mindset and thus your life”). Third, enforce compliance by celebrating those who “get with the program” and silently shunning those who don’t (“if you stay stuck, it’s your choice”). This trick distracts from the deeper issues both within a person and in society at large. In psychologist Oksana Yakushko’s words, “the insistence on optimism and happiness as ideal states” becomes a form of social compliance, requiring us to deny legitimate pain and injustice so we can play Pollyanna. We end up with a chorus of perma-smiling people, all secretly wondering why deep fulfillment eludes them even as they dutifully recite that they’re “glad for everything.”

Disillusioned Devotees and Shattered Reflections

For every success story touted in the testimonials section of a self-love course (and there are always a few glowing reviews about lives changed by “choosing self-love”), there are countless quieter stories of disillusionment. In my line of work, I hear from the ones who aren’t plastered on the website banners. They’re the people who did everything the program said, and still feel incomplete. They often come to me after the high of a self-love workshop wears off, when real life creeps back in with its complexities.

One young man, a client I’ll call Jon, described his experience after investing in a high-profile self-development coach’s “Love Yourself First” program. Jon had always struggled with loneliness and was told that his lack of romantic success stemmed from not loving himself enough. Desperate to fix this (and frankly, to get a girlfriend), he dove headfirst into the course’s regimen: daily gratitude lists, mirror compliments, no negative talk. For a few weeks, he reported feeling a boost—“like I was on this motivational cloud,” he said. He even asked a woman out on a date, something he hadn’t done in ages. But when that date fizzled, Jon crashed hard. His inner critic, which he’d tried so hard to silence, came roaring back with vengeance: See? You’re unlovable, even all this self-love stuff didn’t fix you. The course had taught him to invalidate any self-doubt, so he now doubled down, chastising himself for being “weak” and forcing a smile even as he felt like crying. It wasn’t long before he found himself in a darker place than where he started, now convinced that not only was he alone, but he was a failure for not being happy alone.

Jon’s experience isn’t unique. On an online forum, I read a post titled “Why ‘Love Yourself First’ is toxic positivity” by someone who sounded just like him. The poster lamented how often people told him he must love himself before anyone else could love him, which only made him feel more hopeless. “If you’ve always been alone, you can’t just magically learn to love yourself. That comes from experience—experience you don’t have yet,” he wrote. It resonated deeply: how unfair it is to demand someone generate an emotion in a void. Telling a chronically single person to “first love yourself and then you’ll find love” might be well-intentioned, but it can land like a slap. It says: the problem isn’t circumstance, it’s you. As this person astutely noted, it’s like seeing a hallucination—without outside perspective, how do you even know your self-love is real? Must we wait for someone else to love us to grant ourselves permission to feel worthy? The self-love gurus would say no, of course not—love is supposed to come from within. Yet the paradox remains: many people literally do not know how to love themselves in isolation, and being shamed for it only deepens their isolation.

I also think of Maria, an old acquaintance and fervent devotee of a famous positivity influencer. She had spent years diligently following this influencer’s every suggestion to manifest her best life. Maria’s vision board was a collage of smiley-faced aspiration: the perfect body, the perfect relationship, the word “JOY” in glitter. When her life didn’t magically blossom, the influencer’s advice was always: “Raise your vibration. Positive thoughts only.” Maria would berate herself for any moments of sadness, hiding away on hard days so as not to “attract negativity.” Over time, she became a caricature of forced cheer. Friends felt they’d lost the real her; she was like an automaton reciting slogans. Eventually, Maria had a quiet breakdown. She confessed to me that she felt split in two. There was the façade of the “high-vibe, self-loving” Maria, who everyone saw posting inspirational quotes, and then there was the neglected shadow Maria, who felt deeply anxious and inadequate. The more she tried to live in the light, the darker her shadow grew. “I don’t even know who I am anymore without the positive mask,” she admitted. It was only after she hit that breaking point that she became open to a different approach—one that didn’t require her to exile half her emotions.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this cultural moment came not from a seminar or a client, but from an unlikely place: an episode of the HBO show Euphoria. In it, a teen girl named Kat, struggling with self-hate, is suddenly confronted by a horde of imaginary Instagram-style influencers invading her room. They smother her in aggressive positivity: “You have to love yourself!”, “You’re a queen, Kat, smash the beauty standards!”. The scene escalates absurdly, these beautiful, smiling apparitions chanting generic self-love mantras, until Kat screams that she “feels like shit!” and begs them to stop. Watching it, I got goosebumps. It was satire, yes, but uncomfortably true to life. The only thing worse than hating yourself is being guilt-tripped for hating yourself. The road to self-love, at least as sold by these mercenaries of joy, can turn into a hall of mirrors where you’re both the prisoner and the prison guard. You end up at war with yourself – trying to crush the parts of you deemed unacceptable in order to live up to some sparkly ideal of “positivity.”

No wonder so many people quietly slip into despair even as they post their daily gratitude. They’ve been taught a distorted relationship with the self, one that’s contingent on constant validation (even if it’s self-administered). It’s conditional self-love: I love myself only when I feel happy or successful. The moment you falter, that love is withdrawn and replaced with self-criticism for faltering. It’s a fair-weather friend, not real self-love at all. As one coach candidly wrote, a lot of folks “feel like they love themselves but sense something is still missing,” caught in an endless loop of trying to fix, improve, or ‘heal’ parts of themselves to finally feel “good enough”. The self-love industry often feeds this loop by presenting an ever-receding target: there’s always another level of enlightenment to buy, another course to unlock your inner goddess, another upgrade because loving yourself, as they frame it, means constantly becoming a “better version.” It’s a hamster wheel disguised as a rose garden. And people are waking up, dizzy and nauseous, realizing they’ve been running in place.

Embracing the Shadow: A Shamanic Perspective on Self-Love

So where does that leave us? Do we abandon the idea of self-love altogether? Absolutely not. But we have to rescue it from the clutches of commodification and bring it back to something real. In my journey as a  shaman, working with people and drawing from ancestral traditions, I’ve learned that genuine self-love is not about feeling good all the time. It’s about feeling everything. It’s about wholeness over perfection, authenticity over constant happiness. This is a far cry from the perfumed, sanitized version of self-love being sold. It’s messy, and at times it’s downright difficult—but it’s real.

The shamans I apprenticed with in the Amazon rainforest had no concept of “toxic positivity,” yet they intuitively understood its antidote. In ceremony, when difficult emotions arose—fear, grief, rage—we didn’t push them away. We sat with them. We gave them space, even reverence. I was taught that you cannot heal what you refuse to look at. In Jungian terms, this is shadow work: facing the parts of ourselves we label “shadow” or “dark” and integrating them, rather than running from them. If the modern self-love gurus build a wall to keep out the dark, the shamanic approach invites the darkness in for tea. Because within that darkness are truths and lessons indispensable to our wholeness.

Years ago, in my own life, I tasted the poison of forced positivity. Seduced by New Age rhetoric, I tried to exist as my “higher self” only—always calm, smiling, spiritual. I thought I was being enlightened, but really, I was fragmenting myself. I denied my human hurts, my doubts, my ego’s cries. Eventually, the facade cracked. It always does. I found myself depressed and anxious, the very state all that positive thinking was supposed to prevent. In my case, it took a humbling return to shamanic practice—and a good mentor who wasn’t impressed by my blissed-out act—to pull me out. I had to do what I now advise everyone to do: embrace the full spectrum of my humanity. As I later wrote, “When you draw the line between what’s acceptable within yourself and what’s not, 50 percent of who you are is being rejected”. And you cannot love a person (including yourself) while rejecting half of them.

True self-love, as I see it, is an unconditional acceptance of oneself. That means we don’t just love the tidy, inspirational quote-worthy parts. We love the angry us, the grieving us, the insecure us. Not by pretending those parts are wonderful, but by acknowledging they exist and treating them with compassion rather than scorn. If I’m feeling jealous, for example, self-love isn’t berating myself for a “low vibe” emotion and slapping on a smile. It’s noticing the jealousy, understanding it’s telling me about a deeper longing or wound, and not hating myself for being human. It might involve challenging those feelings—yes, growth is still part of the equation—but doing so from a place of kindness.

In a shamanic view, every emotion has its place in the great tapestry of life. Anger, when not repressed, can be a fuel for justice or change. Fear can be a teacher of caution or a prompt for courage. Sadness opens the heart and connects us to others’ suffering, birthing empathy. Even hate, examined deeply, often masks hurt or love that’s been twisted. Life is full of challenges, and facing them triggers all kinds of thoughts and feelings; to be whole, we must face them, not fight an inner war to banish them. As I’ve written, “stop dividing your thoughts and emotions into ‘positive’ and ‘negative.’ Who decides what’s positive and negative, anyway?”. The goal is integration. It’s to say, I am both light and dark, and I can hold myself in my own heart completely. This kind of self-love doesn’t always feel like a Hallmark card. Sometimes it feels like grief, or like sitting in solitude wrestling with your demons. But it leads to a sense of peace far more profound than the plastic happiness sold by the self-love peddlers.

One powerful exercise I often share (counter-intuitive as it sounds) is born of both psychological and shamanic wisdom: rather than visualizing best-case scenarios all day, give some time to imagine your worst-case scenario. Truly let the feared thing play out in your mind—be it failure, rejection, loss. This isn’t negativity for negativity’s sake; it’s a way of dragging the monsters out from under the bed. When people do this earnestly, something amazing happens. The fear shrinks. I’ve had clients literally sigh in relief after doing this. They often say, “It’s weird, but I feel calmer knowing I don’t have to avoid these thoughts.” That’s the paradox: by embracing the shadow, it loses its grip on us. We reclaim the energy we spent running away, and we can redirect it into building a life aligned with our truth.

Crucially, a shamanic perspective on self-love also steps outside the narcissistic bubble that some modern self-help creates. It recognizes that loving yourself is not actually separate from loving others or loving the world; it’s all interconnected. The individualism of the commercial self-love message (“focus on you, you, you”) can inadvertently become isolating. In contrast, many indigenous traditions emphasize community and connection as part of a healthy self. Self-love is not about gazing at your reflection adoringly like Narcissus; it’s about feeling so secure in your own being that you can afford to be humble, to admit faults, to apologize, to grow, and to extend love outward. It’s about wholeness. And a whole human is inherently imperfect and inherently worthy—no purchase necessary, no filter needed.

Wholeness Over Hype: The Path to Genuine Self-Love

Investigating the self-love industry has been a confrontational journey for me as both a skeptic and a believer. I believe deeply in the power of loving oneself; I have witnessed the miracles when a person embraces who they are, warts and all. But I have also come to fiercely confront the false prophets of self-love who reduce this sacred work into a commercial transaction or a feel-good trick. It’s not just misguided—it can be dangerous. It leads people away from themselves under the guise of bringing them home. It took me years, and many personal trials, to unlearn some of those shiny, surface-level lessons and replace them with something earthier, truer.

If you’ve felt let down by a self-love book or course, know that you’re not alone—and more importantly, it’s not because you’re hopeless or “doing it wrong.” In fact, your disillusionment can be a friend. It’s a sign that your soul refuses to be appeased by pat answers; it hungers for authenticity. Real self-love is a radical act precisely because it asks us to defy societal expectations of constant positivity and productivity. It asks us instead to slow down and listen inward, to be willing to meet ourselves as we are. In a society that thrives on selling us improvements, choosing to accept yourself can be the most revolutionary (and terrifying) thing you do. But it is also deeply liberating. As I often remind my readers and clients: The goal is not to become someone else, but to finally be fully yourself. All of you.

This kind of love cannot be bottled or sold in a webinar. It’s cultivated in the slow, sometimes mundane moments of life: forgiving yourself for a mistake; standing up for yourself when it’s scary; allowing yourself to rest when you’re tired, even if the world screams “hustle”; saying no to a toxic relationship because you know you deserve better; or simply acknowledging your pain instead of hiding it. It’s in the practice of daily self-honesty. And yes, it can involve many of the same tools the courses mention—journaling, meditating, affirmations—but done with a different spirit. You might journal not to fix yourself, but to know yourself. You might meditate not to escape your thoughts, but to observe them kindly. You might say affirmations, but not to cover up your doubts; rather to encourage yourself like a friend, all the while knowing it’s okay if not every part of you believes the words instantly.

In the end, the difference between commodified self-love and genuine self-love is the difference between a candy high and a nourishing meal. One gives you a quick buzz followed by a crash. The other sustains you, quietly, over the long haul. The self-love industry in its current form is a lot of candy. It appeals to our cravings for quick esteem boosts and simple answers. But I’m here to tell you: you deserve a feast, not scraps. You deserve the kind of self-love that doesn’t demand perfection or eternal sunshine. The kind that survives your bad days and holds you even when you sob into your pillow.

My confrontation with this industry hasn’t made me cynical about self-love; it’s made me protective of it. I want to strip away the nonsense and bring it back to something raw and true. So if you find yourself standing in front of the mirror, fed up with forcing a smile, I invite you to do something revolutionary: let the smile go. Look at that person in the mirror and see their weariness, their longing, their fear. Acknowledge it. Maybe even say out loud, “I see you. I’m here for you.” It might feel awkward, or it might release a wave of emotion. If tears come, let them. That, right there, is an act of self-love. Not the postcard version, but the real deal—accepting yourself in your most unlovable moment.

The self-love hustle would have you believe there’s a finish line – some state of constant blissful confidence. I’m here to lovingly cry bullshit on that. There is no finish line. But there is a beautiful path, and it’s yours to walk, at your pace. It winds through light and shadow, through thickets of doubt and across fields of insight. Along that path you collect pieces of yourself you abandoned, and you welcome them back into the fold. You learn that “loving yourself” is not a destination, but a practice – a verb, something you do, especially when it’s hard.

As I finish writing this, I reflect on the woman from the beginning of this story – the one sobbing softly behind her brave face. What she needed wasn’t another uplifting slogan. She needed permission to feel her pain without self-judgment, to understand that her sadness did not make her a failure at self-love. I sat with her as she cried, and I simply affirmed the truth: “It’s okay. You’re okay, exactly as you are right now.” In time, her breathing steadied. She removed the mask of positivity and relaxed into something real: a tender, fragile peace. That is where real self-love is born. Not in straining to stay in the light, but in having the courage to walk through our own darkness and hold ourselves gently on the other side.

In a world eager to sell us self-love, let’s dare to experience it instead. It won’t look like the Instagram posts or the seminar success stories. It will look like you, in your most honest moments, learning to be your own companion. And as you do that, bit by bit, you’ll find that you haven’t just learned to love yourself – you’ve learned to live, whole and unafraid, in your own skin. In a society full of mirrors and smoke, that authenticity is revolutionary. And it’s worth everything.