The Opposite of Selfishness is Self-Love

Odille Remmert
4 min readSep 21, 2020

The opposite of selfishness is not: altruism, generosity, or compassion for others. The opposite of selfishness is not: caring about others or putting others first. Selfishness does not come from being too focused on the self. Selfishness comes from the natural, human survival instinct — in response to not knowing how to give ourselves what we need and want, to feel safe.

Image Source: Canva.com

Although love, kindness, compassion, and connection with others, is a key part of who we are, as humans — and how we’ve been able to survive — it is not our strongest instinct.

Our strongest instinct is survival. It has to be, because if we don’t survive, we won’t be around, to express the love, kindness, compassion, and connection with others. We have a built-in, automatic instinct to survive.

There are two main causes of selfishness:

1. The brain identifies more than just physical danger — as a threat to our survival

2. We don’t know how to give ourselves what we need in order to feel safe

The Invisible Bear

Whenever we feel a negative emotion, the brain and body are flooded with stress chemicals…

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Odille Remmert

Author of: "Change What Happened to You: How to Use Neuroscience to Get the Life You Want by Changing Your Negative Childhood Memories"