"You have to prioritize yourself"

“You have to prioritize yourself”. Ours is a time when recommendations to focus on oneself are proliferating. “You have bent over backwards too much for other people who bring you nothing”. These are ideas that circulate in cafes with friends, on social media, and in self-help books, but also in the consultations of many psychologists. “Enough of always trying to satisfy the desires of others instead of your own”.

I have never heard anyone close to me say that their psychologist has recommended them to be more generous, more welcoming, more patient. No psychologist has ever encouraged me to do so either. But how many times have people close to me told me that now, finally, thanks to their psychologist, they have understood that “they have to start prioritizing themselves”, which invariably means that now it's time to dedicate more time to themselves at the expense of others.

In a poignant and disturbing academic article, Jeff Sugarman warned us that a good part of contemporary psychology, especially the so-called positive psychology, despite good intentions, is increasingly impregnated with an individualistic idea of the self, typical of neoliberalism, which fundamentally looks out for itself and only establishes bonds if it gains some benefit from them (Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 2015). Sugarman is blunt: “There are psychologists who are contributing to an ideological climate in which people are not obliged to consider the well-being of others, let alone assume any responsibility for it.” Thus, he argues: “Psychology, especially positive psychology, operates in a way that sustains and promotes the neoliberal agenda that dominates the world”.

Generally, the term neoliberalism is used to refer to a way of understanding the economy in which the state progressively disengages from the well-being of citizens. It is the individual who must ensure they provide themselves and their family with housing, education, and medical care. But the term neoliberalism is also used to refer to the mentality associated with it: the individual is absolutely responsible for their personal fortune and misfortune. If they don't want to go under, they have to manage their individual life with the efficiency criteria of the business world. Within this logic, others are either means or obstacles to achieving one's own successes.

When a friend, TikTok, or therapist tells us that we need to focus on ourselves, they are reflecting – and at the same time, promoting – this notion of the self. And, often, this well-intentioned advice does us no good, not even to ourselves. Edgar Cabanas, in an academic article on the same issue, goes so far as to wonder if it is not the case that “positive psychology and its conception of human well-being are not contributing to sustaining and creating part of the dissatisfaction for which they promise a solution” (Theory and Psychology, 2018).

Others also come off badly from this scheme, of course, because it urges us to disengage from them with maxims like “don’t waste effort on people who aren’t worth it.” What happens is that, in the prevailing imaginary, these others in whom I must “stop investing effort” are toxic people who take advantage of me, don’t love me, or don’t care about me at all. Obviously, this happens and something must be done about it. But the reality is that many of these others are not that type of person at all.

For example, it may be the case that this other person from whom it seems the friend, TikTok, and therapist are encouraging you to get rid of once and for all is someone who, in reality, we find burdensome because they are never well. They have fibromyalgia, they have chronic fatigue syndrome, or they have a set of symptoms that keep them down much of the time. Next Tuesday is May 12th, the international day for these illnesses, and that’s why I think of these people.

It is well documented that most of these patients consider that the worst thing about suffering from these illnesses is not that they physically torment them, but two things on which others can have an impact. The first is the lack of credibility they suffer from. The second is the abandonment by people in their emotional support network because they are considered a burden. Among people with these illnesses, there is a significantly higher prevalence of suicide than in the rest of the population. It is striking to hear the interpretation given by people involved in patient associations for these illnesses: most have not taken their own lives properly or exclusively because of the physical suffering itself, but because of the neglect and abandonment they suffered.

It seems to me that this abandonment is partly instigated by the discourses I have described above, which often take the form of an expiatory "you cannot help others while you are not well," an idea that has become the master excuse of our time for never helping anyone. It may seem that I am exaggerating. Therefore, I transcribe literally below comments from some of these patients. "So-and-so no longer wants to meet with me because the psychologist told her she has to prioritize." "My sister has been advised by some psychologists to distance herself from sick people, like me, because they overwhelm or exhaust others." "Many people, with the discourse that they 'have to take care of themselves,' have turned their backs on me because I bother them."

May the commemoration of World Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Day not only lead us to promise that we will do more research, because the well-being of these people also depends on a lot of things that we others can do even if we don't know a shred of biomedicine. And may this faction of positive psychology stop presenting the other to us as someone at the service of our well-being.