Welcome to the show!

In this episode, I’m excited to be interviewing a man who was recommended to me by one of our listeners (thank you Courtney, by the way). This guest is a psychologist who lives in the Los Angeles area and works with celebrities, professional athletes, and a variety of other people.

His name is Dr. Sharr Chardas (it’s a Hungarian name), but he goes by Dr. C. to keep it simple.

His practice is driven 100% by referrals, and he has a long waiting list.

Today, we’re talking all about a topic that we’ve been approaching a lot over the last few months on the show. The generic term is “self-love”, but what we’re really talking about is that deep down feeling of acceptance. Being able to sit in a room by yourself for a long time without panicking, feeling disgusted, or trying to avoid who you are. Some of us never got the message that we are acceptable as we are. Some of us have even done things we regret, and as a result we feel ashamed, and can’t stand ourselves. We don’t feel like we deserve for good things to come our way.

So today, we’re talking to all of us, who, for whatever reason, have a hard time loving and accepting the person that we are, and as a result, we try to get that need met by other people. Or, maybe the result is that we can’t seem to accept other people as they are, or have happy, content, drama-free relationships with others.

This interview did go pretty long, so we’re dividing it into two episodes (you’ll get the second half in the next episode).

While you’re here, I’d be grateful if you would take our podcast sponsorship survey to help us find a sponsor for the show. It’s just a few questions and takes less than a minute!

So, here’s the first half of my interview with Dr. Sharr Chardas.

Interview with Dr. Charr Chardas

Brian: Hey, Dr. C. Welcome to the show today. We’re so glad to have you.

Sharr: Thank you, Brian. I appreciate your having me here.

Brian: Absolutely. I’ve been really excited about talking to you again. It’s about a topic that is just so important in the field of codependency recovery that I’m really interested to get your perspective with all the life experience and counseling experience you have. I can’t wait to dig into this. So, I’ll get started with the first question here:

Question: If someone comes into your office and says, ‘Hey, Dr. C. My biggest problem is that I need to learn how to love myself,’ where do you start in order to help that person?

Sharr: Brian, that isn’t limited just to codependency. I think it’s straight across the board. In my opinion, in all the years of my practice, that seems to be the root cause of all neurosis. Now, remember we’re talking neurosis, not psychosis here; there’s a world of difference. With neurosis, you can change the way a person thinks if they choose to change it, because there’s a process to reaching self-love.

Codependency neurosis is actually the symptom, not the cause. It’s the lack of self-worth, self-hatred, self-doubt that the primary caretakers or parents inadvertently laid on us. That’s not to say that all parents are terrible people, they’re not. Remember that they have their issues. We, as children from zero to eight, misinterpret horribly. What happens is we begin to doubt and actually dislike ourselves. What we do is we attempt to get others to approve of us to bring that into our life.

There are three stages to loving ourselves. The first is; do we like ourselves? The second; do we trust ourselves? If we like and trust then we love. The problem is, everyone goes, ‘Oh, yes. I absolutely love myself.’

As I mentioned earlier, when I was teaching, the first thing I ask those individuals, “Would you speak to yourself the way you think about yourself? Would you speak to yourself that way to your husband, your wife, your children, and your friends?” Immediately they would say, “No, I wouldn’t.” Because the self-talk that we’ve programmed ourselves of is horrendous, ‘Oh, I’m stupid,’ ‘I’m ugly,’ ‘I’m fat.’ In other words, we put ourselves down constantly, ‘Oh, why did I say it? I am such a fool.’

One of the ingredients to self-love is we have to like ourselves. We must begin to speak to ourselves like someone we care for or someone we like. We have to take a step back and go, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not a fool. I’m not stupid. Everybody makes mistakes,’ so on and so forth.

I’m really attempting to change my life here and I can like that. Ooh, there’s something to like myself.

I’m beginning to discover that I am worthy. There is something else to like about myself.

I’m using the discipline to consider that for a change instead of, as the Hindus refer to it, allowing the ‘drunken monkey’, (our conscious awareness) to run away with how terrible we are.

Gradually, especially in my practice, one of the core issues we begin to work on is self-esteem, building self-confidence, and self-awareness; all of these terrible things that we put the box about ourselves. Let’s open up that box and let’s take a look at it, Brian. Let’s see what’s really going on.

Are you this terrible, horrible person that God and humanity just tolerates on this earth (laughs), or is that something you’ve created for yourself? Without question, it’s something we’ve created for ourselves. We begin to de-engineer all of that.

‘Oh, wait, you say you’re no good to people? Yet it seems to me – especially since you’ve developed this codependent neurosis – you do more for other people than you do for yourself. That’s a pretty good person, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Yes, Doc, it seems to be,’ they say.

‘Alright, if you’re a pretty good person, then you must be likeable.’

‘Gee, I never thought about it that way.’

If we begin to like ourselves, and what we’re doing for ourselves, then we move on to the second step; self-trusting. If we don’t like someone, we’re not going to trust them. If we don’t trust them, we’re sure  not going to love them.

Each week, when my patients/clients come into the office, we have to step back and see how they’re doing. “What have you done for yourself?” “You know, Doc? I really thought about what we talked about in our session. These events came up, this situation, I set limits and boundaries and that really felt good. I can begin to trust myself to be aware when I begin to feel less than especially in a codependent relationship. ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to set a limit. I’m going to set a boundary here.’ By that, I begin to trust that I like myself and I trust that I can, I will, and I am going to set reasonable boundaries for myself, not only with my codependent partner in situation here, but with all things. Then, I can really begin to love myself for doing that, not only for myself but for the positive results that come from that.” Does that answer the question?

Brian: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

Questions: The next question of course is, let’s say that you didn’t naturally love yourself due to the way you were brought up. Maybe, like you said, it’s something we create or gets created somehow that we’re not lovable or likeable – where do you go from there?

You did a good job laying out some things you can do to get to the next level, which is great. I’d like to dig into that a little bit more and just talk about the concept of loving yourself in the first place.

Another question for you would be, what is it about love that makes us need it so much, even to the point of desperately trying to get it from other people when we can’t give it to ourselves? I guess the other question is, what is the nature of this thing that we call love? Is love really even the word that we should be using?

Sharr: I’m not so certain that love is the correct word. Brian, we tend to think of love as this all-giving, all-wonderful thing. Again, technically – don’t let anybody get upset with this – but love is a very selfish emotion. We cannot, on any level, use in a relationship of any kind – whether it be a friendship, a marriage, no matter what it is, many levels of love – every aspect of love comes back to self. Think about the terms that we use; ‘I love her,’ ‘She makes me happy,’ so on and so forth. It’s really about ourselves. When we’re lacking in self-love, then we’re going to attempt to draw that from every relationship we’ve got.

Here’s where the problem is as well – all of those people are also lacking in self-love. Everyone is functioning on need instead of want. When we are in a relationship of need, anything that we need, we make demands of. We also give up our power to the other person in the relationship totally. The example I use is we become the prisoner and they become the jailer. We need the jailer to bring us food, water, and to let us go out in the sun. I’m telling you, we better hop to it when the jailer wants something.

However, if we want, then we can