You have read both kinds of advice in the same week, possibly the same afternoon. Put yourself first, protect your peace, you cannot pour from an empty cup. And also: love is sacrifice, real commitment means showing up when it costs you, selfishness is what kills relationships. Nobody tells you how to hold both of these at once, because you cannot. At some point you have to decide which one is true, or at least which one is true right now, for this specific ask from this specific person.
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would approach that decision from completely different starting points. None of them think "selfish or selfless" is even the right frame, but they disagree sharply about what to replace it with.
Adler: connection is the point, not the price
Alfred Adler would question the premise before answering the question. For Adler, the measure of a healthy self is not how well it protects its own borders. It is how capable it is of genuine social feeling, what he called Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a sense of belonging that is not the opposite of self-interest but the completion of it. He would ask whether "putting yourself first" in this instance moves you toward other people or away from them. Withdrawal dressed up as self-care is still withdrawal, and Adler thought most of it traces back to discouragement rather than strength.
Social interest is the true and inevitable compensation for all the natural weaknesses of individual human beings.
That does not mean he would tell you to give in. Adler was suspicious of relationships built on one person's constant accommodation, since he saw that as its own kind of discouragement, a person who has decided they can only belong by disappearing. He would want to know whether your boundary is in service of a more honest connection or a way of avoiding one.
Klein: guilt is the clue, not the enemy
Melanie Klein would go straight for the guilt, because for Klein guilt is not noise to be managed away. It is information. In her account of the depressive position, mature love requires the capacity to feel bad about hurting someone you care for, and to want to repair it. A person who feels nothing when they disappoint the people they love has not achieved freedom. They have regressed to an earlier, simpler way of relating, where other people are either all-good or all-bad and their feelings do not fully register.
Gratitude is rooted in feelings of love, and it is the basis for the appreciation of goodness in others and in oneself.
But Klein would not say all guilt is trustworthy. She would ask you to separate the guilt that follows real harm from the guilt that follows a normal, reasonable boundary, the kind manufactured by someone who never learned that other people are allowed to want things. The first kind deserves attention and repair. The second kind deserves to be named for what it is.
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Le Guin: the self was never a thing to be traded away
Ursula K. Le Guin would reject the whole transaction. Her fiction returns again and again to people who try to draw a hard line between self and other, only to discover the line was never where they thought it was. In her worlds, identity is not a fixed possession you either keep or surrender. It is something continuously made in relation to other people, which means the question "should I put myself first or them first" assumes a split that does not actually exist.
Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
She would point out that both "always sacrifice" and "always protect yourself" treat love as a fixed quantity you are dividing between two accounts. Le Guin's answer would be that there is no ledger. There is only the ongoing work of making something together, which sometimes looks like stepping back and sometimes looks like showing up, and neither one is the permanent rule.
Where they disagree
Adler would say the test is connection. If putting yourself first draws you closer to the people who matter, it is probably right. If it isolates you, it is probably fear wearing the language of self-care.
Klein would say the test is guilt, but only the guilt that survives close inspection. Feel it, examine where it came from, then decide whether it is telling you something true or something you were trained to feel.
Le Guin would say both of them are still counting. She would rather you stop asking whose turn it is and start asking what you are actually building, together, right now.
None of them would tell you what to do.
The question you came here to avoid
You searched this question because someone in your life wants something from you that you do not want to give, or because you gave something and now you are wondering if you should not have. Either way, "who comes first" is a smaller question than the one underneath it.
The real question is whether the relationship you are protecting yourself inside of, or sacrificing yourself for, is one you actually want to keep making. So which is it: are you setting a boundary because it will let you stay, or because some part of you is already looking for the exit and calling it self-care?