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Self love is hard for me.

SunsetDawn83

Confident
Why is self love so hard to do? I've books, I've websites but not one is helping me. Been feeling worthless and treat like rubbish is a norm for me after decades of parental neglect, abuse and trauma. I just can't love myself. I suffer daily with the effects of it and it overrides everything to better myself. I want out of here.
 
I've been called names all my life by my parents. I had parental roles when I was a child and supposedly in school. I wasn't allowed to play outside with kids my age and I wasn't allowed to spend time alone in my room, I got called down if I spent even 20 alone.
 
Self love is hard sometimes, because of what it is. A baby’s brain learns to love itself by experiencing the love of others. Self “anything” is internalized external experiences.

A lack of those external positive experiences means one’s baby brain does not get “wired” properly during development, which is why such things feel hard and foreign now.

Time cannot be turned back, so you now have the task of doing for yourself what was not done for you. Be your own best friend, shower yourself with internal support and words and love for everything you are. In tiny steps, that internal love will begin to change your brain. Give yourself what your parents did not - unconditional love and unlimited compassion, so that your body begins to know what that feels like. If you can find a therapist who understands attachment they can help you with this.
 
i'm real sorry you went through all that and it is still ongoing. please know you could always chat with us and that i am certen you had heard this before, but perhaps therepy may be a good option. or in some case you may simply need to leave her. it is difficut.

my mother was very mentelly ill. and i felt oblegated to stay. and be in contact with her. and be her medecal proxy. but that is not my responsebility. i was 19. and she had abused me my whole life. it was her turn to get help for her self. and not rely upon me for every thing. the children was supposed to leave the nest.

if we stay inside the nest with everyone else, it will fall out of the tree!
 
Why is self love so hard to do?
Why would you want to?

Legit question. People have a lot of reasons why…

- Most of which require zeeeeero self-love to accomplish. It’s just an excuse to not do those things “until” some impossible goal has been achieved… or not understanding that self love is NOT a requirement to do the shit they want to do “after”
- Many of which are for wildly different reasons/motivations than above.

…so my assuming why you would want the whole self-love thing, would just waste a lot of time.
 
i'm real sorry you went through all that and it is still ongoing. please know you could always chat with us and that i am certen you had heard this before, but perhaps therepy may be a good option. or in some case you may simply need to leave her. it is difficut.

my mother was very mentelly ill. and i felt oblegated to stay. and be in contact with her. and be her medecal proxy. but that is not my responsebility. i was 19. and she had abused me my whole life. it was her turn to get help for her self. and not rely upon me for everything. the children were supposed to leave the nest.

if we stay inside the nest with everyone else, it will fall out of the tree!
Thank you @grief, that's why I'm here to talk to other people going through the same thing. At the moment I'm waiting to go for a mental health assessment to see what I'm struggling with. Going through a tough time atm.

Why would you want to?

Legit question. People have a lot of reasons why…

- Most of which require zeeeeero self-love to accomplish. It’s just an excuse to not do those things “until” some impossible goal has been achieved… or not understanding that self love is NOT a requirement to do the shit they want to do “after”
- Many of which are for wildly different reasons/motivations than above.

…so my assuming why you would want the whole self-love thing, would just waste a lot of time.
I've heard it so many times that you can't truly love someone until you love yourself and I wanted to see if it was true. I love other more than I love myself.
 
I've heard it so many times that you can't truly love someone until you love yourself and I wanted to see if it was true. I love other more than I love myself.
This reads a bit like you want to love yourself purely because you want to be able to love other people more? That's not a judgement, I'm pretty sure I'm similar. But I amnt sure things are as black and white as that. Do you have reasons to want to love yourself that are more based on you? Cos trying to love yourself so you can focus better on other people might backfire a bit.
 
This reads a bit like you want to love yourself purely because you want to be able to love other people more? That's not a judgement, I'm pretty sure I'm similar. But I amnt sure things are as black and white as that. Do you have reasons to want to love yourself that are more based on you? Cos trying to love yourself so you can focus better on other people might backfire a bit.
The short answer is To see if I feel better about myself, both mentally and physically. The long answer is I don't know.
 
Being able to stop hating myself has been my number goal since I started therapy. My default state is self-loathing.

For me? Trying to make the leap from self-loathing to self-compassion (which is probably easier than self love - both, I think, are excellent goals) was way too big and plain old unrealistic.

So these days, I work at 'self-neutral'. That's my middle ground between the 2. It's where I stop punishing myself, and treat myself like anyone else who is a human being and has fundamental needs that need to be met. It's a state where I might not be going out of my way to be kind to myself, but I try and make a point of not doing anything that is unkind to myself.

It won't work for everyone, but it's taken a lot of the pressure off for me, and made self compassion a goal that I feel I could realistically get to one day. Because I'm getting better at self neutral. And that's progress from self-loathing.
 
I found doing the buddhist practise of metta surprisingly effective at beginning to shift self hatred.

It felt a bit like physiotherapy. Repeat a very simple exercise daily, and you think I don't see what this is going to do, and then gradually it works.

I actually had a dream where lovely things happened to me when I was practising it daily for a while.
 
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