why should I love myself?

[Viking]

Today just as I woke up I was in a weird mood. I woke up and tried to prove to myself why im worthless. I knew it would make me unhappy yet I did it anyway. I was very aware what I was doing and looked for a reason not to do it. i knew it would bring me bad things in the end but i felt like it didn't matter. i concluded that I just dont love myself, so since how im feeling is meaningless, it doesn't really matter what to do, so i had trouble choosing.

i always hear that i should love myself but why? the reason of loving myself to feel good doesn't sound good enough because i dont care if i feel good anyway.

what im looking for is a rational reason to arrive at loving myself, to care about myself feeling good.

why am i writing all of this post if i dont care about how i feel? im curious, so it's kind of an automatic process and i have some cognitive dissonance happening somewhere in my brain. the problem comes when i need to exert force for myself to feel good. i dont really exert much force writing this.

[oMarcos]

because that's the only thing you can love, no escape

[Rilles]

Im serious. These are not healthy thoughts. Talk to someone. For real. 

[caspex]

Edit: Before you read, if you have mental problems like depression and all that. Consult your therapist and seek some help first. 

You must go the other way round and find reason for why you hate yourself. And then disprove them later on through you realizations. 

Your question doesn't really work anyways because it like asking the hand to grasp itself or the eye to look at it itself. You can't love yourself, you're talking about loving your ego. You cant accept many parts of your ego because of assumptions and biases. All you need is realizations, which ones I don't know. That for you to see. To love yourself is to love everything, it's to be the consciousness that you are. 

Edited November 18, 2020 by Swarnim

[Viking]

@Rilles im leading an ok life just these thoughts creep up sometimes. i wonder if they will get worse over time so im trying to prevent it

@Swarnim i dont really hate myself (at least i think so) i just dont care. im disconnected from the emotions that i feel, so doing things that make me feel bad are equivalent to things that make me feel good and i cant choose what to do

[fridjonk]

God will love you even if you can't. 

God loves you just as you are. 

[Vladimir]

Have you really ever felt good? I think if you felt good you would want to feel good, everyone wants to feel good. Loving yourself is feeling good and doing things for yourself that bring you closer to love.

[Shin]

You care more about sustaining an ego than feeling good right now.

You're addicted to stories where you're the center of the attention, and the easiest way to create infinite stories of how your ego is real is to feel bad about something.

When you feel good, there is nothing to think about, you just feel good.

To feel bad, you need a story that says something is not right for you.

To feel good, you don't need anything.

To feel bad, you need to think about something.

 

[4201]

9 hours ago, Viking said:

Today just as I woke up I was in a weird mood. I woke up and tried to prove to myself why im worthless. I knew it would make me unhappy yet I did it anyway. I was very aware what I was doing and looked for a reason not to do it. i knew it would bring me bad things in the end but i felt like it didn't matter. i concluded that I just dont love myself, so since how im feeling is meaningless, it doesn't really matter what to do, so i had trouble choosing.

Are you saying that you don't love yourself because in the past, you tried to prove yourself that you are worthless? Isn't that you creating meaning out of the fact you did something?

But you yourself recognize that doing that thing felt bad. It's like I start cutting wood, I hate it, it feels like hell. Then I call myself a lumberjack. Why? Because I cut wood this morning, despite it feeling very bad.

9 hours ago, Viking said:

i always hear that i should love myself but why? the reason of loving myself to feel good doesn't sound good enough because i dont care if i feel good anyway.

what im looking for is a rational reason to arrive at loving myself, to care about myself feeling good.

So you want a reason to love yourself that "sounds good". You want to feel good about your reason to love yourself. Isn't that ironic? You just said many times you don't care about how you feel but at the same time you are looking for a "reason to love yourself" that feels good.

The reason for all this mess might be that, you dislike the idea of loving yourself as you are, since there's something about yourself you dislike and you would want it to change. You are scared that if you were to stop the judgements and self-shaming then you would lose the ability to be what you want.

9 hours ago, Viking said:

why am i writing all of this post if i dont care about how i feel? im curious, so it's kind of an automatic process and i have some cognitive dissonance happening somewhere in my brain. the problem comes when i need to exert force for myself to feel good. i dont really exert much force writing this.

All of those fears are pure fallacy however, if you can notice that  your intentions are pure. You are here trying to solve the problem. You want to fix the cognitive dissonance that is happening. Isn't that a proof of love? If you truly didn't love yourself as you pretend, then why would you even care about helping yourself like you do? 

 

But hey, you wanted a "rational" reason to love yourself, so let me give you one. In any system, what is the best way to obtain any desired outcome? To directly create that outcome. What is an irrational/unconstructive way to try and get to a desired outcome? To put all your energy on hating and complaining about any current situation that is different from the desired outcome, in hope that somehow "it will change itself" once the system went through enough hate and dislike.

You might say "well I don't know what's the desired outcome, all outcomes are meaningless!". It might be true that there's no "absolute" outcome, but you certainly desire something. Otherwise there would be no problem.

[Origins]

@Viking For what its worth, maybe you're just spiralling based on experimenting with the that negative feedback loop, which I think is perfectly fine as long as you're aware before hand what you're doing and how you're going to mitigate that negative feedback loop once it begins. So I would ask yourself constructive questions:

1. What have I done to prepare myself for reshaping this negative feedback loop I've created when I'm ready to return to baseline?
2. What unconstructive thoughts have I developed as a consequence of beginning this feedback loop and how can I release from their illusion?

It's important to explore, be creative, experiment outside the known while at the same time its important to be responsible for the journey before it happens as much as possible. So to this end, its not necessarily a matter of what is bad in a black and white way but rather, what is potentially less constructive and what have I done to mitigate in advance any potential negative side effects. It's like pre-psychedelic work or even pre-work before seeing what could be a dodgy psychologist, its important to not make assumptions about either the authority we have over our future behaviours or the supposed authority that someone else has simply because they have a certificate when we haven't done our prior homework. For example, both for myself in this situation and for a psychologist, I'd be drilling the psychologist with carefully thought out questions to probe them on their capability while at the same time doing an analysis on my own behaviours to ensure that any biases I have don't obstruct my own perception of them as much as I can.

On the actual question though, "why should I love myself?, I just feel nothingness for myself (not in a bad way) so I'm not really sure what other peoples experience is like but for me its more a matter of what do I love and for me its life and what are the directions I'm flowing in that I love and that I will do out of love and have faith in out of love. I love consciousness that I experience, that's something I can definitely associate with, and just as much as its important to understand how to answer the preparatory questions we've created for ourselves regarding any exploration into the unknown we might do its important to identify things we at the very least like more than others so we can begin to understand what we love, why and how we can love the direction better as we improve our self knowledge there. So for me as a final response to that question contextualised based on what I've stated so far, because its the most fundamental precondition for my life along with its continuation and advancement.

Best 

[Megan Alecia]

Because love forces you to go through everything else. Love is the ultimate "high", not just like drug high but like apex of pyramid kind.. To seek self love is like hunting a unicorn almost (in a world like this).

Edited November 19, 2020 by Megan Alecia

[Origins]

To add to my comment just above: @Viking and one other empowering mindset I have that I can share is reminding myself to treat every experience as a potential source of creative inspiration, so I'd be asking myself something like, "even though I'd prefer not to repeat this again as I think I've created enough of a first person direct experience to establish a real life narrative out of it, what are all the lessons including unconventional useful ideas I can take away from this experience?".

This ties into one another empowering mindset I came up with that involves the gamification of memory (not real life, just memory - for me that creates the ideal balance between direct experience and abstractly orienting towards experience in a creative way), in the sense I'll use memory as a source of information to continually inform the creative possibilities of the present moment while at the same time not taking away from the sentimental aspects of experience itself, because what we create in our imagination can often influence how we interpret direct experience, hence that balance I was referring to before, creative in this sense would be to utility relative to the full expression of the human spirit, for lack of a better way of putting it at present.

This (gamification of memory in the way I've described) makes learning from experience a heck of a lot more fun, it literally becomes like conquering a game, discovering new levels, hidden passages, etc to experience so the reward system of your brain just becomes more and more incentivised to come up with more and more creative ways to direct your consciousness to an increasingly more sophisticated level.

Peace.

Edited November 19, 2020 by Origins

[Ethan1]

Pretty good chance you were born normal, innocent, and freely expressing yourself without shame before you could speak. 

 

Self-love and self-acceptance were with you automatically by default. ??

 

Why should you want to heal? I'd say because deep down you have value and worth. And the idea of worthiness is just an idea. ⭐⭐You are worthy to exist⭐⭐. Whether you know it or not there is value in you. You were born worthy of love. Now part of you holds that true value.

 

If you can point to this thing called "worthlessiness" then do it. Where is worthlessiness at?️? What does it look like?️, smell like?, taste like?, sound like??

 

I can't see it. ?

 

It probably doesn't exist in physical reality. It's an idea? in your head?. 

 

Just the belief of shame ? inside you is getting in the way. The voice of shame ? is the belief of "I am not enough".  Which is a false belief. It's a psychological wound most likely. 

 

Truth is, you are valuable. Value really is perspective. If the the glass half full ? or is the glass half empty?. Which is true? It depends on your perspective. Is the cup worthless? ? If you haven't had water in 3 weeks then yeah its worth something probably. 

 

I'm saying you have value by worthiness of being alive. 

 

Now worthlessness by the measurement of what? Society? ? Me? ?Who creates this so called measuring stick of your so called worth? What type of worth we talking about?

 

Monetarily or net-worth?? Dude money is invisible and it comes and goes. ?Even some of the wealthiest people feel not enough. They strive for trillions to find enoughness.?‍? What is enough by definition ??? Define enough? 

 

A baby would eat a dollar?? if you gave it to the child. It's a social tool. 

 

Well social worth?? Social value? Social status??????️ That's all social conditioning to categorize you and organize the system. Has nothing to do about you for being you.

 

A baby holds zero social status and could care less what clothes holds the greatest value.? Baby has no intellectual value too. It can't work. So its value of labor is worthless.?? Would you shame that child and say you're a worthless little child bc you aren't doing anything but taking. No that's silly. ??

 

You are taught to feel an anxiety towards not having or buying "stuff". This makes you a good consumer and enables the marketing to mess with your buying behaviors. ???

 

Self-esteem?? Now then what is esteem? Self-image? Self-ideal? Self-acceptance? Why can't you accept yourself? What's blocking this? Why the lack of self-respect? What personal values do you even hold? Well honor your personal values and don't feel ashamed. 

 

Typically the voice of a care taker or an authority figure put this silly narrative of I'm unworthy or I'm not enough. That voice ?️lives in your head on autopilot all the time as self-judgement. The more you feed that silly voice, subself, or belief the louder it gets. ?

 

Most the time as a child we think in terms of "black⚫ and white⚪". The critical factor ?allows all ideas as truth to live in the mind. No critical thinking. Either I'm a good boy? or I'm a bad boy??. People either like me or they don't like me. They love me or they don't love me.

 

Bro Life ain't that simple.

 

Just because someone doesn't like your music doesn't mean it's worthless or bad music.? Just because someone doesn't like your red hair, doesn't mean your red hair is bad.?‍? Just because your mom doesnt like your autistic friend named Larry. Doesn't mean Larry is a completely worthless dirt bag. Larry might have a unique skill. Just because someone doesn't want to date you, doesn't mean you're undateable. Just because you got fired at waffle house, doesn't mean you can't get a job at ihop to contribute value for someone that likes breakfast food. Heck if you can flip pancakes you're worth something to someone that values pancakes. I like pancakes.?

 

Just because one person doesn't see your value, doesn't mean you are valueless. Value or worth is a complex thing in this thing called life. 

 

Hopefully this connects a few dots. 

 

Spend a little bit of time and understand this emotion called shame. 

 

Here's a video of an old whistling guy that has some decent information. ?️

 

Edited November 19, 2020 by Ethan1

[No Self]

Just another opinion. No need to worry about all this self-love stuff. Be as you are.