What does it mean to love yourself? I always use to say: “I’m not really my type,”.
If you answer: “masturbating 15 times a day”, you probably have a lot of issues to deal with, maybe some tissues too for that matter…
Anyway, I would like to offer my theory on the issue, as the claim can actually create more anxiety and depression. Of course… It’s about helping people when you say, “Love Yourself”. But at the same time, it’s not so easy for everyone to just “love themselves”. It may even make the situation more difficult for some.
It would be nice if we could all love ourselves and each other. But what if we can’t do that? It’s easy to get caught up in a search for feelings, to get caught up in a mindset that makes you try to ban certain feelings and thoughts. You’re locking yourself into a resistance that actually means the exact opposite.
Acceptance
My own theory is that loving oneself is based more on acceptance and permission of oneself. To allow yourself to take up more space in your own life. You need to learn to accept ourselves and to allow ourselves to take our place. We don’t have to love everything about ourselves. You just need to learn to accept our thoughts, the feelings we feel, and who we are.
Acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to like everything, but it’s more about understanding that things are what they are. It may not be optimal for you right now, but that’s what it is right now. Right now you may feel sad and it’s rarely very fun, but it’s actually okay to be sad and it’s completely natural. Everyone feels sad in the course of their life.
Allow yourself to be angry, sad, depressed because you can’t do anything about it anyway. Nothing gets better when you judge yourself for what you feel or think. The feelings are shadows of your thoughts and it will only make you more depressed and anxious if you sit and judge yourself.
Ps.
I’m going to go into this more the more I get into blogging and writing here. I will be presenting some different tools as I get into a better habit of writing. So far, I’m a little inexperienced at this and don’t really know how to get the information in a way that’s easy to absorb so try to be patient.