Self acceptance and unconditional love (or lack thereof)
Why does my brain resist it so much?
"Love the process. Accept who you are and love yourself no matter the imperfections, mistakes, and where you are in life".
That's something I understand in theory, and I love my family, partner and friends just like that: unconditionally.
When it comes to myself though... my brain actively *resists* the thought.
Anything like the sentence above would trigger the immediate response of "Yes, but..." and then a long list of things I don't like about myself, that I could do better, that I am not satisfied with.
Some stuff I don't even know why it would matter so much to me at all, it's like my brain has just put it there to make sure I remind myself to hate myself.
Sorry, bit bleak for a Wednesday afternoon.
Bartender, some tequila please.
Replies
~theoddballphilosopher wrote (thread):
Sometimes the behavior we possess are inherited by those we looked up to.
"Love yourself" increasingly sounds to me like one of those platitudes that people repeat, and repeat, and eventually end up all believing as a sort of axiom, uncritically and without question.
Isn't love a painful process? Love is a two way process, it involves the lover and the loved. In this case it's a reflexive process, complicating matters. One is both the subject of love and the agent thereof. To love is to accept, flaws and all, and to be aware that those flaws exist and, being in an "imperfect" (that is non-ideal) material world, makes the subject "perfect", as it is the rough spots that makes life possible, quite literally. To be loved, on the other hand, implies reciprocating, and thus being willing to change, and to be worthy of being loved, by transmuting oneself to try and make the loving agent proud, so to speak.
I must apologize. For one thing, I got too abstract, too philosophical. Moreover, I tried to define and constrain what "love" means and what it means "to love", how conceited of me! What is love, but a word?
I think learning to love yourself is a hard and not always a pleasnt process. its basically "fake it till you make it". you need to remind yourself that you love yourself, yeah you'll find buts, but over time as you remind yourself that, as you love things about yourself, the buts become less frequent and less loud
I think it's that even the localization of boneheadedness also known as "individuality" occasionally can't help but see what it actually is and, thus, what it couldn't possibly be.
~ghodawalaaman wrote (thread):
There is a similar post on BBS in Gemini you would like.
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