How to LOVE YOURSELF: three steps to overcoming self-hatred

I'm Dr Orion taraban and this is psychak's Better Living Through psychology and the topic of today's short talk is How To Love Yourself loving yourself is extremely important and this is because wherever you go there you are what does that mean everything that you experience you experience within your Consciousness it's not possible for you to experience anything outside of your Consciousness and within that Consciousness will be yourself or more precisely that Consciousness is yourself that self is sort of like a die that saturates throughout a liquid it will color and flavor all the other contents

in that solution this means for example that if you are cruel and self-loathing even if the other contents of your Consciousness are the most Pleasant and delightful possible that cruel self-loathing self will permeate these other contents and spoil whatever goodness pleasure or happiness you might otherwise have experienced by the same token a self that is clean and loved will make it much easier to experience even unpleasant painful and difficult content without suffering in this way attending exclusively to your external circumstances without paying attention to your internal environment is likely to prove self-defeating consequently we need

to learn how to love ourselves so that wherever we go we can be assured of good company now if you were raised in a securely attached loving family this will likely be easier for you to do than if you are raised in a chaotic and conflict-ridden environment however no matter your circumstances I'm here to give you three actionable things that you can start doing today in order to accelerate your progress in the direction of self-love here we go first and foremost make a commitment starting now not to speak to yourself in a way that you

wouldn't speak to a close friend though I've been a therapist for over 10 years I am still shocked from time to time at just how negatively some people speak to themselves every mistake they make is painfully Amplified and everything they do well is grossly minimized by this horribly negative critical inner voice so the first step to loving yourself is to stop speaking to yourself in that way if you wouldn't say something out loud to someone that you cared about then don't say it to yourself even if you don't care about yourself yet you have to

begin to act as if you did this is so important because if you denigrate someone over time it's so much easier to hate them this is like an initial step in all totalitarian regimes towards pogroms and genocide to justify the violence against a hated group you must first denigrate them if the denigration does not occur it's much harder to see the targets as in human and therefore much more difficult to justify the atrocious Behavior by the same token self-denegration justifies self-hatred and self-violence of all kinds so stop doing it now now how do you respond

to your critical inner voice when it invariably arises well as soon as you become aware that it is active you implement the block and replace technique first you block it hey that's not true or hey we don't talk to ourselves that way anymore and then you replace that thought with the least pathologizing interpretation of reality that still fits the facts of the case this could look something like no it's not true that I'm a complete piece of I just suffered a setback and I'm going to continue to work through this difficult moment or no I'm

not Unworthy of love if one person isn't interested in a relationship with me that doesn't mean someone else won't be something like that now before I go any further if you're liking what you're hearing please consider sending this video to someone who might benefit from its message because it's Word of Mouth referrals like this that really help to make the channel grow and you can also hit the super thanks button it's and there's three little dots in the lower right hand corner beneath the video and tip me in proportion to the value you feel you

derived from this episode I really appreciate your support it makes all this happen okay so once you've made a commitment to stop talking to yourself in a way you wouldn't talk to somebody else that you cared about the next step is to begin to talk positively to yourself what does that look like basically you want to speak to yourself like you're a supportive coach or a good friend or for some of you a loving parent this is likely going to feel really weird in the beginning but trust me it's super necessary to the process just

keep in mind that a supportive coach or a good friend isn't going to ignore your mistakes or fluff up your ego they address what needs to be addressed and they praise what deserves to be praised what characterizes these roles is their Unapologetic and unwavering support and commitment like these folks will be in your corner until the end what I'm talking about here is the same degree of support and commitment for your own success and well-being so what does this look like well it can actually be a little cheesy it could sound something like hey you

worked really hard today it wasn't always easy but you did your best and things seemed to turn out all right good job or hey you were afraid to do that but you did it anyway that was courageous I'm proud of you the idea here is to accurately reflect the good that you do in your day-to-day life just like an Engaged and supportive Parenthood over time this kind of self-talk slowly develops into a sustainable self-love notice again that we're not catering to our egos with hyperbolic positive language all this does is reinforce the fragile narcissistic self

that is the steward of the Wounded self-loathing self in reality these two are two sides of the same coin which means that strengthening one will actually only serve to strengthen the other we're interested in grounding our self-worth in something real and active not something illusory and reactive so resist the urge to assuage your pain with love food that may taste sweet but is ultimately not nutritious now if you stop the negative self-talk and you begin to speak positively to yourself in the sense of providing accurate Reflections on the good that you do throughout the day

then you're actually pretty far along the road towards loving yourself the third thing that you can do to accelerate this process is to act in a way that you would find easier to love in someone else my first video on this channel was entitled be the person you can love the production values have improved since then but the message is as good as ever how are you going to love yourself if you continue to act in unlovable ways like it's much easier to love other people when they're lovable isn't it well it's theoretically possible to

love anyone some people are much much harder to love than others this could be because they are critical or unpredictable or unreliable or untrustworthy or touchy or demanding Etc these people are like the double black diamonds of interpersonal relationships for experts only on the other hand it's easy to love people who are supportive and even tempered and reliable and trustworthy and easy going and appreciative Etc and if it's easier to love people with those qualities you are not the exception develop those qualities in yourself and it will also be easier to love yourself and of

course the less you criticize yourself and the more you accurately acknowledge the good that you do the easier it will be to develop these qualities which creates a virtuous cycle and like all virtuous Cycles this can be hard to get going you may have to put in a lot of effort for longer than you anticipated before you see any appreciable movement it's kind of like moving this enormous Rock You may have to expend an enormous effort to get it to budge an inch but once that rock starts to move momentum begins to kick in and

further efforts see increasingly better results so if you follow these steps it still might take a while before you begin to love yourself however if it might take a while then you may as well get started especially given the fact that it will never be easier than it is today what do you think does this fit with your own experience let me know in the comments below and if you've gotten this far you might as well like this episode And subscribe to this channel you may also consider becoming a channel member with perks like priority

review of comments or booking a paid consultation as usual thank you for listening