How To First Love Yourself

Learning To Love Yourself Without Guilt

The river that dies, kills all its fish. If you can’t quite love yourself, you can’t quite love others. Love begins with you.

Ashamed To Love Yourself

It started when somebody told you that self-love was selfish. You argued against it. But even then it found its way deep into your unconscious.

Perhaps for the first few times you just felt guilty about loving yourself. Then it grew into a toxic shame. You stopped seeing yourself as your friend. You couldn’t forgive your mistakes. You blamed and criticized yourself. You spent hours judging yourself and obsessing over all your wrongs.

You even lost all empathy for yourself.

Somewhere along, you even crossed the line. Then came the self-punishments. You kept yourself up without sleep for 48 hours straight. You made yourself go without any food for 24 hours. You pulled yourself away from all activities that are fun.

It might not be you. It might be someone else that you know who’s going through this. And you don’t know how to help. It’s a tragedy of our times that so many of us don’t know how to help those who fall out of love with themselves.

That’s perhaps an irony too. We can help patch up two different people, but we can’t show them how to patch up with themselves. Because of the same guilt we carry in our minds — the myth that self-love is selfish love.

Why should you love yourself first?

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