Self love or loathing

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I have read time and time again that in order to be loved you have to love yourself.

I have also heard people say "I can't stand her she loves herself" (not about me, about others)

When I was young I would go to church from time to time or Sunday school where I was told that we should humble ourselves and put others first, be lowly.

It all gets a little confusing I wasn't familier with the consept of loving yourself until much later in life and like I said - it came from books.

I grew up thinking it was a bad thing to love yourself. I didn't grow up loving myself. I grew into an adult that had self loathing rather than self love. I wonder how different things might have been if I had known it was good to have self love.

I am now trying to learn to love myself - but it's hard to now where to begin!

i loathe myself. that is the perfect word. i would love to er love myself but i dunno.... if anyone else had caused me the troubles i have caused myself i certainly wouldn't love them

I feel more self-loathing than self-appreciation (I won't even touch the word "love"). I've always been under the (perhaps false) impression that self-love inevitably leads to arrogance and so I've always avoided praising myself or taking compliments to heart. It's kept me from being arrogant but also from being confident and it's left me unable to determine my strengths while continually being aware of my faults.

I believe that it is very important to love yourself but it doesn't mean that you put yourself first in each situation. You can be kind to others and still love yourself.
"Love everyone equally". I believe you are included in "everyone".

I am disappointed in myself, but I do my best to hide it from everyone. Society doesn't tolerate self-loathing much, and the way I see it, I need their help getting out of this hole.

I love myself, but I also know when to put others first.

Well I kind of hate myself most of the time.

I can't tell either way, since I find it hard to see myself as an actual person. I think of myself as "I" or the camera, not as a person who can be loved or hated. At most, I think of myself as a computer that reacts differently to different stimuli, and I experience my emotions as though they are the world.

There's nothing about me to love, let's face it.

I've been loathing myself since the age of 10 or so, though I'm trying my absolute best not to. This year has been one of healing and positivity, so I like myself much more than I did a year ago. It's a start.

I'd say I'm also in the self-loathing queue also.
I just feel at times so damn inferior compared to the NTs.
Its damn well lonely being on the AS path.

But then again, who knows? Maybe AS has been around for eons and the NTs are the workers with the AS crowd being your Philosophers, Artists, weird Intellectuals.
Maybe we are objects of amazement and intrigue by the outside crowd deep down whilst inside we hate ourselves?

Who knows what is the truth?

First of all I would like to say How sorry I am to hear that a lot of you aren't loving yourselves either and I would like to send you all a *big hug* and ask that you love yourself as best you can tomorrow - give it a go, see what happens

Does "accept yourself" make more sense as advice than "love yourself"?

I'm not sure what loving oneself would mean exactly, at least not sure how to convey what it should be like, what one actually does, what it feels like, etc.

It seems that "accept yourself" can be more practical (in the utility sense) and easier to measure. Practical in that, for most people, one's own self isn't going away, one's can't take a vacation from one's self, a self can't be turned in for a replacement under warranty, etc. So one is stuck with oneself. Like with any other encounter in life, one might not be able to choose whether the encounter happens or not, but one does choose how one feels about the encounter.

"Accepting the situation" is probably more familiar to people, in that I think most folks have experience with experiencing a bad encounter with the thoughts, "Oh shoot, this bad thing happened. How irritating. Now what do I do..."