Just stumbled on this, wanted to give an upvote and add that for people who weren’t brought up with warmth or acceptance, even the concept of what “love” is, is challenging. For me, I would read a lot of these books that talked about healing by loving your inner child or sending beams of white light and whatnot and it went right over my head. I had to break things down into simpler contexts, e.g.:
Love is lighting up when you see someone
Love is being on someone’s side, standing between them and danger
Love is being happy they’re happy, sad they’re sad—their emotions and well-being have weight in your utility function
Love is wanting someone to grow into their potential
Love is telling the truth (vs. lying, concealment, and emotional blackmail)
Love is the absence of disapproval towards a person’s being
etc. etc. in order to reconstruct the moves in my head, to be able to give aspects of myself some semblance of love.
I guess what I’m saying is that for a lot of people, learning not to self-hate is kind of a prerequisite for self-love, because a huge amount of what I was taught was “love” as a child was actually hate, manipulation, emotional blackmail, one-sided bargaining, and exploitation.
Just stumbled on this, wanted to give an upvote and add that for people who weren’t brought up with warmth or acceptance, even the concept of what “love” is, is challenging. For me, I would read a lot of these books that talked about healing by loving your inner child or sending beams of white light and whatnot and it went right over my head. I had to break things down into simpler contexts, e.g.:
Love is lighting up when you see someone
Love is being on someone’s side, standing between them and danger
Love is being happy they’re happy, sad they’re sad—their emotions and well-being have weight in your utility function
Love is wanting someone to grow into their potential
Love is telling the truth (vs. lying, concealment, and emotional blackmail)
Love is the absence of disapproval towards a person’s being
etc. etc. in order to reconstruct the moves in my head, to be able to give aspects of myself some semblance of love.
I guess what I’m saying is that for a lot of people, learning not to self-hate is kind of a prerequisite for self-love, because a huge amount of what I was taught was “love” as a child was actually hate, manipulation, emotional blackmail, one-sided bargaining, and exploitation.