“The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.” — Nathaniel Branden
One of the hardest things about anxiety, depression, and the like, is that eventually one starts to hate themselves. They start to hate that they feel this way, or that their body does this or that. They hate that they are not normal like everyone else. When they start down that path they start to not have love for themselves. When you start to not love yourself it is very hard to have happiness and be happy in life. They say one can not love another until they love themselves. Learning to love myself was a very, very hard thing to do. I have learned that it is hard to face these challenges in life if one can not love themselves because they can not have confidence in themselves. So everything becomes so much harder for them.
Self love is one of the most important types of love a person can have in their life, yet so many lacks this type of love.
A lack of self love will create all types of problems within oneself. Those problems can have a long lasting effect on a person’s mind and body. The problems can be anything from low self esteem, negative thinking, to having feelings of inadequacy, feelings of not being good enough.
Low levels of self love, for the most part, stem from poor self image that someone else has created for you or that we create for ourselves. Being told one was not good enough, one was not attractive enough. They lead to low levels of self love, low self esteem, and poor self consciousness.
Many of us when looking upon ourselves only see disgust, and see faults within. At times we can be our own worst critic, and judge ourselves too harshly. It also doesn’t help when we compare ourselves to others, and when we place high ideals upon what we “think” we should look like. As well as what outside sources tell us we should look like, or what media uses to represent what beauty is.
The first step to breaking free of its grip we must learn to accept ourselves. We must accept everything about us, from our head to our toes. We must accept the good as well as the bad. We must forgive ourselves for the mistakes we’ve made, and will probably make again. Each and every decision we make in our lives. We make with the knowledge that we possessed at the time. That decision made us who we are, and brought us to where we are in our lives. If we felt that the decision was not the best decision, or that we could make a better decision, we must accept the one we made. We then take the knowledge we have from our error and use it to not make that mistake again.