Member-only story

The Major Difficulty in Loving Yourself

Jason Henry
6 min readAug 16, 2021

--

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

It’s great that virtually everyone is on the same page when it comes to loving yourself. But I’ve felt it necessary to go into the mechanics of it every now and then to highlight why we often struggle to practice what we preach.

Society will tell you to love yourself but society may also imply that you’re unlovable. Not just in a mean throwaway comment by a stranger or in a screaming match with a loved one, but in terms of socialization.

If you had certain traits, occupations, perspectives and interests highlighted to you by your society, it implies that these things are the good stuff and everything else is either meh or bad.

If your parents and loved ones didn’t show you a requisite amount of love for you to actually feel like you were worthy of love, it is only natural for you to lament about having to do the self-love for yourself.

But because of nature and nurture, we have a tendency to listen to society’s opinion on us. So if you have a trait that is bad or lack traits that are good, it is again natural for you to feel bad about yourself. It is natural for you to abuse yourself.

Some of us are fiercely individualistic and would never sacrifice what they believe or who they are because of the opinions of other people. Like anything else in life, there’s good and bad in…

--

--

Jason Henry
Jason Henry

Written by Jason Henry

Counselling Psychologist | Current Writer | Constant Learner | “By your stumbling the world is perfected.”

Responses (2)