Unfortunetly, a lot of people didn’t get their full alotment of self-love, which indeed makes it very hard to go through life. You’ve heard of people who seem to have everything going for them, who up and kill themselves, right? Folks with good jobs, loving families, perfect health, who nonetheless decide to put a gun in their mouth and just end it? It’s usually because, despite all their evident success, on some level they’ve never been able to accept that they deserve to be happy. Not everyone who’s got that problem ends up killing themselves, though. Some folks, like your coworker, turn it outwards, and treat other people in the way they feel, deep down, they deserve to be treated themselves. Folks like that can’t change until they learn (as hokey as it sounds) to love themselves, first.
Which is pretty much saying exactly the same thing as what your coworker said, except it uses the more manly sounding “respect” instead of love. But it’s exactly the same concept.
Well, it does have an honorable ancestry in the Biblical “Love (“care for”, I think, is the sense that it is used ) your neighbor as yourself”, which implies that you should care deeply for yourself in order to care deeply for your neighbor.
I think the problem with the phrase “learn to love myself/yourself” is that has been so readily tossed about by representatives of the feelgood movement, that it has unfortunately acquired a certain aura of new-agey fluff that creates some unease among those of us who’d like a more concrete-action-based strategy for fixing what ails us. Which is often identified as a “male” point of view but I’m sure many women, too, have problems with emotional strategies that carry a whiff of patchouli scent around them.
Plus yes, anything that sets off the mental tape of Whitney Houston will be looked at with annoyance
I didnt know they taught people to love themselves. I thought it came naturally, and we just get better with practice. I can love myself anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours!
