Love: An Abstract Concept
For decades, people on social media have been yacking about “loving yourself.” The truth of the matter is, so many of us grew up with a distorted sense of love, because it was entwined with painful longing and yearning to have the adoration we felt for our mothers, reciprocated.
By the time we reach adulthood, we confuse the painful inner craving we feel for another’s warmth, affection and nurturance, with the emotion of love, itself! This is what love meant to us thru infancy and childhood, so how can we know there exists something different or better? This is fucked up of course, but it’s the nature of attachment among millions of core-injured people worldwide.
In short, if your relationship experience doesn’t routinely cause you to feel any pain, you can’t accept nor interpreted it, as “True Love.” Having never gotten an opportunity to engage in a genuine, safe and secure attachment bond when we were young, leaves us with zero frame of reference for what it’s supposed to feel like, when we’re adults!
So, given that “love” has become an amorphous, intangible, fleeting, abstract concept for far too many people, loving oneself is simply a catch-phrase that carries no real meaning~ even though plenty of folks casually bandy it about, like it’s the modern-day Holy Grail.
In truth, if you’ve never experienced what it means to be genuinely adored by your maternal object, you can’t feel worthy of receiving love from anyone else, and you certainly don’t know how to become your own best friend~ or even approach, loving You.