Why I don’t love myself!

The Times They Are A-Changin' by Bob Dylan

I want to double-click on something I said in last week’s newsletter, “The ‘Outside-In’ Guy I Am!” within the paradigm of repressed feelings. Specifically:

“Which is how I have now come to the realisation that I don’t innately love myself. I love myself by proxy.” 

You see, I often spitball streams of consciousness in this blog. Consequently it’s not unheard of for me to miss the blindspots in my theses. Which is to say, my tunnel vision is such that I sometimes lose my bearings and wind up disappearing up my own arse! I might therefore, on occasion, fail to see the holes in my arguments that a period of gestation would reveal if I wasn’t so inclined to rush to publish. This explains why this post is two days late. Sorry, not sorry! I’m trying to practise the dirty word that is Compassion.

Baby Boomers, like my parents, were natural gaslighters because they were taught to prioritise hierarchy over self-emotional-regulation. Their love was transactional. That is how I came to the realisation that I was conditioned to love myself by proxy. For to love myself by proxy is to love myself as others see me. It really was a doozy of a stitch-up. They gutted out all the agency in the parent-child relationship that trust and patience could have cultivated. Specifically, love contained an element of abuse which consisted of psychological punishment and corporal punishment. Nevertheless, since becoming a parent back in the noughties, I was able to see the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Not just as a gotcha moment in which their limitations were finally revealed, given the development of the parenting practices, but a feeling of compassion because parenting is so damn stressful. It, thus, became apparent that their methods were as much to do with desperation as much as narcissism.

Consequently, us Generation X’ers thought we were living through life when in actual fact we were surviving life. We were traumatised, too caught in a fight/flight/freeze/fawn state to be present in processing our emotions. Consequently we now live through repressive emotional blackouts that minimise the quality of our lives in a state of unconscious dysregulation.

And yet the yearning to stick to the familiar is intoxicating even. But as Bob Dylan said, the times they are a-changin'! For I have this interminable itch which means I am quick to envy. I’m a Magpie who craves new and shiny things. There is psycho-sociocultural current that is naturally propelling us forward, all these new pubescent theories both excite and leave me bereft. You can’t stop progress and even though there is a little nostalgia for past ethics, some might say it is like howling at the moon. For there is an awareness that what once worked has now been debunked with regard to parenting. My Mum may have put hands on me at one point but I never felt the urge to uphold that standard when I became a Dad. Everything in its time and every time in its place. In her present, she wasn’t wrong. Just as in my present, neither am I.

It’s a hypocritical headfuck to live by one set of standards but raise your kids by a completely different set of standards. For example, when my son was a toddler, I told him it was okay to cry as I wanted him to feel all of his feelings in an environment of safety. I was adamant he was not going to be emotionally handicapped, that he was loved in all his feelings. And yet have I ever cried in front of him? No, never! I don’t even know how. I’m emotionally constipated. How fraudulent is that? Best I can do, now my son is a man, is work on experiencing a full range of emotions with my Psychologist. Let me tell you, it's the slowest motherfucking metamorphosis ever. If I could thread the eye of a needle there is a world of emotions and expression available to me. Except that world would hit me like a tidal wave and in that, I’m overwhelmed. I’m essentially, spiritually, confused and dazed, caught between two worlds. On the one hand, my philosophy might be outmoded but my philosophy is my irrefutable robust foundation. On the other hand, psychosocial standards have evolved but because they have evolved, I’m adopting a pioneering “do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do” philosophy that has not yet been stress-tested over a generation.

When love is repressed how do you know it is love? The shocking conclusion is we’re all Zombies who’ve had their feelings hollowed out by a thorough gaslighting in our childhood. So if you don’t know how you feel, or, if you do know how you feel but don’t know how to relate to how you feel, how can you possibly love yourself? Having unwittingly undergone a socially systematic conspiracy to suppress negative emotions, how can a Tin man have a heart?

Suppose you can time travel back to when you were four years old and you go shopping with your parents. You see a five hundred gram Apple Pie on one of the shelves and you say to your parents “can I have that?” They say “sure! you can have it all when we get home.” You get home and you sit patiently at the dining table waiting for your Apple Pie. Dad serves a plate of Apple Pie in front of you. You stare at the Apple Pie somewhat befuddled. You don’t know anything about fractions but you were convinced, based on the size of the packaging when you pulled it from the shelf in the supermarket, that the Apple Pie was bigger than this. You see unbeknownst to you your Dad served you a sixth of the Apple Pie. Which is to say, your Dad ripped you off. Nevertheless you chow down without having the temerity to query the size of your portion with your Dad. It’s like your parents telling you the sixth of a pie on your plate is the whole pie when you were a kid even though intuitively, you know the maths aint mathing. Now, fast forward a couple of years when you learn what fractions are and the penny drops that you were being lied to, your parents may say they were just teaching you moderation. However, not only were they denying you the full experience of eating the whole Apple Pie, since they didn’t trust you enough to take the training wheels off in teaching you how to moderate, or regulate, your intake for yourself. Fast Forward to when you’re an adult and can afford to buy the Apple Pie for yourself, you lack the constructive coping skills in said moderation. 

Now this is a figurative anecdote. That Apple Pie is symbolic of an Emotions Wheel. You see the consumption of that one-sixth of the Apple Pie you were served represents your happiness. Through your senses; the visual appeal, the smell, the taste, the texture of the pastry and the soft fruit respectively, you were allowed to fully embrace that happiness in its fullest expression. The rest of the Apple Pie, the five-sixths you were denied, represents the Fear, Sadness, Surprise, Anger and Disgust you were not allowed to learn to manage due to your Parents’ control issues. Because you were led to believe five-sixths of your emotions were not there, you were denied the foundational learning of how to live with all your emotions.

All those feelings have been psycho-socioculturally buried alive from the formative years. This was the experience of Generation X and prior generations. Habitually repressed until the instinct as to how to experience those emotions was forgotten in the one place where it means the most, the bedrock of a child’s identity - the family. And if you were stubborn enough to recognise the significance of affording yourself permission to experience these emotions but your primary caregivers avoided any skills transfer to enable you to manage these emotions, you’re still in a waking hell! The takeaway is that you can’t love all yourself. Emotionally, you feel whole but psychosocially, you’re aware that that whole is actually only a sixth of your identity.

I say if you are only permitted to see yourself through a socially-acceptable lens then you can only have a superficial love of self. There is virtually no third dimension to enable depth perception of your true extent, or the X-Ray vision that one’s own North Star affords. This can only be an impoverished malnourished love no matter how intensely it is felt. It is orders of magnitude less than the sentient experience, isn’t it?

I got mangled between the past and the present. Got caught with my pants down trying to uproot my past understanding of self. Do I anchor myself to the tried and tested, robust roots of my outmoded philosophy or the sway-in-the-breeze green leaves of new superficially sound, not-yet-conclusively-empirically-proven parenting paradigms? It is a maddening conundrum. 

“Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it.” ~ Maya Angelou. 

For, invariably, it seems so simple like, even though I was being psycho-socioculturally led up the garden path during my upbringing, how did I not know that given how the new progressive standards in parenting seem so shiny, simple, obvious and irrefutable? The urge to shame and self-berate is magnetic. Yet who’s to say compassion won't yield even more psychopaths and sociopaths when this generation is grown? Can I honour the roots that made me without being held hostage by them? Can I adopt new practices of self-care without ransacking my roots?

Living in the present can leave you insecure. The grass is always greener mentality can have you believing the “you” that your formative philosophy created should be binned even though you don’t speak the same philosophical language as the new methodologies, leaving you feeling like you don’t know your arse from your elbow in 2024. By today’s standards, I can’t possibly love myself. I don’t acknowledge the presence of all my feelings and those that I do acknowledge, I can’t regulate. 

The thing is those five-sixths of the Apple Pie, those much besmirched emotions that are part of me, have long been condemned to the back of a wardrobe as deep as the one described in “The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe”. Even though the world at large is now screaming that they should be accessible to me, they are so repressed I don’t, unconsciously, know they’re there.

To be clear, I love one-hundred percent of what I know of me. But the factoid, that what I thought was the whole of me is actually just one-sixth of me, is disconcerting. In spite of the deluge of psycho-sociocultural information coming at me from all directions from all manner of media, emotionally, I still don’t unconsciously know there is another five-sixths to me. Like I can’t unhear what I’ve been hearing for sometime and continue to worship at the altar of the one-sixth that my happiness represents. Yet nobody tells you how hard it is to locate and resurrect those atrophic, puny five-sixths and how to integrate them with the jacked ripped one-sixth. I don’t know how or where to find the pure essence of my anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise other than in my ego and I don’t want to keep fronting.

Currently, my left-brain has unilateral control over my spiritual and emotional constitution. But what if my right brain was allowed to contribute to my constitution? What if my inappropriately named “negative emotions” (anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise) could take the steering wheel with all due compassion from my left-brain. That is, and this is my own figurative anecdotal reimagining based on advice from my Psychologist, what if my left-brain could ride shotgun and simply regulate each respective emotion, whenever they are in the driver’s seat, on behalf of my right-brain, with some breathing exercises and calming empathetic words of reassurance? This reimagining came straight out of my right-brain which just goes to show my left-brain and my right-brain can coordinate respectfully. The problem is my left-brain only grants permission to my right-brain for the inappropriately named “positive emotion” of happiness. Nevertheless, this reimagining, in my own tongue, allows me to own the concept. But talk is cheap! Doh! There it is. That signature lack of compassion. For, and again with the reimagining, compassion is the vehicle of change. Nevertheless, action is the only way to achieve proof of concept. I need to snub perfectionism and surrender to action. Spiritually and emotionally, I have to build the muscles. Now I don’t mean jacked like a body-builder. I mean unassumingly jacked like a Yogi. This is a spiritual love not an egotistical love. Specifically, I don’t want to give up my repressed anger for, say, homicidal anger. I want the harmonious anger that my anecdote exacts. Now that would be the ultimate definition of love for myself.

As ever, all views are appreciated, feel free to let me know how you feel in the Comments.