Hey @Birdofparadise8 I wanted to reply to your post from last night. Er... fair warning, big Jynx ramble incoming 😅
So, it sounds like there were a number of factors that meant that you were in a perpetually traumatising environment. More to the point, the primary adult caregivers that should have kept you safe from harm failed to do so on a number of occasions. Of course this leads to feelings of low self-worth, when your need for psychological safety at school is consistently ignored.
I agree that it might be really prudent for you to talk to your psych about your experiences of bullying, as well as the ways the adults in your life failed to protect you from that harm.
I also have some thoughts and experiences about this that I wanted to share:
@Birdofparadise8 wrote:
Lol, me loving myself is hard.
It's funny how much you remind me of my younger self sometimes. I spent sooo many years trapped in deep self-loathing, and I can empathise deeply with the feeling of it seeming impossible to somehow just flip a switch and start loving myself. Not to mention, I had heard time and again the saying, "Nobody can love you until you love yourself first", which as it turns out is toxic as hell and did a lot of damage to my mental health (found a decent blog post about this concept here). Everyone deserves love, no matter where they are in their journey.
Just like the path towards loving another person doesn't just start with immediate love, the path towards self-love has a number of stepping stones to get there. I didn't just wake up one day with the thought "Yeah I'm actually pretty fond of me", I started by practicing self-acceptance. Literally just the bare friggin minimum you might give to a stranger on the street; I am alive so I have needs, and it is okay for me to take up space in this world, and seek for those needs to be met.
Other important ingredients:
Self-awareness - our ability to reflect on and examine our ways of behaving and interacting with the world is incredibly powerful. We are not the voice in our heads. Learning to step back from our own thoughts and become the observer of the voice in our heads helps us to de-identify from the faulty beliefs that we may have developed about ourselves over the years.
Self-care - I think I'm gonna write up a post about this cos it's a term that has almost lost all meaning over the years that it has been circulating in mental health spaces. But at its core, I think it's about identifying and attending to our needs.
Self-expression - To express desire is to make room for the self. What do I want? Who do I want to be? How do I show my authentic self to the world? And incredibly important - are these desires actually mine, or are they things I'm pursuing because I believe that they might gain the approval of others?
Self-compassion - I am human, and thus worthy and deserving of kindness and respect, especially from myself. More about self-compassion, with some practical tools to try, here.
They're all just stepping-stones, and it takes time, effort, and focus to move across them and maintain our balance whilst we do so. It's not a linear pathway either (which is kinda where my stepping-stone metaphor breaks down lol but hopefully you get the idea), and some parts might be harder than others. But it all helps.
You'll get there hun, I believe in you 💜
