Stop Telling Depressed People to “Love Themselves”

Of all the concepts that people in self-improvement love to preach, “self-love” is the most complicated one. It’s complicated because, well, it’s actually good advice.

You should love yourself. You should treat yourself like someone who you are responsible for helping because you are someone who you are responsible for helping.

You should also practice self-care.

By self-care, I don’t mean bubble baths (though if that’s your thing don’t let me stop you), I mean that you should do things like practicing good nutrition, healthy social interactions, regular sleep, exercise, and all that stuff.

But still, something about self-love bothers me.

Self-love bothers me because I know what it's like to not love yourself.

Until I was around 22, I didn’t have any real self-esteem.

I won a world championship in martial arts, and up until the moment I got my hand raised in the finals, I didn’t believe in myself at all.

Even afterward, I still thought I sucked and “got lucky”. My mind has always been fighting against me. Self-hatred used to be my default mindset.

I didn’t love myself, and if you don’t love yourself, it’s impossible to love anyone for a long period of time.

But you don’t need my Quora answer to know that, you’ve read a million other blog posts and seen all the motivational posters.

The message online is always the same:

"You must learn to love yourself before you can do blah blah blah."

For a lot of people, this is great advice for easing existential pain and building a life that has more self-care, self-love, and self-awareness. But if you’re depressed… like actually depressed, self-love seems a million miles away. If you’re depressed, you can’t just will yourself to get better, no matter what Joe Rogan says in that one motivational YouTube video. If you’re actually depressed, you need help.

Because of depression-induced cognitive distortions, self-love often seems like toxic positivity. That’s why we need to change the way that we talk to depressed people about self-love.

Let’s talk about therapy.

Most people can’t afford therapy and that’s fucked up. Plane and simple.

Many people still stigmatize antidepressants.

Too many times, I’ve been told that my antidepressants could make me “lose my personality” or that they’re just a “quick-fix”. However I’ve taken my “crazy pills” every day for over a year, and I still have a personality. Some would even say too much of a personality.

If anything is an example of discipline and hard work, I’d say that it’s braving the side effects of antidepressants and choosing to fix my brain, despite being made fun of or judged by even those closest to me.

But social media has turned everyone who’s ever experienced mental illness into a mental health expert, advocate, and leader. But experience does not determine qualification, especially with mental health. People with no qualifications to do much of anything are suddenly healers, alternative therapists, and life coaches. If you invent a job, you can also invent the qualifications for it.

Going to Peru and doing ayahuasca doesn’t make you a “healer”, it makes a person who went on a trip and did some fancy drugs.

But I digress.

In reality, most people just want to help and they genuinely have good intentions. That’s why this pains me to no end.

Because if you push all the crap aside, they’re not helping. They’re using their “gifts” to exploit people in order to survive in a cut-throat capitalist society. Their altruism is jaded by dollar signs. It’s exploitation in its cruelest and most twisted form because it disregards the humanity of the depressed person and not even the exploiter knows they’re doing harm.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”― Friedrich Nietzsche

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to help people, but toxic positivity and pseudoscience are the roots holding together the cultural self-love obsession that truly does more harm than good.

Why?

Because self-love is a vague umbrella term that means different things to different people. To a depressed person, the concept doesn’t even make sense.

Telling depressed people to just “love themselves” is like telling your beagle to finish your Algebra homework. It’s silly.

You don’t have to love yourself yet.

To some, self-love is about putting yourself first. This might be because those people experienced manipulation from people in the past and they feel they need to take back their autonomy.

For others, it might be about being more selfless. Those people might have found themselves being too self-absorbed in the past and they will feel at peace by connecting with others.

Obviously, I’m generalizing, but hopefully, you follow my thought process here.

How we define our self-love isn’t based on what Google says or what that one guru you met says, it’s about your own personal experience.

Self-love is learning. It requires self-awareness, discipline, time, self-care, and if you need them, antidepressants or other drugs (yes, like ayahuasca or Psilocybin) that will improve your neurological health.

That’s why depressed people struggle with self-love. We lack the self-awareness and emotional versatility to understand what the hell the motivational speakers and therapists are saying.

Over time, even depressed people can learn to love themselves, but it doesn’t just happen overnight. It might take more than a week or a month. Hell, it might even take years. That’s why when you begin your attempt to improve yourself, don’t be upset if you don’t just “love yourself” right away.

The secret that no one wants to admit is that a lot of people are lying about their self-love.

That frustration is why so many people give up and get stuck in their toxic habits, repeating the same shitty behaviors on the new people for years at a time.

With anything—patience is the greatest virtue. Self-love is no different.

Closing Thoughts

In my most heavy experiences with depression, being told to “love myself” didn’t make me feel better or inspired, it pissed me off. It seemed like the tallest order imaginable.

How the hell could I learn to love someone I hated?

Eventually, I learned a bit more. Not because I’m a genius, but because I committed to the program.

One step at a time. One step at a time is how you learn to love someone you hate.

If you don’t love yourself, can you like yourself? If you don’t like yourself, can you respect yourself? If you can’t even respect yourself, why not? What are actions that you perform make self-respect impossible? That answer will give you the map to the first steps on a journey from self-hatred to self-love.

But don’t let me tell you what the right course of action to self-love is, I’m just a random guy on the internet with a blog. I’m just as wrong as the next guru or shaman, I’m just a bit less confident.

That’s probably because of the depression.