Name: How to LOVE YOURSELF: three steps to overcoming self-hatred
Uploaded: 2026-02-17T06:35:12.000Z
Duration: 10 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Dr. Orion Taraban and this is Psych Hacks Better Living Through Psychology.

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And the topic of today's short talk is how to love yourself.

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Loving yourself is extremely important and this is because wherever you go, there you are.

Everything that you experience, you experience within your consciousness.

It's not possible for you to experience anything outside of your consciousness.

It's and within that consciousness will be yourself.

Or more precisely, that consciousness is yourself.

That self is sort of like a dye that saturates throughout a liquid.

It will color and flavor all the other contents in that solution.

This means, for example, that if you are cruel and self loathing, even if the other contents of your consciousness are the most pleasant and delightful possible, that cruel self loathing self will permeate these other contents and spoil whatever goodness, pleasure or happiness you might otherwise have experienced.

By the same token, a self that is clean and loved will make it much easier to experience even unpleasant, painful and difficult content with without suffering.

In this way, attending exclusively to your external circumstances without paying attention to your internal environment is likely to prove self defeating.

Consequently, we need to learn how to love ourselves so that wherever we go, we can be assured of good company.

Now, if you are raised in a securely attached, loving family, this will likely be easier for you to do than if you were raised in a chaotic and conflict ridden environment.

However, no matter your circumstances, I'm here to give you three actionable things that you can start doing today in order to accelerate your progress in the direction of self love.

First and foremost, make a commitment, starting now, not to speak to yourself in a way that you wouldn't speak to a close friend.

Though I've been a therapist for over 10 years, I am still shocked from time to time at just how negatively some people speak to themselves.

Every mistake they make is painfully amplified and everything they do well is grossly minimized by this horribly negative critical inner voice.

So the first step to loving yourself is to stop speaking to yourself in that way.

If you wouldn't say something out loud to someone that you cared about, then don't say it to yourself.

Even if you don't care about yourself yet, you have to begin to act as if you did.

This is so important because if you denigrate someone over time, it's so much easier to hate them.

This is like an initial step in all totalitarian regimes towards pogroms and genocide.

To justify the violence against a hated group, you must first denigrate them.

If the denigration does not occur, it's much harder to see the targets as inhuman and therefore much more difficult to justify the atrocious behavior.

By the same token, self denigration justifies self hatred and self violence of all kinds.

How do you respond to your critical inner voice when it invariably arises?

Well, as soon as you become aware that it is active, you implement the block and replace technique.

First you block it, hey, that's not true, or hey, we don't talk to ourselves that way anymore.

And then you replace that thought with the least pathologizing interpretation of reality that still fits the facts of the case.

This could look something like no, it's not true that I'm a complete piece of shit, I just suffered a setback and I'm going to continue to work through this difficult moment.

If one person isn't interested in a relationship with me, that doesn't mean someone else won't be.

Now, before I go any further, if you're liking what you're hearing, please consider sending this video to someone who might benefit from its message.

Because it's word of mouth referrals like this that really help to make the channel grow.

And you can also hit the super thanks button.

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And tip me in proportion to the value you feel you derived from this episode.

Okay, so once you've made a commitment to stop talking to yourself in a way you wouldn't talk to somebody else that you cared about, the next step is to begin to talk positively to yourself.

Basically, you want to speak to yourself like you're a supportive coach or a good friend, or for some of you, a loving parent.

This is likely going to feel really weird in the beginning, but

trust me, it's super necessary to the process.

Just keep in mind that a supportive coach or a good friend isn't going to ignore your mistakes or fluff up your ego.

They address what needs to be addressed and they praise what deserves to be praised.

What characterizes these roles is their unapologetic and unwavering support and commitment.

Like, these folks will be in your corner until the end.

What I'm talking about here is the same degree of support and commitment for your own success and well being.

Well, it can actually be a little cheesy.

It could sound something like, hey, you worked really hard today.

It Wasn't always easy, but you did your best and things seemed to turn out all right.

Good job or hey, you were afraid to do that but you did it anyway.

The idea here is to accurately reflect the good that you do in your day to day life.

Just like an engaged and supportive parent would.

Over time, this kind of self talk slowly develops into a sustainable self love.

Notice again that we're not catering to our egos with hyperbolic positive language.

All this does is reinforce the fragile narcissistic self that is the steward of the wounded self loathing self.

In reality, these two are two sides of the same coin, which means that strengthening one with will actually only serve to strengthen the other.

We're interested in grounding our self worth in something real and active, not something illusory and reactive.

So resist the urge to assuage your pain with love food that may taste sweet but is ultimately not nutritious.

Now, if you stop the negative self talk and you begin to speak positively to yourself in the sense of providing accurate reflections on the good that you do throughout the day, then you're actually pretty far along the road towards loving yourself.

The third thing that you can do to accelerate this process is to act in a way that you would find easier to love in someone else.

My first video on this channel was entitled be the person you can love.

The production values have improved since then, but the message is as good as ever.

How are you going to love yourself if you continue to act in unlovable ways?

Like, it's much easier to love other people when they're lovable, isn't it?

While it's theoretically possible to love anyone, some people are much, much harder to love than others.

This could be because they are critical or unpredictable or unreliable or untrustworthy or or touchy or demanding, etc.

These people are like the double black diamonds of interpersonal relationships.

On the other hand, it's easy to love people who are supportive and even tempered and reliable and trustworthy and easygoing and appreciative, etc.

And if it's easier to love people with those qualities, you are not the exception.

Develop those qualities in yourself and it will also be easier to love yourself.

And of course, the less you criticize yourself and the more you accurately acknowledge the good that you do, the easier it will be to develop these qualities, which creates a virtuous cycle.

And like all virtuous cycles, this can be hard to get going.

You may have to put in a lot of effort for longer than you anticipated before you see any appreciable movement.

It's kind of like moving this enormous rock.

You may have to expend an enormous effort to get it to budge an inch, but

once that rock starts to move, momentum begins to kick in and further efforts see increasingly better results.

So if you follow these steps, it still might take a while before you begin to love yourself.

However, if it might take a while, then you may as well get started, especially given the fact that it will never be easier than it is today.

And if you've gotten this far, you might as well like this episode and subscribe to this channel.

You may also consider becoming a channel member with perks like priority review of comments or booking a paid consultation as usual.