"You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else."

Hey there, I'm sorry you're feeling this way and it's an interesting point to raise! I used to hear that phrase all the time--that you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else--and I thought it was completely untrue. Now, however, it does ring true for me at times. It's not that you can't love someone else without loving yourself, but rather (as you've mentioned) it's often very very difficult to accept the love others are returning to you. It's a pretty disheartening situation to be in, so I understand your dilemma! Can you recall any times you did believe his love for you? Or any evidence that he cares so to speak?

For me, when I struggle with this, I try to remember that I'm looking at someone's feelings towards me through my own bias of myself, you know? So while these feelings of disbelief or unworthiness are completely valid, they aren't necessarily true and trying to challenge these opinions you have with rational thought could be helpful.

I don't know if that makes sense, but here's an example of what I mean. Say someone says "I love you" or "I care about you" or something along those lines. Your first line of thought might be, "Wow how could they love me? How could that be true? What do they see in me?" To counteract these thoughts, you could try to find evidence against it like "Well, I don't see how they could, but they did ask to go to _____ with me and someone wouldn't ask to spend time with me if they didn't care" or "They did help me out when ____ so they must care about me"

It's really a tough mindset to get out of, so I understand you might feel stuck in it at the moment, but I'd challenge you to try to find your own evidence against your negative thoughts towards yourself--I think that you don't always necessary have to believe love is true or deserved to hold onto it and appreciate it.

I hope things get better soon, sorry for the rambling haha.

Dan Savage says you don't have to be perfect to be in a relationship but you do have to be in good working order. What I worked on was trying to see myself the way the people who love me best see me until the person who loves me best became myself. Depression makes things harder but you can rewire your brain with a little of the "fake it till you make it" tactic. Take people at their word. It is so much easier than trying to be a mind reader and it really does help over time.

I don't believe you'd need to "love" yourself, but you need to be dependably secure for at least most of the time or your lover can become your caregiver. The latter dynamic is fatal to relationships in most instances, and creates mutual strain and guilt.

Hey there, first of all I'm sorry that you're feeling this way, it must be very hard to handle.

I can only tell you what I seemed to have learned about it all myself, which is that it's all about the mindset. All too often with depression we find ourselves unable to cope with it all and often get times where we feel very low and worthless, resulting in a poor self-esteem and thinking nobody could ever really love us.

In my honest thoughts, you don't need to "fake it" or just let it go, it's often good that we notice these problems, that way we can start to fix them! People often see things better about us, than we see them ourselves, this is perfect normal as we are indeed our own biggest critics. We find flaws within ourselves even if they aren't necessarily there in the eyes of others.

One concept/idea helped me to over come a similar issues, the fact that our best traits lay on our back. People always see things we can't because it's like the principles like "Beautiful", "kind" & "Compassionate" are on our back, not our front. That way other's see it, we just don't alwaysknow about it. Think about how many times you've looked at or talked to, someone and thought something good about them, they likely didn't see it themselves but you did.

Just because we don't always see it doesn't make it any less true. It's a hard problem to start to overcome, I'm not going to say differently, however I know first hand that it's possible to overcome. You'll get through this I promise you!

You don't always have to "love yourself to love someone else", you just have to come to terms with who you are and begin to understand that who you are, and what your depression is, are two different things and that no matter how overwhelming it can begin to feel, you'll get through this and beat these negative feelings.

Just try to remember, you're a unique and valuable individual who deserves the love that you have and get, we're all here for you too!