So this is a psychological technique that I think I created. For now, let’s say I created it and deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. But basically I ate an edible and was playing The Last Of Us 2. Great game by the way. As I was playing the game, I pondered on why I felt certain ways and why it was so hard to change deep rooted destructive patterns. You know, the usual when playing video games. I was thinking about self love because someone told me I couldn’t love anyone else until I loved myself. And I guess they were right. How could I love fully when empty.
My emotional needs weren’t met as a kid, not out of malice but out of circumstance. It was like one day I was held and then I never was again. It was like being outside in the windy winter, in below freezing temperatures, with just a t-shirt on. You try to huddle up with people, but they push you away. You try to enter the shops with the heater on, but it seems like everyone was allowed in except for you. So you go out in the forest and collect some sticks and leaves. You get some discarded metal from a trash can and try to create a spark. The fire would light for only a few seconds at a time before the wind blows it away. The flame was so small you practically had to set your fingers on fire to feel its warmth. People will come by and laugh, people will come by and stomp your little fire out for laughs, and sometimes people would just walk around you. The hope to one day become apart of the community restrained you, but the animosity still leaked out at times. You wanted to burn down the village, but then you’d be even lonelier when the flames died down.
It makes sense why it felt so hard and impossible for me. There isn’t anything at all I could look back on to prove to me I deserved love. But the problem was, I kept looking back. I kept identifying with the past that no longer served me. Then I thought “What can I do?” I mean I had to learn how it felt to love myself. Positive thinking and affirmations are cool and all, but it seemed too mechanical for a person like me. It’s like my brain knew I was doing it as a shortcut to feel at peace. And my brain being dick, would block all my efforts. I guess I was a person that needed to feel.
I think I love creative endeavors because they allow me to feel without the vulnerability. When I play a sad song on the guitar, I feel sad. But, of course, not because I’M sad but because it was a sad song. Men don’t feel sad or cry, it’s common knowledge guys.
Creating my own stuff (like music, writing, and art) gives me the ability to process emotions without claiming ownership to them. So you’ll never know who keeps babbling on this website, but you might know a little of how I feel. When you think about it, empathy is a reaction of your imagination. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, feeling how they feel. It’s an amazing thing, it’s actually the basis of my technique.
For the first time in a long time, or maybe ever, I had a glimpse of self love. I just simply thought “What would it feel like to love myself?” I was able to imagine a parallel universe where everything was the same except I truly loved myself. I guess detaching myself from the experience, in a way, allowed me to truly imagine and see what it would actually feel like. There were no doubts or anything like that because, hidden in the guise of a question, it slid into my psyche as something purely theoretical, which I guess made it safe for me to consider (because it didn’t attack my current mental framework). I learned that, for me, the core of self love was to believe someone can actually love you honestly and sincerely. I imagined friends, family, and lovers loving me despite my flaws. Frequently imagining stuff like this soon allowed me to consider that this was possible in my current reality. Who knows what comes next?
I’m not saying this technique will save you but it could be worth a shot. I mean it’s better than thinking about your past and your future, in my opinion. The technique could literally be used for anything, but the key is to be realistic. Throw your ego to the side and keep the questions purely psychological/philosophical. Make sure they are questions of something you can literally do in the present, mind willingly. Don’t ask “What would it feel like to have a lambo?”, ask yourself “What would it feel like to be content with whatever I had?” You know, stuff like that.
Obsidian God 