I understand the feeling of hating yourself (there are things i have done which, at the time, just made me feel horrible) but what does loving yourself actually feel like, and how exactly can it be accomplished?

My personal opinion is that loving oneself comes from an ability to forgive oneself. If you can recognize that you've fucked up and are able to forgive yourself for fucking up, then you can be content and love yourself.

Shinji spells it out for you in the revelation scene close to the end of episode 26 (not to be confused with the beginning for 25' )

Shinji:
Maybe it's okay for me to be here!
That's right! I'm me, nothing more, nothing less!
I'm me.
I want to be me!
I want to be here!
And it's okay for me to be here!

Loving someone includes accepting the person, warts and all. Being comfortable in your own skin, with what you do and are, without self-recrimination or self-pity.

I'm not sure that loving oneself is crucial - the important thing is to accept oneself and so have no self-hate.

pwhodges wrote:I'm not sure that loving oneself is crucial - the important thing is to accept oneself and so have no self-hate.

Accepting yourself hardly prevents future self-hate. Isn't being stuck fighting mental illness for the rest of one's life keen?

Part of the reason I hate EoTV as an ending is the way it acts so pat about fixing up one's life. Illusory, saccharine nonsense.

Bad stuff possibly happening in the future is kind of a fact of life. When someone tries to accept themselves they aren't trying to protect their future selves. It's more about moving forward from where they are now in the moment. What happens after that just happens. If you do end up hating your-self again, presumably for a different reason, you just have to try and do it again. If that sounds morbid it might help to keep in mind that the second time around a person will be wiser since they've had the experience and that will help them deal.

Mental illness really has a lame definition. I mean if the mental illness is physical(Brain is just wired in a way that ends up hurting you) then yeah it's keen. I don't really know what that's like so I have no idea how those kind of people deal with life. I imagine medication helps. If mental illness is psychological/thought related then it means you can change it so it does not have to be a life long issue at all. It will be something that is always a part you and your past but it doesn't have to dominate your life or well being.

Arcadia's legacy wrote:I understand the feeling of hating yourself (there are things i have done which, at the time, just made me feel horrible) but what does loving yourself actually feel like, and how exactly can it be accomplished?

Accept your failings, recognize your virtues, correct your mistakes and understand that you are okay. Or, what Tines said.

Reichu wrote:Part of the reason I hate EoTV as an ending is the way it acts so pat about fixing up one's life. Illusory, saccharine nonsense.

In fairness Shinji has a behavioral disorder rather than a mental disorder per se, and breakthroughs are actually possible there (particularly when a lot of smart people are sharing your headspace and showing you their perception of you). And this isn't particularly unrealistic even in the real world: most of us have had our perceptions turn on a dime in response to a particular event or conversation, and that's possible wrt self-perception just as much as anything else. Is it common? No, not at all. But it's certainly possible.

I think for Shinji it just comes down to accepting that no one actually hates him and that he gains nothing from staying in his own shell. I don't think its so much about Shinji loving himself as it is about not hating himself.

Reichu wrote:Accepting yourself hardly prevents future self-hate. Isn't being stuck fighting mental illness for the rest of one's life keen?

Part of the reason I hate EoTV as an ending is the way it acts so pat about fixing up one's life. Illusory, saccharine nonsense.

Accepting yourself is certainly necessary to help stop future self-hatred. Once you do something like accepting yourself once, it's easier to figure out how to do it again.

Just because something can't happen to you doesn't mean it can't happen to somebody else. I'm reminded of a line spoken in the webcomic Questionable Content by one of its characters, who at several points refers to herself not being pretty and feeling overweight. On prompting by a character that perhaps she might want to try a makeover (on the basis that they're fun, not that one is required) Marigold gives the following response:

I fucking hate it in movies and TV shows where they have the nerdy weirdo girl and all they have to do is comb her hair and put on some makeup and all of a sudden she's SO BEAUTIFUL HOW DID WE EVER NOT NOTICE BEFORE.

That's not how it works in real life. It's bullshit.

I disagreed with this strip on the basis that I've actually seen this happen. Several years ago there was a girl in my grade that was fairly indiscriminate about choosing clothing and didn't really do much in terms of hygiene (washing one's face or hair, for instance.) There was this big sleepover event one night, and some of the girls took this one person off and totally did her up-- washed her hair, combed it, put some makeup on, put her in different clothes, all that jazz-- and when they brought her back in, you could practically hear everybody's jaw hitting the floor, guys and girls alike, because she looked bloody gorgeous.

How is any of that relevant and why did I quote it? Just because it only took Shinji a little nudging (okay, a lot of nudging, but still) to get over his issues, there are going to be people who can't. However, just because they are unable to does not mean that there are people for which something actually works-- and just because it doesn't work for them is no reason to dismiss the entire thing as illusory, saccharine nonsense.

Nuclear Lunchbox wrote:just because it doesn't work for them is no reason to dismiss the entire thing as illusory, saccharine nonsense.

It's far from a one size fits all solution, and ending things on a note of the whole world clapping your congratulations, acting like everything will be just peachy from that point forward rings so false I can't take it seriously. It's like someone stumbling into some bullshit placebo treatment and feeling like they're on the top of the world for a little while -- only to have their problems catch up with them and bite back harder than ever.

Reichu wrote:It's far from a one size fits all solution, and ending things on a note of the whole world clapping your congratulations, acting like everything will be just peachy from that point forward rings so false I can't take it seriously.

But it's not presented as a one size fits all solution, it's presented as a solution for one specific individual in an esoteric set of circumstances. If there's nothing physically wrong with Shinji, and it's his behavior and his perception of others that's causing his problems, then it makes sense that being able to see into the minds of others and understand how they actually perceive him would have a positive effect on his perspective (and thus on his assessment of himself and his own worth).

It's like someone stumbling into some bullshit placebo treatment and feeling like they're on the top of the world for a little while -- only to have their problems catch up with them and bite back harder than ever.

This is tantamount to saying that psychotherapy and behavioral counseling are ineffectual bullshit, and I know for a fact that this is not the case for many people. It won't help people with chemical or neurological disorders, of course, but Shinji is not one of those people. And with Instrumentality magnifying the effects by an order of magnitude (or two or three) . . . placebo this ain't!

Bagheera wrote:
This is tantamount to saying that psychotherapy and behavioral counseling are ineffectual bullshit, and I know for a fact that this is not the case for many people. It won't help people with chemical or neurological disorders, of course, but Shinji is not one of those people. And with Instrumentality magnifying the effects by an order of magnitude (or two or three) . . . placebo this ain't!

If we're using the counseling/psychotherapy idea for Instrumentality then the problem is that there is no plan for the future for Shinji. Sure Shinji accepts himself for who he is but that still leaves him with a lot of the other problems he had, social phobia, anxiety, being afraid of being close with anyone. I mean you could assume that this could all come from the fact that he hated himself but while that is a part of the issues he has its not the only thing.

I guess this is why its relatively common in fan fiction to explore how Shinji would be after 3I. The need to know how he would react in the long term is very interesting

Sure. Instrumentality was a breakthrough, but not a quick fix. It just showed him what was possible and left it to him to make it happen.

with all this talk of there being no future for him because he still has crippling defects aside from hating himself, i think its worth noting that the circumstances of instrumentality are never specified in the show, as far as i can remember. is it the same as EoE, where nobody exists as an individual anymore? if so, why does it even matter? in EoE, the only reason Shinji could exist as an individual after instrumentality is because of circumstances unique to EoE, and maybe there, the psychotherapy would have a legitimate use. in the show, it is left vague and for all we know, the cast could all be stuck in their own minds for the rest of eternity, never actually interacting with each other again.

You got become to someone you can love, that you can stand to be around, which would mean a lot of life changes. I believe what Shinji said he hated about himself was that he was, weak, cowardly, and insincere.

Arcadia's legacy wrote:I understand the feeling of hating yourself (there are things i have done which, at the time, just made me feel horrible) but what does loving yourself actually feel like, and how exactly can it be accomplished?

An interesting question and a lot of interesting and good answers. Do you really hate yourself, or simply the behavior? If things which we've done made us feel horrible, do we not possess free agency to change the behavior that leads to that uncomfortable feeling? Consider for a moment that we (as adults) are the primary architects of our lives, that all of our relationships are consensual and therefore we have more power over ourselves than we would (probably) like to admit. Why probably? Because people lack self-knowledge, which is empowering. Power entails responsability, which in my experience is something that most people flee like the plague.

So as to the means by which this can be accomplished, the very, VERY short and condensed version is, in my opinion, self-knowledge and taking responsability for ourselves. This, I postulate, is the penultimate truth which NGE (and its derivatives) attempt to convey: the whole of the world is a stage designed to help us remember who we really are.

Reichu wrote:Accepting yourself hardly prevents future self-hate. Isn't being stuck fighting mental illness for the rest of one's life keen?

I suppose I'd have to say that if the hate hasn't all gone, then the acceptance is not complete. Full acceptance implies not wishing for things to be different. But I understand that this can be hard, perhaps too hard. After all, mere forgiveness might be easier, in that you know that what needs to be forgiven was in some way voluntary.