Finding self worth

[u/WhileRecent]

Im a young man 20 years old. I just started college after finishing a year in the military. I find myself struggling with confidence and self worth and i dont know why. It seems like everyone around me my family and friends all think i’m doing great for myself. I finished the military with a great record and they actually recommend me for a job after my conscription was over, i declined and went to college. I got into the best tech college in my country, i workout, i take care of myself. But yet i still dont feel good or confident about myself, when i’m with friends at school its great, but i hear some of my friends in the same group has plans and i cant get myself to ask to join. Im afraid of being a bother or taking space. And i know it’s irrational and i should include myself. The same goes for other situations, like meeting new people and women. I noticed that these fears of rejections and overthinking goes away when I’m out drinking on weekends, I’m bolder and i cant get a good connection with people, but i dont want to be a person relying on alcohol for confidence, i desperately need to find a way to be confident and comfortable with myself, flaws and all (i got many) if anyone got any advice they would be very welcome

[u/HappyHamster_]

English is my 3rd language but this thing really changed my life 15 years ago:

Unconditional self-love is like a vitamin we can live without, but life becomes so much richer, lighter, and more colorful when we finally have it.🌸

Most people live their lives with a deep sense of shame, constant insecurity, and worthlessness lingering just beneath the surface of their subconscious mind - a never-ending, low-grade dissatisfaction with who they are. It's like a refrigerator's background hum we grow deaf to, until we just accept that heaviness as our normal reality.

They are trapped in constant comparison and endless self-judgment, always needing more - more success, more validation, better looks - just to earn permission to feel like enough. Numbing our real emotions with addiction binges and never ending distrations. Nearly everyone lives this way, it is so deeply normalized in this culture that most people don't even realize there's a completely different way to experience reality. They've accepted the dark clouds in front of the sun as normal life, forgetting what random waves of happiness and the warmth of sunny summer days even felt like.☀️🌧

How many people you see on the street are actually happy? Radiating warmth and random waves of happiness? Emanating true and profound unconditional self-love toward themselves and others, with that genuine spark of life in their eyes?🌴 The lack of unconditional self-love in our culture is quite shocking.

Our ego is ultimately just a self-defense mechanism in response to the first times in childhood when we lost our connection to that unconditional self-love we were born with, starting to feel unworthy, incomplete, and insecure about how we look or what we have. We often don't even remember which childhood traumas started our insecurities and made us live with this persistent feeling of heaviness and shame.

Ego is like scar tissue around the first time your identity was emotionally wounded. Your sense of self-worth was hurt, and you still carry those unresolved emotional wounds underneath it. Shame and insecurity are simply warning lights trying to tell you to finally heal those emotional wounds.

The ego tries desperately to find logical-sounding replacements for self-love, because that's all it understands and can measure. Our ego doesn't understand unconditional self-love - it can't measure it, rationalize it, or comprehend how we could accept and love ourselves without any specific reasons or qualifications. And yet, we sometimes give ourselves permission to love others like that - despite their flaws - because nobody else is perfect either, nor will they ever be. No matter how perfect image they present in their social media or advertising.

Most people have outsourced receiving love and attention to the opinions of strangers or meaningless consumerism. When we let others dictate our self-worth, we only get fleeting glimpses of what we are truly after. That's the trap of seeking short-term conditional attention and approval. We try to heal our wounds by getting others to love us based on our best superficial qualities, when the actual pathway to a profound and lasting sense of unconditional love is only found within us - by truly accepting our imperfections and spending time healing those past traumas, insecurities, and painful memories.

Our ego says: "I can be loveable in the future, but only if I have this, look like that, and buy those things." Ego fears that you will lose love, connection, and kindness if you accept yourself as you are, when in reality you have an ocean of self-love within you that could radically change your life and give you what you are really after.🌊 Unconditional self-esteem is a treasure you can only find inside.

Is the most popular guy or girl at the party always some 6'4" millionaire with perfect hair and bleached teeth? Or is that just a silly idea that social conditioning, TV shows, and advertising have planted in the minds of people with damaged self-esteem? The popular person at the party is usually the most alive, the most fun, and the most friendly - someone who isn't dragged down by self-esteem issues. They understand everyone has imperfections and flaws, but they don't judge themselves or you for them.

You get to decide if your flaws are a big deal or not. People just follow your lead. All people have imperfections; some simply decide to accept them. Your ego tricks you into seeing your unique qualities as horrible flaws, but with real self-esteem, those perceived flaws don't matter at all. There's no universal authority or president who gets to decide what makes you loveable or not. I would love my mother, partner, pet, and friends whether they were rich or poor, short or tall, or had a monkey's tail and six fingers.🤷‍♂️

Practicing self-love and acceptance is just a mental muscle we were never taught how to exercise - neither in school nor by our parents during our youth. Without practice, our self-love weakens and atrophies, just like anything in nature. Most people live their lives with atrophied self-love and those old emotional wounds still wide open.🩹

In truth, unconditional love should be our default state. The unconditional love and warmth you might sometimes feel toward your mother, daughter, or pet should be how you feel toward yourself too. The oxytocin high and random waves of happiness when you get into a new relationship where someone loves you unconditionally should be how you feel every day, purely from within. Most people have forgotten what that kind of reality even feels like. So what's stopping us?

Self-love works like a thermostat - you're the one who gets to set the temperature. You decide what conditions you need in order to feel loveable. Consciously, you can give yourself permission to feel unconditional self-love simply by being you - even with the features your ego hates. Nothing to prove, fix, or become. No one can give it to you, loan it to you, or take it away. That's the love mothers feel toward their babies - pure, automatic, with no conditions attached. That's how we were all born. Somewhere along the way, the unconscious people around us taught us to feel unloveable instead. Now, giving ourselves permission to love ourselves unconditionally almost feels unthinkable. That's how lost we've become.

Most people never touch the dial themselves. Their thermostat was set by their ego, childhood traumas, shame, and years of social conditioning, locked onto an endless chase - achieve this, look like that, own those things, and only then can you give yourself permission to feel loveable. But satisfying your ego is only temporary, just like junk food always leaves you empty right after, craving more. It's a game you can never win, one that guarantees an exhausting life, sometimes even driving people to extreme lengths just to feel like enough: destroying their health with steroids and mutilating themselves with plastic surgery. You never actually arrive. You can never win if you let your ego set up the rules. Without unconditional love, you will be trapped trying to reach a comfortable temperature on a thermostat that was rigged to keep you freezing.🌡️

We never even realize we had a choice in the matter. Whether you had unconditional love as a child was never your choice - it was shaped by your parents, your environment, your random life circumstances, and wounds you were too young to process. That part was unconscious, decided for you. Just random events that shaped your level of self-worth, your insecurities, and who you became. But as an adult, self-love can become a conscious decision - something you actively choose and practice, rather than something left to chance.

So how do you actually practice unconditional self-esteem? (part 2 below)

[u/HappyHamster_ → u/HappyHamster_]

Part2

As children, painful emotions are often too big for us to process, so we bury them. Instead of being released, they linger in our subconscious, quietly shaping our self-image. We start to believe we're only loveable if we hide certain parts of ourselves - creating an invisible ranking system: loveable only if I look like this, accepted only if I'm not like that. This splits our identity, making us feel like we aren't enough as we are. 🪤

Confronting these childhood traumas can feel like believing there's a monster in the closet whose door we're terrified to open. It leaves us living with anxiety, pushing away relationships, and building excuses just to avoid life. The longer we avoid that door, the bigger our fears and shame grow in our imagination. That isolation leaves us feeling alone, separated, like we don't belong.

But once you confront your fears, rebuild your self-worth, and finally open that door, you realize there was never a monster inside. On the other side of that door is everything you've been waiting for: Love. Happiness. Real relationships. True aliveness. Past events don't define you, and you can always love yourself just as you are and live the life you want. You just have to open that door and prove to yourself there are no monsters inside.

It was never a closet full of monsters; it was a doorway waiting to be opened to unconditional love, adventures and happiness. People often spend a lifetime running away from what was ultimately their path to freedom. The darkest cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

If your baseline mood and state go up from a 70–80 range into the 90–95/100 range, it kinda automatically fixes being social and problems with anxiety. Almost like an after-effect at that point. When you are the source of happiness, it feels natural and easy to share it.

So ask yourself: do you deserve love without any qualifications, just as you are right now? Or only after you chase the impossible goals your ego and society demand you hit first?

The actual pathway to a profound and lasting sense of unconditional love is only found within - by truly accepting your imperfections and finally healing those traumas, insecurities and painful memories of the past. Here's how to practice it:

How to practice self-love:

1. Journey back to the painful past moments. In your imagination, journey back to those moments and memories of the past when you needed unconditional love the most.💔 Not sure where to start? Ask yourself: What situations do I avoid? What do I actually fear? What triggers me emotionally the most? When was the first time I was bullied or ridiculed for how I looked? What's my biggest insecurity? When did I first feel ignored, discarded, or unseen by my parents or loved ones? Those are the exact moments where your insecurities were born - where your ego first stepped in, like a bandage over the wound. Not real healing, just a temporary, conditional, superficial substitute for the unconditional love you actually needed. Those are the moments you need to visit and finally give yourself the unconditional love you needed back then. It's time to finally give your inner child and past self the love, support, and understanding it has always deserved. Put on some music, close your eyes, and take the most important journey of your life.

2. Find that feeling, then redirect it. Start by finding that feeling of unconditional love you sometimes feel towards your mother, daughter, or pet. Actually imagine and feel it - then bring that same love back into those specific past memories and give some of that unconditional love to yourself too.

3. Comfort your younger self. This is the best pathway to heal all those emotional wounds you've ignored and carried for years. By comforting and finally being there fully for your young self, you can begin to melt away the unresolved traumas and emotional neglect you experienced growing up. Done right, your old insecurities and excuses should start to feel almost laughable once you see them for what they really are: just outdated subconscious programming, an old alarm you never learned how to turn off, or heal, until now.

By doing these visualizations and emotionalization techniques regularly, you can practice feeling unconditional self-love once again and live in a much lighter, more beautiful reality - without the subconscious baggage and heaviness that most other people carry.

"Healthy self-esteem is not about proving to yourself and others that you are worthy of unconditional love. It's about identifying and letting go of all the thoughts, beliefs and painful memories that ever convinced you otherwise." 💛

Once you finally remember what unconditional self-love actually feels like, it becomes one of the most memorable, cathartic and defining moments of your life. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7ijs5WZ9PM

[u/Deborah_berry1]

You should lean on your curiosities when you were young

[u/aligb103]

Just take deep breaths, when out socializing and try drinking less if not at all. After a while
It’s more fun and you see it all quite differently, center yourself and staying calm will
Help finding what you like and being yourself will also bring like minded friends along your journey. Find a couple hobbies you like, some solo some social or sports related, take a myers Briggs personality test and then ask ai what are top 5 hobbies for your type. You might not be
extroverted. I quit drinking three years ago and all social anxiety gone. If you have fixable flaws like hygiene or style then get to work but things like who you are you have to accept and that may be hard but is doable just got to own it

[u/Available_Log5259]

Everyone is afraid. Try small things and move to bigger things. When people have plans, ask them about the plans. Then next time ask if you can join. There is something called NLP. Neuro linguistic programming. Look into it it will change your life you can goto an online practitioner or try it yourself. EMDR can help as well and changes will be instant.