I'm sure that you must first love yourself. But how do you do that? It doesn't seem like you just change a spark plug in your brain and one day you wake up and bingo...I LOVE ME.
I'm sure Jim has hit the nail on the head here, along with Sleepy and Jer.
It's our problem, and not our partners for the most part.
We struggle with the strange feelings that go against intimacy, and we struggle because our self esteem, self worth, confidence and trust have been ripped away so long ago. We don't love ourselves.
And there's no instant fix for sure, we've tried to fix ourselves for so long and failed in as much as we couldn't make ourselves better, We survived by using our various survival techniques, but we got no better. I for one got worse as my survival techniques became tired, and then more extreme.
with the right help through therapy, and my own efforts I got better - slowly I admit - but compared to how I was 5 or 6 years back I'm a different person. Now I do have self esteem, confidence etc. Maybe not as much as I'd like or I might have had in different circumstances, but I have more than before, and I'm thankful for that I can promise you.
Do I love myself ? maybe I do.
Maybe it's something I can't yet admit to myself because I know I still have traces of my old survival techniques within me. I was always a big 'self destructor' and constantly put myself down because I was unable to accept that I could do anything well or succesfully. I recognise that at work still, but it's not much and I can usually deal with it.
So, where does that leave me ? well I think that it's all a part of the slow recovery process.
Sometimes it's so gradual we don't notice what's happening to us until we push ourselves a bit.
And that's hard for us as well because we don't believe we are capable of pushing ourselves, we hang around until somebody comes along to drag us, at least that's how I was.
I needed a kick in the arse, and this topic gave it to me. It might not be the complete answer, but it's got me started.
Dave