Loving/Hating ourselves

I have no idea where to post this so I put it here, feel free to move it in a more adapted area.

I feel like sharing some of my experience about loving/hating myself. I am sure that all the members have found their own ways to relate to themselves, but I feel this topic may be helpful to think…

After the loss of my father (I was 18) I felt a violent surge of inner rage, and deep sense of guilt, I really was hating myself- the result of it was self punishing me (not physically but by mental/emotional tortures) and my being very aggressive with other persons, especially the ones closer to me.
You see, when I hate someone (it usually doesn’t happen) I don’t want this person to better, I want the destruction of the person- so that is basically what I unconsciously wanted for myself…
At theatre, I was playing only tragedies or evil characters- my favorite was Lady Macbeth (who by the way destroyed herself too because of guilt…)
I was practicing Fencing for 9-11 hours a week to release my rage…dark times…
Theatre and fencing were a kind of self therapy anyway but the worst thing is I had panic attacks (self attacking of course) that prevented me from properly studying-
So you see, in this case, self hate was totally counter productive.
When I finally discovered and worked on self compassion, I felt so free- free from the useless burden of guilt- remorse is essential, because when we mistake, we need to learn from it and better- but guilt only drives us down more and more-
I will give another example: a father that sees his child going bad at school- surely he will not tell him “You have done great”- he will punish him, understand why he went bad and help him study better or increase self discipline- this dad does not hate his son for going bad at school, he will punish him because he loves him-
Love, for others as well as for ourselves- does not always mean to be kind, at times it means to stimulate ourselves to better- we see our mistake- we forgive ourselves- we make amend if possible and we learn from it to improve-
Self love leads me to self discipline- as I love myself, I keep myself fit, with a very rigid routine, healthy life- not giving myself only pleasures and good times- but challenging myself to better- and of course, I treat the others just as I treat myself- because when you care for yourself, you also care for the others.

I think this is what all of us do here- and if you prefer to call it “hating myself” it is fine- each of us has his own way- but I wrote this topic because I want to make sure nobody tries to destroy or harm himself- if ever anyone of you feels the need to do it, then please talk to someone about it, here, offline wherever you feel it is right.
Here, we all want to become better than our former selves, it is right and healthy- and every possible efficient ways are fine- but we need to make sure that those ways always lead us to improvement.