Stop Hating Yourself for Feeling Too Much
Self-loathing feels like honesty. It's actually just an old habit repeating itself.
If you were criticised for every small mistake as a child, you keep criticising yourself as an adult. You never learned to sort a real mistake from a normal need. So wanting love becomes a mistake too. You decide love isn't for you, and you stop asking.
Self-loathing is good at one thing: keeping you small. It keeps you from ever admitting you get hurt. It looks like discipline because it comes from the same training that shaped you as a child. But discipline and punishment are not the same thing.
Try talking to yourself the way a friend would. Tell yourself it's fine to feel too much. You're sensitive because you never got enough love, and now you notice how much you want it. That's not weakness. Sensitivity also means you know which words hurt, so you're careful with them. It means you notice pain in other people before they say anything.
You never gave yourself the warmth you kept looking for in the world. Be as patient with yourself as you wish someone else had been. Forgive yourself for wanting love. Stop treating your own feelings as evidence against you.
None of this means you stop protecting yourself. Some people are cruel, and they will hurt you on purpose. This is where acceptance actually does its work. Once you've admitted what you need instead of hiding it, you stop asking why you're like this and start asking how to use it well.
Empathy is good until you meet someone who doesn't care about it. Some people will hurt you regardless of how carefully you treat them. So the real question isn't how to stop feeling. It's how to protect your sensitivity, your art, your real connections, from people who were never going to meet you halfway. Most people don't value emotional intensity. You don't need their warmth. You need to find the people who do.
Look at what actually changed. The personality is the same. Only the direction is different. You've gone from hating yourself for feeling too much to protecting that same feeling from people who don't deserve it. You haven't killed the sensitive part of you. You've just stopped wasting it.
There's a cost to this. When you feel everything, everything gets to you, and you can't always control how much. That's the price of staying sensitive instead of shutting down. So you build a strategy for it, or you sit with the hurt until it passes. Either way, you stop being ashamed of having a nervous system that works this way.
Self-loathing keeps you from ever being yourself in public. You try to change what you are, and when you can't, you hate yourself more for failing. That's the whole loop. Acceptance breaks it. You stop asking to be different and start asking how to make the most of who you already are.
I spent years running the first loop. Too many years. The second one is better. Try it.