I read a couple times but can't really make sense of your first paragraph. But I realise this conversation may be more difficult than anticipated considering you seem to have several different definitions of self love, of love, and of self.

I too believe that there is an eternal part of our being. But, it is a difficult sell to convince everyone else of that. So, I don't know how helpful it is to tell people that you should love the part of you and of others that is divine. I know it is a common saying you need to love yourself before you can love someone else. But, I think it is only common because someone said it, it sounded cool, so others repeated it. In my experience, you don't have to love yourself at all to be able to love others. Not only from personal experience, but from several people I have known who have been deeply insecure but unbelievable loving towards others. But again what are you meaning by love? If not acceptance, then do you mean admiration? Because self-admiration also doesn't sound particularly healthy to me.

You ask if I would prefer to be accepted or loved. Supposing you do mean admiration by love, I would say that admiration is more intoxicating, but not necessarily healthy. As far as acceptance, there is less than a handful of people whose acceptance I care about to any degree at all, and I believe that shows I still need to grow a lot, because no one's acceptance of me, bar my own, should mean anything at all. What is important, is that I accept the exterior - other people, current situations in the world etc. For when I do not accept them, the exterior then has the power to upset me greatly, which is weakness in my opinion.

I agree with you that self-loathing and shame are limiting emotions. That is, when you wallow in them, which is, as I said, something that one might do if they take sight of their ugliness but haven't the confidence to believe they can overcome it. The point is not to analyse oneself and then become crippled by shame. The point is to honestly criticise yourself and your prior actions, to recognise that you could be so much more, to become ashamed that you have failed thus far, and then to use that shame to inspire you to become more. And as I said, the shame is only there while you refuse to better yourself, as soon as you start making changes, shame becomes redundant, because you have transformed your historical fuck ups into valuable lessons, and have nothing left to feel shameful about.

I do not think nature to be so silly as to give us an emotion that is useless. Even pride, hailed by biblical scripture as the most heinous of sins, is useful at the right times. Namely, if you accomplish something very difficult, you ought to feel proud of doing so. You should just not allow that pride to lead to you thinking of others as less important than you - that's the sickness.