Loving Yourself

We often tell our children and others to just "love yourself". This tends to be the response during times of hurt or heart ache, but the questions is . . . when do we teach others to actually do this . . . and more importantly, how?

I had a great conversation last night about the process of learning how to love one's self and that (quoted by a young person) "if I would have known this early on (in my early teens) I wouldn't have done some of the things I look at now as destructive and dangerous and put myself in harms way".

This made me really raise and eyebrow, as I feel I am still learning how and what it means to truly love myself. My question is . . . who taught you how to do it, and is it something that can really be taught?