We talked about why I hate myself, don't believe I matter, don't care about myself, etc
I think sometimes he forgets how good I am at intellectually challenging irrational beliefs. The problem is that I don't want to. Knowing intellectually that I'm applying different standards to myself than to everyone else and that I say and believe things about myself that I never would anyone else doesn't make the irrational beliefs feel any less true.
He said he knows I would never talk to anyone else the way I talk to myself. He brought up a previous example I used of an undergrad making a mistake in the lab and some undergrads will beat themselves up so much over it, but others won't take it seriously enough and you have to actually try to get them to take it more seriously.
And he said he knows I'd never tell an undergrad that they were a worthless piece of **** and totally incompetent and should go hurt themselves because they made a mistake.
And I was like, yeah, I know exactly how to challenge that belief when it comes up:
"Everyone makes mistakes; it doesn't mean you're incompetent"
"You're focusing on the one mistake you made and not giving yourself credit for the million things you've done right"
"Beating yourself up doesn't solve anything, the important thing is that you learn from this going forward"
And he was slightly surprised by how easily I rattled those off. I reminded him that I lead CBT based recovery meetings and walk other people through these tools all the time. He knows that, but I don't think he realized how good I am at it (that sounds arrogant but w/e). I told him that I've known how to do this since long before I walked into the first session with him. It's getting myself to let myself do it. Which he kind of knows but I think at some level he's still trying to reason me out of these beliefs.

He wants to understand why, despite being able to acknowledge that my beliefs are illogical intellectually, I can't get myself to believe otherwise. Like why do I continue to believe I'm a bad and weak and pathetic person, why can't I believe that my feelings matter?
What's keeping me from allowing myself to believe these things?
I don't know. Isn't he supposed to be the one to figure out why?
I've been journaling about it, but I can't figure it out. I can come up with hypotheses that sound plausible, and are even partly true, but nothing that I've come up with truly explains it.

He asked what I was telling myself the times I really really wanted to hurt myself but didn't. I didn't really have an answer there either. I told him it was partly on faith, faith that if I do these things and work on this stuff that maybe I'll eventually care about myself and feel better.