Hatred of self originally comes from the inability to have or maintain boundaries. As a child who had been abused once boundaries were crossed, you lost the ability to understand what was happening to you, why it was happening, and what your part in it was. This is complicated with conflicting feelings at the time of the original abuse and who the perpetrator was. If this was a trusted important figure in your life and the abuse was the only attention that they gave you, then it can sometimes be misconstrued as affection. Trying to make sense of “why” something as happened afterwards as a child is impossible. If this sounds difficult for you as an adult to imagine why something was done to you, imagine yourself at the age of when the abuse happened, trying to figure it out at that age! A child barely has the ability to hold one thought in their heads, how would they be able to hold all of the conflicting feelings and thoughts that abuse brings in?
It was My Fault
To question adult authority is one of the most fearful things that a child can do. If the adult in charge is an alcoholic, or is unable to express themselves in an appropriate way, then for a child to challenge their authority would invite consequences, punishment. Remember to most children adults are viewed as powerful and all knowing. This is the imperfection of “childhood logic.” The parents or guardians are the first role models in a child’s life. Their actions and their dialogue with the world around them are absorbed by the child. If they have fear, the child will have fear or at the least mistrust. If the parents are listless and uninvolved, this will give rise to feelings that they will not be there to protect the child. This makes the child reluctant to share or question their parents in fear of upsetting them further and could overtly give more responsibility to the child. This is called “parentification”, when the child takes on what would be seen as adult responsibilities. He or she has two ways to react to this, fight, or retreat into themselves. Neither is healthy, but expressing the anger in the moment is the healthier of the two.
Children as a rule find it difficult, if not impossible to blame their parents for their hateful behavior; instead the child will internalize this and blame themselves. It must be something that I did? The abuse continues, whether its emotional, physical or sexual, and since the child does not have the intelligence yet to see their parents clearly as flawed, then the abuse that is being done to them is justifiable, because they have little to no worth. They must be bad, hated and worthless. They must “need to be abused, punished” because of their badness. Children cannot blame their parents-so they blame themselves.
Self-hate is often a side effect of children that have been adopted, or suffered under one or both parents who have struggled with substance abuse, or been part of a divorce. Abandonment will be at times the core issue of a client struggling with self-hate. Who would want them if their own parents didn’t?
The more the children are ignored, treated with indifference or treated with hatred, the more the children will hate themselves. Eventually, children as they grow older may learn to hate their parents, but their first response is to hate themselves. Self hatred reveals itself as the child grows into their teens and is the root of self-injury behaviors. Without intense self hatred, survivors would not be nearly so prone to cutting, burning, overdosing or any number of self-destructive and suicidal behaviors.
It’s easier to be in a relationship where the survivor loves someone else more than they are loved. Being in a healthy relationship is being comfortable accepting the reciprocal love-caring-compassion-support from others. People that inherently hate themselves find it very difficult to believe that they could be loved or that they are lovable. This will eventual cause problems in those relationships and will undermine the strength of them. People that truly hate themselves can’t imagine that anyone will be in relationship with them for any period of time, so abandonment will follow and be part of the self-confirming self-hate cycle for the victim.
The emotional pain connected to feeling hated or unworthy of love or protection cuts very deep to the emotional core of a person. In many cases after years of therapy, the survivor may have an understanding intellectually what this is, but after years and years of blame and shame the self-hatred feels locked into place. It’s just sooooo hard to feel differently.
Some of the long term affects of self hate:
- Low self worth and depression
- Underlying feelings of abandonment.
- Long term self-hatred and self-loathing.
- Loneliness and isolation.
- Sadness, emotional pain.
- Self injury, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
- Drug and alcohol abuse. Self medicating. Acting out in self destructive ways.
A Way Out
Stop hating yourself. Direct your hate, if it helps, at the person or persons who neglected or abused you. If you pay attention to the messages that your body is constantly sending, you’ll be starting at the right place. Try this experiment. It’s Sunday, and on Sunday let say, you always call your parents. If your parents were the ones who abused you, then you’re going to notice that physically, you hesitate before you make that call. Listen and notice what your body is telling you. Your palms may be sweating, and your breathing shallow. Your body which retains memories on a cellular lever is warning you not to have contact with your abusers. Those memories if used correctly hold wisdom. Hang up that phone! Right then, you have set your first boundary!
Cognitively, your mind will continue to send you false messages of yourself. It may sound something like this; you’re a piece of shit. You’ll never change. It’s too late now! Go ahead, call your parents. The idea is to stop identifying with what your mind tells you. Your mind is like a cheap AM radio that has no pause button, nor does it discriminate between a good message versus a bad one. It lets everything in. Since we cannot control our minds, the least we can do is to stop identifying with the faulty belief system that preaches that we are what we think! When you really start observing the messages that the mind is constantly sending, and realize that most don’t hold a grain of truth, then you begin to learn detachment.
To practice Detachment one has to rewire, reprogram how they take information in. Learning to hesitate, pause before you find yourself following a thought with an action that has no validity is a good start. Detachment is learned through practice. Sometimes you find yourself overwhelmed with anxiety or depression. You let your guard down and followed a thought into a tiger’s cage. When you begin to have the feelings of overwhelm, you say out loud or in your mind “Stop!” Just stop! Take a deep breath that physiologically brings oxygen to your bloodstream. This action alone lowers any anxiety that you’re experiencing.
Often the victim is triggered and then becomes reactive. By practicing the above, you will find yourself freer to experience with full awareness the present moment. Remember, feeling follows a thought, and not the other way around. Living with detachment firmly in place, you stop wasting your energy and consequently, you’ll feel better as well.
Refusing to let someone get close to you physically.
Being touched when you don’t want to be touched violates you. It makes you an object. By allowing this to continue, you allow yourself to feel like a piece of garbage. It further perpetuates self hate.
Refusing to allow someone to get too close to you emotionally.
We do not live in a world of unconditional love. We live in a world of selfishness, where others try to get their needs met, even at the expense of your needs. People will try and get you to open up when you don’t feel like it. (Pay attention to your bodies signals) They say you’re uptight, or don’t share or respond when their insisting on your participation. It’s very possible, if you hesitate and listen to your own intuition, that they will use your information against you. Allowing yourself to be pressured like this hurts only you—and that is an act of self-hatred. For many who were abused as children, the lack of boundaries enabled the abuser to confuse and manipulate you and afterwards, that information that you learned from them was never fully explained to you. (Another example of how self hate gets its grip on you).
Refusing to betray your moral values.
Many religions are based on this, however in this context, I will give credit to ones own intuition. Your intuition is an older system than your brain. It’s where that expression “fight or flight”, originated. Animals are intuitive. They will not do anything that is counter to what their intuition is telling them. It means being true to yourself. It’s something that if you’re made aware of early on in your life, it will be the compass that you can fully rely on the older you get.
John Shinavier, MA, RYT, Life Coach