Hello and welcome back!
In case you missed it, you can read Part One here! - and I highly recommend that you do. It will make everything in THIS post make a LOT more sense!
Now let’s continue to dive deeper into why self hate is actually rooted in trying to keep ourselves safe and why learning to meet our needs is the key to moving out of self hate.
Remember, this is a MAP - and it’s going to be a long journey - so don’t expect yourself to just ‘get this’ because you read this.
Be kind to you!
Now let’s continue, shall we?
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The second reason we feel so deeply insecure all the time, is because there is a very real reality present that we truly ARE social creatures who are MEANT to live, work, play and thrive together in community.
We aren't meant to be totally isolated, alone and individualized.
So again, I want to encourage you to take a moment here to really deeply question WHY you hate the parts of yourself you hate - where did you learn to hate these parts and what was happening? What is the real fear behind the self rejection? What do you feel will happen to you if you don’t change? What’s the worst case scenario you are imagining?
Can you see that at the ROOT of your self hate is the fear of being alone, and the fear of not getting your needs met?
Can you see that if you really question it all the way through, you feel like if you don’t change that this will mean everyone will hate you, and that that will mean you lose your job, lose your friends, lose your ability to create security and safety for yourself?
Just see where you get when you REALLY dig into this.
Also you can ask yourself what you think you will GET if you WERE to become that perfect person you want to be.
If you were to change in the ways you feel you need to change - then what?
Again you may find that the root, you feel like if you could change you would then get the perfect love you’ve always wanted.
And in getting that perfect love, there is a feeling that you will then get perfect SECURITY.
You will get that promise that you will never get fired/need a job/never be broken up with/never have sickness or pain that you have to go through alone, never have sickness or weakness at all - and in this you would be invulnerable to any of the existential realities of life.
There is likely a deep, core belief that if you were to fix yourself, you could get rid of ALL THREAT to your being.
If you could perfect your body, it could never hurt you again.
If you could perfect your personality you would never have to be alone again and there would constantly be people around you to fill your social needs AND to help you with all the things you need in order to live and survive.
If you were to perfect your mind you could never feel sad, lonely, mad or upset ever again.
Again, don’t take my word for it - do this investigation for yourself and see what you find.
The Roots Of Self Hate Go Both Ways
Now, back to this deep fear of separation and isolation - remember there is a GOOD REASON that we fear rejection so deeply. It’s not just that we want to be liked because we are superficial and vain.
We want to be liked because we are meant to live and thrive in community. We are humans who not only had a childhood experience of needing others to see us, understand us and nurture us in order to be ok, we also have had an entire human history where survival was dependent upon being a part of a community.
This culture that we are living in now where we are driven into this kind of ultra-indiependence, where so many of us live lives where we are deeply isolated from any form of meaningful community actually DRIVES our sense of insecurity and feelings of not being good enough in ways that most of us don’t connect to or realize.
In the culture we live in today, the fact that we are being so deeply driven into these states of isolation - the fact that we are taught to suppress and deny our true selves in order to try to ‘fit in’ to what culture says is good enough/acceptable, the fact that we are driven into a state of seeing everyone and everything around us as competition rather than community, the fact that many of us are relying upon parasocial relationships because we don’t have REAL human to human connection - these are all deeply painful experiences that tend to actually DRIVE our feelings of insecurity and self hate - because again, the more isolated we feel, the more we assume there’s something wrong with US that’s causing this isolation.
That childhood association between ‘I am loved and therefore safe and therefore GOOD ENOUGH’ and ‘I am being rejected and therefore I am NOT safe and that means I’m DOING SOMETHING WRONG’ also works in reverse - the more rejected and isolated we feel, the more we are going to ASSUME that there’s something wrong with us.
The more pain we feel that we don’t know how to fix or that we can’t identify, the more we are going to assume there’s something wrong with us.
It’s PAINFUL to live a life of isolation. It’s painful to live a life where we feel like if the other shoe drops, we don’t have people around who will be able to help us out and support us. It’s painful to face the existential realities of being alive - getting sick, being in vulnerable bodies, losing our jobs, losing our homes to weather and other disasters, going through dark times emotionally - and to feel like we don’t have a robust network of people we can rely upon to help us get through these things.
It’s deeply painful to feel like we have to constantly be putting on a kind of ‘act’ in order to be loved or accepted by the people around us. It’s deeply painful to feel like we can’t be our true, real selves and be loved and supported.
We aren’t MEANT to do life alone. We aren’t MEANT to be so isolated.
When we feel this way, our childhood coping mechanism is to assume that we are doing something wrong, that we are bad, that we are flawed - that WE are the cause of this lack of connection.
Literally the more isolated we feel, the more we are going to be drawn into our insecurities because we learned deep in our core that rejection = something wrong with ME.
Because we couldn’t connect to the idea that our caregivers could be flawed, we couldn’t solve any of our own problems and all we knew as children was that our caregivers were an extension of ourselves. That the ONLY reason we could be being rejected, denied, neglected or otherwise abandoned was because WE were bad and WE needed to change.
The more lonely we feel the more we feel like we aren’t good enough because most of us aren’t able to really identify the actual ROOTS of why we feel so bad, isolated, lonely or why this is ACTUALLY happening - all we can see is that we must be doing something wrong.
The same goes for the more pain we’re in in general that we don’t know how to solve.
You see, many of us when we experience illness, the loss of a job, conflict in a relationship, the feeling that we aren’t able to fully express how we want to express or an emotion we don’t know how to process - rather than being able to identify that THIS is what’s happening and rather than being able to go into ‘adult’ problem solving mode - we automatically go into a state of looking for what we’re doing wrong, how we’re messing up and who is mad at or rejecting us.
Rather than being able to identify that ACTUAL pain we’re in and the ACTUAL cause of that pain, we simply feel pain on some level and our brains immediately jump to our ‘scapegoat’ part of self that we ALWAYS blame for being the reason we’re ‘bad’ - because again there is a deep NERVOUS SYSTEM PROGRAM that says ‘if I am in pain and that pain isn’t being taken away by someone outside of me or if I need something and that need isn’t being met - that MUST mean that I am doing something wrong’.
Rather than being able to say ‘oh I feel sick, I need to take care of my body on some level,’ we feel sick and start feeling like the sickness is our fault, like we aren’t doing good enough to take care of ourselves, that we failed, that others are going to see us as a burden OR we go into a state of helplessness and hopelessness feeling like we will never get better because there isn’t someone there to rescue us.
Rather than being able to say ‘I am feeling insecure about money and my future’ we automatically start thinking about all the ways we messed up at work, all the ways our boss or coworkers may be upset with us, all of the ways we’re failing to be perfect and are surely one step away from being fired and then having to live on the streets.
Rather than being able to identify that we are feeling resentful that our family isn’t able to love us and support us when we are struggling or feeling upset that they aren’t able to show us love in the ways that would feel meaningful to us, we instead go into a spiral of feeling like we need to fix our bodies, our personalities, our expression on some level - not even connecting to the fact that what we are REALLY feeling is lonely and like we need someone to come alongside us and tell us that they are going to be here no matter what.
We feel pain, and we scapegoat that pain onto the part of ourselves we always blame as being the ‘reason’ we don’t feel good - and then we go into self help/self improvement to try to ‘fix’ what’s ‘wrong’ with us - never actually seeing the ROOT of what we’re feeling - pain, isation, fear of the unknown, insecurity, an emotion we don’t know how to process, a need that we aren’t getting met or the need for connection.
We feel pain and automatically go into self help instead of slowing down and identifying the ACTUAL pain and the ACTUAL need.
This is why the self help cycle never gets us where we want to go.
This is why trying to fix ourselves NEVER actually leads us to freedom.
Because it doesn’t get to the ROOT of the issue - it’s a childhood coping mechanism that is covering up what we actually feel, what we actually want and what we actually need.
Learning To Feel Your Feelings/Identify Your Needs
So with all of that - what do we actually DO to improve our self esteem, to see past our traps of self hate and to get into a state where we can actually learn to like and love ourselves?
Step One: Witnessing: The very first step is learning to witness ourselves when we go into our spirals of self hate - and to create a bubble of AWARENESS around this.
You see most of us are SO USED to being in these states of self hate and rejection, that we don’t even realize that we’re in them.
We don’t even recognize that the self hate that we have is something we COULD question. Is something we COULD challenge.
For many of us, the things we hate about ourselves feel like a foregone TRUTH.
Clearly our bodies are not right.
Clearly we MUST change our personalities.
Clearly we AREN’T good enough at work and are failing.
It seems SO REAL to us - it doesn’t feel like a belief it feels like a blatant observation of reality.
So learning to take a step back and actually witness our self hate stories as just that - a story that could be questioned - is step number one.
This is a BIG step for most of us, and it takes time to learn to do this.
Step Two: Connecting: Next, once we start to witness our stories of self hate, we want to start to question, just like we did above, WHY we hate these parts of self.
- Where did we learn that these parts are bad?
- What was happening that made us believe these parts were bad?
- Where was there a sense of threat that if we didn’t change we would be separated from love and connection forever?
- Where do we believe that if we were to fix these things, that we would then have access to the safety/love/provision we feel we need or feel we lack right now?
- Where did we experience love going away, being harmed, being isolated in our past, and what did we make that MEAN about OURSELVES? What parts of self did we believe was the ‘cause’ of this - and was this actually TRUE?
Just start to see if you can connect to the root causes of yourself rejection. Where did you learn to reject yourself, and what associations do you have with these ‘bad parts’ and being alone, rejected, harmed, hurt or otherwise not safe?
Step Three: What Am I ACTUALLY Feeling? Finally, the big questions we want to start to ask ourselves ANY TIME we are going into self hate/shame/guilt/self help/trying to fix ourselves is this:
What am I ACTUALLY feeling?
This is the golden ticket to helping us recognize what’s REALLY going on and what we ACTUALLY need to feel better.
When we can start to pattern interrupt our self hate with compassion and curiosity - this is going to swing the door of true self awareness WIDE open.
When we can really look at our ‘I’m not enough/I’m bad/I have to change this’ about me stories, when we can look at where we are blaming ourselves and shaming ourselves - believing that the pain we’re in is due to us being inadequate, at fault or somehow fundamentally flawed - and we can start to peel back the childhood perspective so we can step into the adult awareness we need - in THIS we are going to be able to figure out what’s actually going on, what’s actually hurting, what we actually want and most importantly - we can then take proactive steps towards getting those needs met.
So, the next time you are judging your body, criticizing your personality, believing that you have made someone upset with you and that this is the end of the world, believing that your pain is your fault because you aren’t trying hard enough/are doing something wrong, or otherwise are in ANY state where you feel like the solution to your problem is FIXING yourself I want you to take a step back and ask yourself:
- Where am I in PAIN right now? What’s hurting that is driving me to look for the cause of that pain within myself?
- What do I WANT right now that I don’t know how to get?
- What is happening to me in my relationships/at work/in life that I am actually NOT ok with, but feel like I SHOULD be ok with?
- What do I NOT want right now that I don’t know how to escape or get rid of?
- Where am I feeling I am being REJECTED and why do I feel that fixing this part of myself would make that go away?
- Where am I hurting and feeling like fixing myself would take that pain away?
- What do I believe would be SOLVED in my life if I were to fix myself?
- Where am I feeling insecure in terms of getting my needs met and how am I projecting that onto myself?
- Where am I feeling lonely or in need of community and blaming myself for not having that?
- Where am I upset at someone else for not showing up for me, and instead of being upset with them I am blaming myself?
- What EMOTION am I feeling right now that I feel I am not allowed to feel/express?
- What THOUGHTS am I having about what happening that I feel I’m not allowed to have/express?
- What do I want to do right now that I feel like I’m not allowed to do?
- Can you start to dig into what you are ACTUALLY feeling when you go into self hate?
- Then can you ask yourself what you NEED in real reality to feel BETTER?
- What do I need to SAY?
- Where do I need SUPPORT?
- Where do I need something in my WORLD to change?
- Where do I need to learn how to communicate what I want to those around me instead of expecting them to understand me?
- Where do I need to set boundaries in my life?
- Where do I need to learn to embrace my emotions and express them even if others don’t like that?
- Where do I need to see that I can be myself and be ok even if others judge or reject me?
- Where do I need to start saying YES to the things I want to say yes to and see that I can be ok even if others disapprove or don’t understand?
Because I promise you that it’s NOT to shrink your thighs or get rid of your emotions.
This is hard core work.
This requires a LOT of patience because digging past those self protective shame stories is HARD TO DO.
They are deeply imprinted in there for a reason - they have been the stories we’ve told ourselves for likely DECADES based on childhood reasoning and logic.
Learning to figure out what we are actually feeling, and then learning how to meet our real needs is NOT an easy process - it takes time. It takes a lot of practice. It takes a lot of being willing to take a RISK and see that we can be ok.
So don’t expect that just reading these articles will equal a miracle.
It’s going to be a slow journey of self discovery.
And what you are going to find is that the more you learn to identify what you actually feel, what you want, what you need and what you don’t want - and th more you start to actually MEET your needs in real reality - either through doing things on your own or asking for support where you need it in a conscious, adult way - the more you are going to find that you hate yourself less.
Why?
Because actually meeting your needs is going to work BETTER than hating yourself!
You are going to LEARN through EXPERIENCE that you can keep yourself safe and meet your own needs with or without the love of others.
You are going to EXPERIENCE that it’s no longer about being what others want so that THEY will understand you and meet your needs that keeps you safe, but YOU seeing YOURSELF and meeting your OWN needs that accomplishes this.
As you start to EXPERIENCE this - you are going to NATURALLY find that your level of self love increases.
That you literally mature that part of yourself that believed that the ONLY way to be safe was to be approved of, and the only way to get your needs met was to be understood and met by someone else into a part that can start to operate in the adult world.
You are going to LIVE it - and in living that you are going to see that your level of self confidence and level of safety within yourself increases all on its own.
You won’t have to do affirmations or convince yourself to like yourself.
This will happen as a byproduct of showing up for yourself and keeping yourself safe in real reality.
THIS is the key.
You won’t have to convince yourself to stop hating yourself, you will work to meet your own needs so much that eventually you stop defaulting to self hate, and start moving from a place of actual awareness when you are hurting right away.
Instead of defaulting to self help, you will start to default to ‘what am I feeling and what do I need?’
And the drive to fix yourself to be approved of will become less and less, as you LIVE OUT seeing that you can be fine whether people like you or not.
It’s a really magical thing that won’t FEEL all that magical once you start to EXPERIENCE it.
This is a map you can follow.
It won’t be a fast journey.
But it is a WORTHY one.
One step at a time.
<3
Are you sick of the self help roller coaster that leaves you constantly striving and never arriving?
Are you ready for a true spiritual path that connects you to yourself and reality so you can feel good about your life?
Then come check out the Mystery School
