The roots of poor self esteem aren’t what most of us believe they are.
Many of us have been trying to ‘fix’ our poor self esteem through all the typical self help and spirituality routes - affirmations, positive thinking, questioning and challenging our thoughts - and we’re finding that no matter how hard we try or how much we practice we still default to the old negative patterns.
Many of us get stuck in spirals of shame, blame and guilt - believing that we are truly messed up or fundamentally flawed - and don’t even realize that those are paradigms and beliefs that can be questioned.
Many of us are trying our hardest to learn to love and accept who we are - and it seems like no matter what we do or how much effort we put in, we still default to those same old patterns of self rejection, denial and suppression.
The reason for this?
We’re missing the FUNDAMENTAL ROOT of why we hate ourselves, and thus we are approaching the problem from a place that can never lead to a real solution.
So what’s the root?
Why do we hate ourselves?
What’s this magical solution?
The ROOTS Of Self Hate Are Actually Self Preservation
As hard as this may be for us to connect to at first, the biggest key we need to realize and work with is the fact that self hate, poor self esteem, the belief that we aren’t good enough and that we need to fundamentally change parts of ourselves are all behaviors and thoughts rooted in one idea:
That we are dependent upon OTHER PEOPLE to understand us, see us, love us and empathize with us in order for THEM to figure out what we want, what we need, what’s hurting us, what’s working for us, what doesn’t work for us and then for THEM to take our pain from us or give us the things we want or need.
This idea that being loved = being understood by someone outside of ourselves = them understanding us and figuring out what we want and need to be happy = them giving that to us is the childhood view of the world that we all got when we were children.
This situation where we didn’t have the power to understand ourselves, where we didn’t have the capacity to meet our own needs, where we didn’t have the ability to solve our own problems, identify why we were hurting or to shift our reality in any way so that it would work better for us was a temporary one.
In this situation we really DID depend upon our caregivers love and empathy in order to get what we needed and in order to be rescued from the pain we were in that we didn’t know how to control.
In this situation the ONLY power we had to control our environment or the outcomes we were experiencing was to manipulate our own behavior in order to try to be lovable, acceptable and approved of by our caregivers.
To us, if we were in pain, if we wanted something we didn’t know how to get, if we needed connection, if we needed comfort or if we needed something in our environment to change so that we could feel better - we were dependent upon our CAREGIVERS to see this, recognize this and facilitate this. We couldn’t do it on our own. We couldn’t problem solve. We couldn’t meet our own needs.
If our caregivers didn’t do this, this meant that we were stuck in pain.
The ONLY power we had was trying to signal to them in some way, shape or form that we needed something so that THEY would figure it out for us and THEY would solve the problem for us.
To Us Our Caregivers Were ‘God’
We couldn’t understand that our caregivers were separate people from us, and we couldn’t conceptualize that they didn’t possess the ULTIMATE power to make anything happen or to take any pain away. We couldn’t see that that they had limits on their capacity. We couldn’t understand that not everything in their world was about us. We couldn’t see or conceptualize that sometimes they didn’t meet our needs not because we were doing something wrong or because we lacked something - but rather because THEY were incapable, unaware or otherwise unwilling for reasons that had nothing to do with us.
All we knew is that if we were in pain and they weren’t fixing it - we must be doing something wrong.
Whether we were explicitly being shamed, blamed, rejected, abused or otherwise told that we were ‘bad’, wrong, shameful or that there was something wrong with us or if we simply were being harmed or hurt in some way that our caregivers weren’t fixing - we learned to look for what WE were doing that WE thought was the CAUSE of this lack of rescuing/harm - because from our perspective that was the ONLY reason it would be happening.
We learned that ANY part of ourselves that they outwardly shamed, blamed, rejected or saw as ‘bad’ was an existential threat to us. These parts that they openly rejected or harmed were parts that we are going to have a DEEP association of PAIN with - and we are going to hate them because to us, they were the REASON we were being separated from our source of everything.
If we were not being cared for or if we were being harmed in ways that our caregivers didn’t understand or couldn’t fix but they weren’t directly ‘blaming’ or shaming us - we were STILL going to look for associations between our behaviors and ways of being and their seeming ‘response’ to us.
This is where it can get tricky for a lot of us.
You see, if we were in a situation in our households where we weren’t getting the love, attention or affection we needed, if we were in pain and our caregivers didn’t/couldn’t solve it for us or understand it, if they neglected us in ways that left us suffering alone, if they didn’t understand us and wrote off our pain as not being real or important, if they didn’t let us explore and expand into what we wanted to explore and expand into, if we had to care for THEM on any level or be empathetic to their needs in order to get their attention, if they were more concerned with their own needs and problems and required us to constantly be monitoring their behavior in order to be ok, if we didn’t get our needs met for reasons that were outside of their control - all of THIS was still very painful for us and was going to have a major impact on our experience.
In these experiences, even though we weren’t directly being shamed, blamed, guilted or told we were wrong or bad - the INDIRECT lack of care was ALSO going to make us turn in on ourselves and look for what we were possibly doing or being that we shouldn’t/what we were NOT being that we should be in order to be loved by them.
It was STILL going to be our MO to look for the flaw in US if we were in any kind of pain that wasn’t being solved by them, because to us they were SUPPOSED to be able to fix all of our pain!
We learned to reject ourselves, or be caregivers before it was our time, to suppress our emotional expression, to not ask for our needs to be met, to over empathize with others, to people please, to not say no, to hide ourselves, to reject ourselves and to fight ourselves, we learned to invalidate our own experience and feelings and to accept things that were painful in order to try to be pleasing to our caregivers in the hopes that doing so would lead them to see us, love us, approve of us, understand us and then meet our needs.
We learned that if we are in pain, this means WE are doing something wrong. This means there is something wrong with US that is separating us from the love, support and provision of our caregivers - and that fixing ourselves so that they will see us, love us, approve of us and then understand us and meet our needs FOR US was the SOLUTION to all pain.
THIS is the root of ALL self hate.
When we hate our bodies - this is why. There is some root in there that says ‘if my body was perfect, my caregivers will love and and then they will meet my needs.’
If we hate our personalities we believe that it is our personality that is separating us from getting our needs met.
If we drive ourselves to do things that we hate we do it because we believe on some level that if we do it enough then we will finally be seen, loved and provided for.
THIS is where ALL self hate comes from.
Trying to figure out what we need to do and be so that OTHERS will love us - and that in that love we will then be given the support we need to process our emotions, to express, to grow, to get rid of pain and to step into pleasure and provision.
THIS is why we fear rejection - because to us rejection = not getting our needs met.
So the roots of self hate are not actually low self esteem or a lack of positive affirmations - the root of self hate is the fundamental belief that our problems are solved and our needs are met through OTHERS seeing us, loving us and understanding us so that THEY will then meet our needs and take our pain away.
You see?
We are trying to be what we think we need to be so that others will meet our needs for us.
Connecting To The ROOT Of Self Hate - WHY You Don’t Like The Parts Of Yourself You Reject
When we can take a step back and really look at the big picture here again, we see that the ROOT of self hate is actually self protection.
We are trying to change ourselves into what we believe we need to be in order to be loved by others.
We believe that if we were to be rejected, if we were to be told that we’re not loved, if we were to be put in a situation where we weren’t valued and respected - that this would the WORST thing possible for our survival.
We are experiencing an existential relationship with any parts of self that we believe got us rejected - and we are trying to change them so that we will be liked and loved in the hopes that others will then understand us and meet our needs for us.
Which is why I propose that a BIG part of finding our self esteem is actually found in learning how to recognize, validate and understand our OWN needs, and then learning how to get those needs met in real reality.
I understand that this path from self hate to self love may not feel as intuitive and straightforward as repeating affirmations or trying to convince ourselves that we love ourselves.
I understand that this path to self love doesn’t seem as direct - learning to meet our own needs as a way of learning to not hate our thighs or laugh?
Doesn’t seem to connect.
Which is why to get you started I want to invite you to deeply question WHY you dislike the parts of yourself you dislike.
If you were to really SLOW DOWN and look at the deep REASONS you have for feeling like you need to reject the parts of yourself you feel you need to reject - can you identify the CORE reason why you feel like these parts of you are bad, and what you feel will happen to you if you don’t change them?
For instance, if you really dislike the fact that you are sometimes ‘overly emotional’ - can you identify WHY being ‘overly emotional’ is a bad thing? Who taught you that your emotional expression was not ok? What happened to you that made you believe how you express emotionally is not ok?
Chances are the root of this self rejection will be found in having had an experience where someone in your life rejected you, shamed you, blamed you or otherwise told you that your emotional expression was not ok. You experienced being SEPARATED from the LOVE of someone you deeply depended on at the time (a caregiver, your peers, another authority figure) and this caused you a deep-seated sense of FEAR that if you were to keep being this way emotionally, that this would lead to MORE rejected.
If you really consider this again - you will see that at the TIME - in your childhood/early adulthood - you could NOT reasonably understand that even if you were not totally approved of in your emotional expression that this wouldn’t lead to death.
In your childhood experience this separation from your caregivers or from your peers was literally the WORST thing that could happen to you - because again you relied upon these people for EVERYTHING.
The reason many of us have trouble really connecting to the reality that the rejection we experienced in childhood caused us to develop an existential relationship with parts of ourselves in our adulthoods is because as ADULTS we can NOW see that the rejection of caregivers or peers wasn’t ACTUALLY a threat to our survival. We can NOW see that we were fine, that we ended up being fine, that we survived and that everything worked out.
We may also struggle because as children we may not have blamed our bodies, or we may not have had the ADULT coping mechanisms and self sabotage strategies we have now - like indulging in substance, over-extending ourselves for others, getting into risky situations within our relationships and so on - but if we look a little deeper, we will see that the ROOTS of our current self rejection and behavior patterns fall in line with wanting to be loved, and trying to be what we think others want us to be so that we will be loved and therefore safe.
We have our ADULT perspective that is covering OVER what we felt and experienced as children - causing us to struggle to connect to just how scary it was for our childhood selves to be rejected in these ways.
We have to remember that in childhood, to be disconnected really DID FEEL like the end of the world. To be abandoned, shamed, abused, neglected or otherwise told that there was something about us that was wrong/bad/causing our caregivers NOT to care for us really DID feel like the end of the world to us.
And this feeling, this connection got deeply wired into our NERVOUS SYSTEMS.
It’s not living in our conscious minds. Most of us aren’t going around thinking ‘if I continue to be overly-emotional people are going to keep rejecting me and if that happens I will die.’
We don’t THINK these things, but we FEEL them.
So taking this investigation deeper - if you were to then question why it feels so bad to be seen as overly emotional.
If you were to go DEEP into the fear - you will likely find that at the ROOT of the self rejection is that fear that if you don’t change, this will mean you end up alone or rejected forever.
It’s likely if you follow the fear all the way through, there is a core belief that if you don’t change, you will end up being isolated and abandoned or otherwise not liked forever.
If we question why THAT would be so bad - we are going to find that this is because the idea of being isolated forever is literally the WORST fear of pretty much ALL humans.
This again, is for many reasonable reasons - the first being that our very first experiences of being alive all revolved around the fact that we absolutely NEEDED to love, protection, guidance and support of others to be kept alive - we have covered that pretty thoroughly at this point.
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Alright, let’s take a break here and come back next week for the second part of this post!
<3
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