Hello!
For the next few weeks, we’re going to be talking about WHY we engage in self hate.
For some of us, self hate seems logical - it seems like of COURSE we need to beat ourselves up, because if we don’t we won’t be ‘holding ourselves accountable’ and then we’re going to slip into all of our WORST habits and find ourselves spiraling out of control.
Many of us feel like if we were to STOP beating ourselves up all the time, this would be the WORST thing because we would then become the worst versions of ourselves.
On the flip side, many of us can recognize that self hate doesn’t actually get us anywhere - that it tends to trap us in cycles of shame, blame and guilt that only serve to make us REPEAT the patterns we are trying so desperately to break.
When we get on the self love path, many of us do come to the realization that self hate doesn’t actually work as a motivator - but then it’s really really challenging to actually STOP this pattern.
So what do we do with this self hate? How do we see it for the unhelpful strategy that it is, and how do we shift things so that we are working from a place of self love and support rather than shame, blame and guilt?
That’s what we’re covering below!
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WHY We Hold Onto Self Hate
First things first, there are many of us out there who truly believe that we MUST hate ourselves, that we must be on top of ourselves, that we must have constant awareness of where we are messing up and doing the wrong thing if we want to have ANY hope of creating a better life for ourselves.
Many of us are convinced that if we were to stop hating ourselves, if we were to stop beating ourselves up and looking for our flaws, that this would be an act of ‘letting ourselves off the hook’ - and that in doing so we would spiral into all of our worst behaviors and ways of being, losing control over our lives and never becoming the people we want to be.
Many of us are convinced that our shame, blame and guilt are the things that are keeping us from becoming our own worst nightmare, and so the thought of NOT having self hate is actually a scary one.
This totally makes sense - for many of us, we’ve never truly and deeply experienced what it’s like to be LOVED and SUPPORTED into a new way of being.
We’ve never had the experience of being held in who and what we are right now, so that we can start with finding compassion for where we’re at and how we got here.
We’ve never had the experience of being deeply understood in our habits - in being SEEN in why we’re doing what we are and figuring out how we are just trying our best to get our needs met in the only ways we know how.
We’ve not experienced the power of being given the space and time to process what we are actually wanting and needing and how we can start to get those needs met in ways that are different and more conducive to health than our current ways of being.
We haven’t been shown how to take a DEEP look at our current habits, how they are serving us, how they are the best we know to do right now, how they are what we learned at a time in our lives when we had less power/control/understanding and how our past programming plays into our current adult lives.
We Aren’t Doing What We’re Doing For No Reason
For many of us, the first few steps we are going to take on our self love journey, are those steps of slowing down and finding compassion and curiosity around who and what we currently are.
What this means practically, is that we are going to start to look at all the things we are constantly trying to ‘fix’ about ourselves - all the ‘bad habits’, our ‘self sabotage’, our ways of numbing, coping and checking out, our ways of lashing out and reacting to situations we don’t feel proud of, our emotions and all other things we have been trained to see as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ - and rather than continuing to try to fix these parts of self, we’re going to slow down and get CURIOUS and COMPASSIONATE about and with these parts of self.
We are going to take a pause on trying to change for a while, and instead we’re going to start to investigate into what the positive intentions are behind our current behaviors.
We’re going to start to look for the REASONS we’re doing what we’re doing - where we learned to do what we do, how our current behaviors have evolved since childhood/where they started, how they are supporting us in ways we may not realize, how they are meeting needs we may not know we have/that we feel ashamed for having and feel like we can’t have, how they are giving us an escape, how they are simply what we LEARNED and then never unlearned, how they are our programming that got set into us during a very vulnerable time in our lives - and we are going to first move from a place of gentleness around all of this.
We are going to shift out of the constant shame, blame and guilt that most of us live with and we are going to move into giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt.
We aren’t simply adults who arrived in our adulthood with full knowledge of how to be the most productive, healthy, balanced human being on the planet, who then just DECIDED to mess everything up and be destructive to ourselves and others.
Rather we are going to slow down and take some time to realize that we weren’t raised in perfect conditions and therefore likely learned ways of coping, numbing and behaving that worked to keep us safe within our households to a degree, but that required that we abandon ourselves and take on habits that aren’t the MOST beneficial long term.
We are going to realize that we learned the habits we have at times in our lives when we had less resources, less autonomy, less experience and less capacity - so we didn’t just ‘decide’ to make ‘bad choices’ or create destructive habits when we had perfectly viable alternative options available. Rather we were doing the best we could with what we had - and sometimes we learned our patterns in CHILDHOOD, when we were literally being PROGRAMMED to believe that how things were at that delicate time, were how things were going to be ALL the time.
Changing those childhood patterns is hard, and often requires a lot of grounding, creating safety and figuring out new ways of getting our needs met and slowly working to replace old patterns with new ones. It’s not so easy to change our programming - it’s not so easy to change those things we do that feel so automatic and like we take action without thinking because again those patterns aren’t coming from our conscious minds.
They are set in our BODIES and they are what our bodies believe we HAVE to do to be safe.
Change is HARD and we have to respect that. For instance we may notice that we have a tendency to shut down during conflict instead of being able to stand up for ourselves or speak out loud what we are actually feeling/wanting/needing. This may seem like a self sabotaging behavior - but when we look back on our history, we may see that in our childhoods we were constantly punished for speaking up - so much so that we learned that speaking up led to us being deeply UNSAFE - because if we felt that our caregivers pulled away from us when we were expressing ourselves, this would have been an existential threat to us.
So we may have learned that it was safer in that time to just be quiet and go along with things. This strategy was the best thing for our safety at the TIME when we were dependent upon our caregivers and their love for all things - but now in our adult reality it isn’t the best strategy. So we start with seeing that we have a GOOD REASON for shutting down - it’s how we learned to be safe - and now in our adulthood we can slowly start to speak up a little at a time, and prove to ourselves that even if this upsets others, we are still able to be ok. Which again takes LOTS of time and LOTS of patience to re-learn.
We are going to realize that ALL of what we do has SOME sort of positive benefit - no matter how much the negative consequences also exist - we’re doing what we’re doing because it meets a need on some level. We’re doing what we’re doing because if and when we STOP - there are negative consequences we don’t know how to escape from or change. We are doing what we’re doing because again, we know no other way.
When we take the time to slow down and actually get curious about what we’re doing and why, we are always going to find that we are getting something from our current behavior. In this we can start to assess what those positive outcomes are, and we can start to look for OTHER possibly HEALTHIER more empowered ways of getting those same positive benefits without so much of the negative side effects - not through blame and shame, but through understanding and compassion.
While we may notice that we have a tendency to avoid exercise and just crash out in front of our phones for hours at night - leading to us feeling sluggish and less than ideal - that at the same time doing so helps us to SHUT OFF all the pressure we feel all day to perform and be at our best. We may notice that the benefit of scrolling on our phones is that it helps us release the pressure from our lives, and that thinking about working out when we are super overwhelmed just seems like MORE pressure. Thus, we may want to work to find some other ways to shut down/rest/recuperate at the end of the work day BEFORE we ask ourselves to work out - making sure we are giving ourselves that positive benefit of wind down time - then we can move towards including more activities that make us feel good after that.
We are going to find that we likely have needs we didn’t know we had, or that we have been trained that we SHOULDN’T have or that are shameful. Thus, we are doing our self sabotage or ‘bad’ behavior as a way of getting our needs met in a covert way. For instance we may notice that we are prone to zoning out for hours in front of the t.v at night and we feel like this behavior is toxic in the sense that it stops us from doing other, healthier behaviors like self care or working on that ‘side hustle.’
But when we do an investigation, we may find that in real reality, we are quite exhausted from our day to day life, and that this zoning out is literally the ONLY time we give ourselves to rest. We may feel like rest and relaxation is something we ‘shouldn’t need’ or maybe we tell ourselves that we don’t ‘actually work that hard’ - but in real reality, our true selves are letting us know that we DO need rest time, and if we don’t deliberately schedule it in, if we don’t proactively work to get that need for rest met in a way that perhaps feels a bit better than losing ourselves in Netflix for hours, we are GOING to get the need met through an unconscious pattern. We are first going to have to accept that we need more rest than we want to admit, that we can’t come home from work every night and expect ourselves to continue being productive - and then we can look for other ways of resting that may feel more nourishing.
We are going to find that a lot of our self sabotage isn’t actually self sabotage, but our attempts to either live up to the expectations of others via sabotaging our true selves in order to be liked and approved of, or we are going to notice that our true selves are perpetually sabotaging our efforts to fit in and be what others want us to be because our true selves want to run the show. We’re going to figure out that all the ways that we are stopping ourselves from pursuing a certain line of work, stopping ourselves from engaging in certain kinds of relationships, holding ourselves back from different opportunities and ways we could be ‘moving forward’ in life are ALL our attempt again at being SAFE.
We are either trying to fit in by sabotaging ourselves from doing what’s truly good for us - because again we learned on a visceral level in childhood that being SAFE and being APPROVED OF were one and the same thing, thus anything that takes us away from that is going to feel like an existential threat - or what we learned we had to do and be to fit in is SO counter to what we actually want and need, that no matter how hard we push ourselves we can’t make ourselves walk the path.
With this compassion and curiosity - with giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming we are just ‘making bad choices’ and with this getting curious about what we actually want, need and intend with our actions and current ways of being - we are always going to discover that there is innocence in what we’re doing, and that we don’t actually need to fix ourselves.
Because we aren’t broken. We are doing our best with what we have, all the time, every time.
From here, we are going to realize that trying to HATE our way into becoming the people we think we SHOULD become in order to be happy - isn’t going to work.
We are going to realize that what we actually need is true self awareness, so we can figure out what we actually want, what we actually need and what actually works for us, and then we are going to have to figure out how to slowly organize our lives around this new awareness - while holding space for the fact that doing so is going to be scary.
It’s hard to embrace the parts of self we had to abandon to fit in when we were young.
It’s hard to admit to ourselves that we have limits and maybe DON’T want or can’t do what is expected of us.
It’s hard to embrace who we really are, when we feel like who we are ‘supposed to be’ is the only way we can be happy or get love.
It’s hard to walk away from our systems that are constantly telling us that we aren’t enough, that we aren’t doing enough, that we have to strive harder and be more when in reality most of us need to step back and do less to find satisfaction and peace in life.
And the BIGGEST thing, is that it’s hard to really take a step back and realize that self hate doesn’t actually help us in the way we think it does.
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Let’s take a break here, and come back next week to look at why self hate actually only keeps us stuck in our current patterns and why trying to hate ourselves into becoming the people we want to be pretty much never works.
<3
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