Hello!
In case you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend that you read Part One of this series before reading this part.
Today we’re going to look at the reasons why self hate don’t actually serve us in becoming the people we want to become.
We’re going to look at why all the shame, blame and guilt in the world will never actually motivate us to make long term positive changes in our lives, and why these tools of self rejection actually push us further into the very behaviors and ways of life we are trying to change in ourselves.
We’re going to look at why it can appear that self hate is helping us to change at first, but why it will always backfire and end up sending us in the direction of simply doing what we’ve always done - even when we want to change more than anything.
Self hate is a sure fire way to keep ourselves trapped in our current patterns - and as hard as it may be to accept, accepting this fact is often what we need to do to be able to take the scary step of questioning our self hate thoughts so that we can get onto a more sustainable self loving path.
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Self Hate Triggers Our Survival Fear
Have you ever had this experience?
You wake up and feel that familiar sense of regret.
You stayed up too late again last night scrolling social media instead of eating a healthy meal, instead of getting to bed at a reasonable time, instead of working on that side project you wanted to work on. You let yourself down AGAIN.
You had the best of intentions, you were all ready to come home from work, change into your workout gear, get in a good workout, you were going to make yourself a nourishing dinner then you were going to spend a few hours working on that project you’ve been wanting to start for months now.
You had your workout clothes all laid out. You bought the groceries. You had your project supplies all set up.
And what did you do?
You got home, got changed into those workout clothes and thought ‘I can take a few minutes to check my Instagram. What’s the harm in that? I’m tired. I’ll workout in 10 minutes.’
Then ten minutes turned into 20, 20 turned into an hour. You realized it was too late to cook dinner now, so you thought you’d order something and you could workout while you waited for it to get delivered. Then you would still have time to work on the project for a few hours before bed.
The doorbell rang, and you realized the delivery arrived and you still haven’t worked out.
‘I better eat the food while it’s still hot - then maybe I can do something less intense for my workout since I don’t want to do anything crazy on a full stomach.’
You ate your meal while scrolling, and again, before you knew it, another hour had passed.
Now you felt kinda gross because the meal wasn’t the best choice and you were distracted while you ate it. ‘I’ll just skip the workout today, I can do it tomorrow. That still gives me an hour or two to work on my project.’
You scroll a little longer, the motivation to get up and gather the things you need to start working on the project waning more and more with each double tap.
Then before you know it, it’s midnight. You can barely hold your eyes open. You still need to clean up the take-away containers, get showered and ready for bed and the house is a mess and needs a clean.
You failed. Again. Like you ALWAYS do.
You feel that familiar sense of guilt, shame, and self loathing rise in your chest.
‘Why do I SUCK so bad? Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why do I have such little self control?’ You wonder to yourself.
Other people seem to have their lives together. Other people are accomplishing things. Other people are living WAY better lives than you - you know it because you scrolled social media and watched everyone share their perfect morning and evening routines, you saved a bunch of healthy dinner ideas, you witnessed as people presented their online businesses and side projects that are now making them and income that means they don’t have to work a normal job.
But you?
You just can’t get your life together. You can barely manage to get yourself to go to work every day and clean your apartment. You are just getting by. You are doing the bare minimum to keep yourself going and then you spend the rest of your time just WASTING TIME.
And you feel terrible. You feel terrible in your body, your emotions are all over the place, you go from feeling either extremely motivated and sure that you’re going to ‘get your life’ today to feeling like ALL the motivation just gets sucked out of you into the ethers and you have no idea why or how it happens.
You feel ashamed. You feel embarrassed. You feel like if anyone ‘really’ knew how you lived like they would automatically reject you. How could they not? You’re a slob. A failure. You’re making nothing of your life and you’re doing EVERYTHING wrong.
So you make your plan.
To be honest, you’ve made this ‘plan’ a million times - but you are sure this time you’re going to be able to do it. You feel so terrible, you feel SO fed up, you just CAN’T do this for even one more day.
You’re doing this tomorrow.
This is the LAST time you will EVER let yourself fail.
So you put your takeout containers in the trash. You lay out your workout clothes for tomorrow. You take your shower and you resolve that THIS is going to be the start of your new chapter.
You look in the mirror and you see all your flaws. You see this lazy, horrible person staring back at you. You don’t want to be this person anymore. You CAN’T be this person anymore. This is unacceptable. Your skin is sagging. You’re ugly. You’re just WEAK. Everyone can see it. No more. No more.
You climb into bed, replaying in your mind just how badly you screwed up again today. Again vowing that you’re never, ever going to let this happen ever again. You can’t fail again, you simply can’t.
Then what do you do?
You repeat the same cycle again the next day.
Why?
Why aren’t you able to get yourself together? Why isn’t the pain of the failure enough to motivate you to fix yourself? Why isn’t the shame strong enough to change you? Why do you keep falling into the same patterns even though you KNOW better and you know how much better you would feel if you changed? Why do you keep doing the same things over and over again, even when you set yourself up to do something different?
WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?
Shame Triggers SAME
The reality is, the reason that many of us end up in these cycles of repetitive seeming self abuse is NOT because we actually want to hurt ourselves, lack motivation, are weak, lazy or otherwise broken.
It’s not because we don’t really want to change or because we don’t have what it takes to make real change.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that when we feel rejected, when we feel like we are being shamed, blamed, judged or otherwise like we are being abandoned and ridiculed - this actually triggers a FEAR response in us.
This is because in our youths, the ONE way to get our needs met, the ONE way to be SAFE was to be LOVED and APPROVED OF by the people who were responsible for us.
We were not capable of meeting our own needs, of providing for ourselves, of keeping ourselves safe. We weren’t capable of removing ourselves from situations that hurt or finding better environments when we were not getting what we wanted or needed. We weren’t able to see that what our caregivers believed to be ‘true and right’ may not be ultimate reality, and that there were other people who believed different things. We didn’t have the autonomy required to make ourselves safe, to access what we wanted and needed and to express ourselves in ways that felt real and true to us OUTSIDE of our caregivers and their rules.
Rather, we were in a situation where we NEEDED the people around us.
We needed them to love us, so that they would then care for us and meet our needs.
We all got programmed on a deep, nervous system level that safety came from being approved of, and that rejection and antagonism meant that we were NOT going to get our needs met. That we were not going to be safe, that we were not going to SURVIVE.
The BIGGEST threat we faced, from our childhood perspective, was the threat of being rejected and disliked by those who were responsible for us.
Which meant that any time we felt our caregivers pulling away or antagonizing us in ANY way, we were going to sense that there was legitimate threat to our survival - and to fix this, from our childhood perspective, we needed to do whatever we needed to do to get ourselves back into their good-graces by pleasing them, appeasing them or getting rid of whatever behavior we just did that made them pull away.
The main thing to take away here is this - our survival instincts were being triggered every time we were rejected by our caregivers. It wasn’t a matter of being able to see that even if they were mad at us, even if they were absent or upset, even if they were trying to meet our needs but couldn’t - that we would still generally speaking be SAFE - but rather to US it felt like if we got rejected that was possibly the END of life for us.
This is highly dramatic and traumatic in our nervous systems - and depending on how secure or insecure our attachment to our caregivers was - meaning depending on how much we could TRUST that they were going to take care of us and tend to our needs despite their apparent FEELINGS towards us or feelings in general - is the degree to which feeling abandoned, rejected and unsupported will trigger us NOW in our ADULTHOODS into a state of fear.
Now what we have to recognize is that when we are triggered into this fear state, our bodies are going to be accessing ancient patterns that helped our ancestors survive.
Meaning, when our ancestors felt or sensed a threat in their environment, they were going to RESPOND to that threat in some way - they were going to run up a tree, take out their weapon and fight, stand as still as possible and wait for the threat to pass, or try to appease or please the threatening thing that was in their environment.
From there, if they were to survive, their bodies were going to ‘program in’ that that RESPONSE was the lifesaving response. Their nervous systems were going to make a note that ‘when I feel this threat, I should respond in this way again, because that’s what saved my life.’
Because remember, when we felt threat, usually that threat was immediate and we didn’t have TIME to sit around and really think THROUGH what we were going to do to respond.
Those who survived long enough to pass on their genes were the people who were able to respond quickly to threat in a way that was effective - so this little trick of ‘feel threat, repeat response without thinking about it’ really helped us.
What we need to recognize about this is that when WE as modern humans feel threat, we do the SAME THING.
We feel threat, we respond, and if we DON’T DIE our bodies then make the assumption that whatever we JUST DID was the THING that saved our lives.
Meaning the next time we feel that threat, whether what we did was actually life threatening or not, and whether what we did was actually the life saving step or not, our bodies are going to want to repeat our patterns.
When we feel our own rejection, we are triggering ourselves into a state of fear - because remember it got programmed into our bodies at a very young age that rejection = death.
Then when we feel this rejection, we are going to want to do what we’ve ALWAYS DONE - we are going to want to repeat whatever patterns we currently have - because to our BODIES this is how we have survived.
So when we stand there in front of the mirror and feel how deeply disappointed we are in ourselves, how much of a failure we think we are and how much we want to change because we hate ourselves so bad - we aren’t realizing that we are triggering ourselves into a state of fear, and that in doing so we are setting ourselves up to simply do what we’ve ALWAYS done.
We are setting ourselves up to repeat our patterns, because that’s what our bodies WANT to do MOST when we’re scared - what we’ve always done - because it thinks that’s what’s been keeping us alive.
You see the connection here?
We Think We Can Shame Ourselves Into Change
From here, the last piece of this is to realize that most of us deeply believe we can shame ourselves into changing, again because we are working from childhood reasoning in a way we often don’t see.
In our childhoods when we were in that temporary state of codependency, the ONE thing we had any power over was our own behavior.
We didn’t have the power to advocate for ourselves, to get our own needs met, to figure out why reality was the way it was and what we needed to do to get ourselves out of pain and into a state of pleasure and safety.
Rather, all we knew was that our caregivers loving and approving of us was the ONE WAY to get what we wanted.
Thus, anything we did that we perceived to be the ‘reason’ we were being rejected - again even if this wasn’t true in real reality, even if our caregivers were just having a bad day or were unable to meet our needs for some other reason - we believed that the ONLY reason we would ever be in pain was because we were doing something to cause our caregivers to reject us and thus neglect us.
To us it appeared that the ONE WAY we could control whether or not we suffered, was to control our own behavior.
To be what they wanted us to be, and to not be what they didn’t want us to be.
We felt on a deep level that pain was our fault and that it was our fault based on the fact that we weren’t doing what was right by our caregivers definition - because to us, they were reality. Their ideas and ways of life, what they did and didn’t approve of, what they taught us - it was law.
So we learned shame, blame and guilt very early on as COPING MECHANISMS.
We learned to figure out what was ‘wrong with us’, to feel BAD about that and to use those negative feelings to change our behavior in a way that we hoped would get us approved of by our caregivers.
Shame, blame and guilt was our way of making everything we experienced in life that was painful our fault, so that we could feel a sense of power and control over it - if it was our fault, we could figure out what we did to cause it and we could change ourselves to make it better.
Shame, blame and guilt were also the tools we used to get rid of any cognitive dissonance that may have come with our caregivers harming us - we couldn’t process our caregivers not having the power to provide for us, harming us or being ‘wrong’ - we had to believe that they were right, and thus if we were in pain because of them, we again had to make that OUR FAULT rather than processing that it was them that was hurting us.
Shame, blame and guilt are our childhood coping mechanisms. They help us feel like we are identifying the cause of our pain within ourselves, which makes us feel like we then have the power to solve it. We use shame, blame and guilt to cover up our emotions of anger, rage, sadness, repulsion or rejection of a situation that we didn’t have the cognitive capacity to process at the time and we still use these tools today.
THIS is why we all believe that our shame, blame and guilt is going to empower us to change.
If we can make our pain all our fault, if we can identify how we are the cause, we feel we can solve it all.
If we are what’s broken, we feel we can fix ourselves and thus fix life.
We aren’t seeing that the more we blame and shame ourselves, the more we trigger ourselves into fear and repeating of patterns.
It’s a vicious loop that most of us struggle to ever get out of.
But hopefully you can now see it more clearly.
Shame, blame and guilt are our way of trying to take control over our pain via the childhood coping mechanism of blaming everything on ourselves to try to empower ourselves.
We believe it’s going to help us change.
But in reality due to the way our nervous systems work, all it REALLY does is trigger us into a state of fear, which then triggers us into a state of pattern repetition.
This is why we all find ourselves stuck in loops - the worse we feel, the more we try to guilt ourselves into change, the more we do what we’ve always done.
It makes sense to our childhood self, but it’s not true in real reality.
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Let’s take a break here and come back next week for more!
<3
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