TRANSCRIPT
Self-hatred is siding with your traumatizer. Self-hatred is siding with your abusive parents. Self-hatred is internalizing the message that there is something inherently defective and wrong with you, and it’s a lie. Self-hatred is hating the beauty within you. And if you hate yourself, well, probably at some level, it’s allowing you to stay in your screwed-up family system. It’s allowing you to be acceptable to the people whose job it was to love you the most and yet were very deficient at that. They couldn’t do it. They were too threatened by the truth and beauty of you, and so they hated you. But they didn’t admit it. They said, “Oh, we love you. We love you in this way or that,” or maybe they even did admit it. That’s the sicker thing. Either way, children, especially when they’re very young, can’t really believe that their parents hate them. Some part of them has to turn that hatred inward toward self-hate to make themselves be more acceptable to their parents. They have to believe that their parents love them because they have to find some way to get nurturance from their parents. Because if they don’t get nurturance, even some tiny little threads of nurturance, little crumbs of nurturance, they will die. Human infants, human babies, human children are the most dependent, vulnerable beings in the universe, and they’re also the most flexible. They will do anything to make sure that that channel of love from their parents, from their caretakers, keeps coming. And self-hatred is one very easy and simple way to ensure that very deficient, very sick, very screwed-up parents keep giving that nurturance to the child. The child becomes their parent’s best ally. And if the parents hate the child, the child will reflect that at some level in order to get loved. Of course, it’s confusing for the child because they have to reject their true self. They have to reject their instincts. They have to reject their feelings. They have to reject the truth that is their inherent gift as a human. Every human is born with the gift of knowing truth, of feeling truth, of being connected with truth. But then they have to disconnect with it to fit into that sick family system and get that love. And then when they grow up and start gaining intellectual capacities and the capacity to reflect and to self-reflect, it can be very confusing. Why does this person hate themselves? I asked myself along the way, “Why do I hate myself? Where does this come from?” And I see people asking themselves, “Why do they hate themselves? Why are they their own worst enemies? Why are so many people, most people out in the world, why are they their own worst enemy?” And if I ask people that, because sometimes I do, “Why do you think that is?” A lot of times people really don’t have an answer. They don’t have a good answer. Yet when we connect with our childhood, connect with the truth of who our parents really were, that strengths and their weaknesses, especially their weaknesses, because a lot of times it’s pretty easy to see our parents’ strengths. That’s allowed in the family system. It’s allowed to see your parents’ goodness and their good qualities. What’s not allowed is the other side—the really negative lies, the pain, the trauma, the violence, the violations, the perversity, the dishonesty. When people are able to connect with both of those in a balanced and healthy way, it’s a lot easier to see where we got the modeling for self-hatred. And the cure? The cure for self-hatred, well, for starters, just understanding where it came from is a huge step forward, an evolutionary step forward, right? Out of the family system. One of the basic things that keeps self-hatred permanently in place is to deny where it even came from. If we deeply have the embedded belief that there is something defective with us at our core, that we were born defective, that we’re a bad seed, that there’s something just inherently deformed about us, disordered about us, that we have a biological problem, well, that’s safe. That makes our self-hatred safe. It makes the family system safe. It makes our parents feel safe. But when we start looking at it and saying, “No, no, no, this is not where self-hatred comes from,” our self-hatred really does come from our traumas, from our primary traumatizer. That’s the beginning to saying, “Ah, okay, now I can do something with this self-hatred.” And then what comes next is, well, a big part of it can be getting away from these very people and going within more, really understanding what happened to us. Who were we at the very beginning? Why did they do this to us? Well, actually not really that—why did? Because who cares why they did it? Just figuring out the fact that they did it and really understanding the full range of what they did, writing down all the different things that happened to us, all the different traumas that we experienced. The crucible of painful negative truth that we experienced in our life, really making sense of this. Living a healthy lifestyle, living a lifestyle that even if we feel some degree of self-hatred, a self-loving, self-nurturing, self-respecting lifestyle is a big part of negating that self-hatred and setting a stage for us—a new role modeling in which we are the parent in our life now to begin to dismantle that self-hatred. Changing behavior, changing self-destructive patterns, finding healthier people as our allies, healthier friends, maybe even a therapist. Though I think there aren’t very many particularly good ones out there, but at the very least, practicing good self-therapy. I, for my case, journaling was key to dismantling my self-hatred. And ultimately, grieving—this is the key. Grieving the traumas. Grieving what was lost as the result of the traumas. Grieving is a process of gaining back our connection with our self, our connection with the root of our beautiful self—the self that we can love. Grieving our historical traumas is an act of self-love, and it undoes self-hatred. And it’s a long, long, long, painful, painful, painful process. It’s not something that can happen quickly. It’s not something that we want to happen quickly. There is no drug that can provoke us to do a massive amount of healing. Yes, little bits and pieces here and there, but I think when we start taking drugs to do healing of our traumas, we send ourselves a bad message that our self-love alone and the long, slow, persevering, and patient process of healing is not the way. And it is the way. Slowly, bit by bit, grief by grief, tear by tear, we can dismantle our self-hatred, heal, evolve, grow, and transform our self-hatred into self-love.