When self-hatred fuels our healing
Learning to change from a place of tenderness
Within me, I have really noticed how deep it sits: that need to become the person the other person will want to be with. To become the person they can stay with.
I have done so much coaching work, healing work and transformational work. It has been really useful, and it has brought incredible change. But at some point, I began to see what was fueling it: I relentlessly transform because I actually hate who I am.
Realising this is painful. There is such a great pool of hatred towards myself underneath that willingness to change. Such a lack of love, kindness and acceptance towards all the parts of who I am.
And this is what I want to look at. How we learn to use self-hatred to change ourselves, and how we can carry that same strategy into the work we do to heal.
When we need to be different from who we are to survive
When we are children, our environment may need us to be different. With an angry parent, for example, showing what we feel or behaving in a certain way can be dangerous. We need their care, and we need to find a way to live in that environment.
We might make them right about us not being okay. We accept that who we are is wrong, that we need to be different. And one strategy we might then use to become what other people want is hating who we are.
If we need to change ourselves to survive, we may adopt the belief that who we are is wrong—and use self-hatred to make ourselves change.
That hatred becomes a source of energy. It helps us reject the parts of ourselves that our environment cannot accept and become someone who can fit into it.
There is something about this that makes me really sad. Within our hearts and our systems, we knew who we were and what we could do. We came with incredible capabilities. And so much of that has been overwritten by needing to be different, needing to learn, needing to take over other people’s patterns and ways of doing things.
We carry that belief with us: I am wrong. And the need to become someone the other person will want to be with can sit so deep that we don’t even question what is driving us anymore.
We can change so much without changing what fuels us
Once we start healing, we may feel that we are finally becoming who we want to be. Now we are choosing the change ourselves, rather than changing because others want us to.
But is that actually true? Or are we still using the same strategy?
We can do amazing coaching work, healing work and transformational work while still being driven by hatred and unacceptance of who we are at our core. It is an incredible source of energy. We can learn, understand and change so much with it.
Our search for healing can become a way not to look at the hatred that is fueling it.
We keep looking at what needs to change about ourselves. And there is always something else to work on. Meanwhile, that deep lack of love towards ourselves remains untouched.
For me, this is the painful part of the realisation. The work has been useful. The change has been real. And still, at some point, I need to look at that harshness towards my core. At how I am treating myself while doing all this work.
How do we shift this? These are five keys:
1. Stop feeding the voices that tell you you are wrong
I am ugly. I am uninteresting. I am unlikable. Whenever you have such a thought, do not follow it. These are sentences coming from this strategy and from outside voices we have internalised. They are not who you are at our core.
Ignore them. Kill them. Do not listen.
You do not have to keep following their reasoning, finding evidence for them or changing yourself according to what they say. When one appears, you can recognise where it comes from and just stop.
2. Voice the pain and use the anger to create clarity
The hatred I am describing is made of pain and anger. We can work with both: give the pain expression and use the anger for clarity and boundaries.
Voicing the pain means allowing it to have a sound. It might be a cry, a sob, a sigh or a sound without words. We are letting ourselves express how much something hurts, without turning it into another sentence about what is wrong with us.
Give the pain a voice, and use the anger to become clear about what you want, what you do not want and where your boundaries are.
Anger brings energy for saying: this hurts. I do not want this. This needs to stop. This matters to me. Instead of using that energy to attack ourselves, we can use it to communicate clearly and act on what we know.
3. Understand how the strategy was created
How did it become necessary to change yourself? What happened when you showed who you were? Whose beliefs about you did you adopt, and how did hating yourself help you survive?
Understanding the root means looking at how this strategy was created and why it was useful to you. What now hurts you may once have helped you keep the care and connection you depended on.
The moment we recognise self-hatred as a strategy we learned, rather than the truth about who we are, we can meet it differently.
We can ask whether it is still useful and whether we are ready to let it go. We can work with the beliefs, the emotions we had as children and the sentences we never spoke to our parents.
Some of this can be difficult to work through alone. In a session with me, we can explore those roots and work with the beliefs and emotions that keep the strategy in place, including through emotional release and completion work.
4. Learn to draw energy from joy
If self-hatred has been such a strong source of energy, letting it go also means finding and nurturing another source.
You might have less access to joy. By nurturing joy, I don’t only mean doing something small or enjoyable from time to time. I mean really making joy a topic in your life for a couple of weeks.
Laughing for no reason. Having a concrete plan to laugh for no reason. Doing laughter yoga for five minutes a day. Tuning into the energy and feeling of joy without needing something to happen first. Meditating on joy.
Having conversations with your inner child, asking what it wants, and then doing it.
5. Practise being tender
There is such a tenderness when we hold a baby. We can practise by imagining how we hold one, and bring that tenderness into ourselves, into the water, into the way we touch someone, into the way we think of ourselves, into the way we hold a cup.
And into the way we hold our past, our future and who we are in this moment.
Tenderness is what connects everything with everything: try feeling tender towards something and you will feel that connection.
Try being tender towards yourself and see what comes up.
You can look at yourself in the mirror and say beautiful things, but also notice whether you can feel them. What happens when you try to meet yourself with that tenderness? What makes it difficult?
And we can be tender and strong at the same time. Being tender with ourselves does not mean losing our direction or determination. We can bring those apparent opposites together.
We can change without making ourselves wrong again
Change is necessary. Change is welcome. It can bring us closer to who we are, because we have taken over beliefs and ways of doing things from our parents, school and society that are not who we truly are.
But we can keep changing ourselves while leaving the hatred that fuels us untouched. Seeing that gives us something else to work with: the lack of love, kindness and acceptance towards all the parts of who we are.
We can love who we have been and still see what needs to change.
There is an incredible balance and beauty in learning to hold both. To love our history and all those parts of ourselves, and at the same time be firm and full of determination about where we want to go.
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