"I hate myself"

[ILoveLife]

too busy being "strong"

This makes sense!

Is she open to seeing the rational side of why you did what you did and why you suffered what you suffered?

I think she is? Not sure. Feeling all lovey dovey at the moment, can't really connect to that hateful side right now to ask.

 

[Hopefulphoenix]

@Sietz not heresy, opinion ?. Mr Walker was the first thing I read about CPTSD after Id just found out I had it. Before that I was just lost sick and suicidal with no idea why. I felt so alone. I think any writer with knowledge would have gained my admiration.
I wrote him a letter and he wrote back..I was really pissed off coz I could no longer watch stuff like Game of Thrones LOL and asked why ? (I didnt understand triggers or anything then) Now I dont actually want to watch that and my problems are slightly bigger...
He wrote back something validating like he and his wife didnt watch it either.
But I dont think his work would ever work as self help. That stuff is far too intense. I know coz I tried and I ended up dissociating and going into "parts mode" way more. But I now just use him as a background reference. He kind of cured himself and I got so much respect (and envy! for that)
Also..(ok I admit he does have a bit of a herioc status to me ? ) it was in his writing I first found the notion it was ok to be furious, especially for parts of me at my abuser. And for me the cognitive Christian notion of forgiveness "pushed" upon me was making me sicker. I was trying to work a 12 step program and I was different to all the others.
But anyway..end of my little Pete Walker essay! ...
@Abstract ty so much for that. My mum said to me constantly said to me that I was "abnormal" and selfish and would never have friends. Its still at my core. (Its the first time I wrote that , it makes me feel sick to even type the words). I know cognitively yeah yeah she was sick bla bla bla , but I think my core still believes it.
If I tell myself and think of it like a transference of negative emotion it has maybe more of an impact. But I got a lonnnnng way to go yet.
I accept, now that I will never be cured from ptsd, Ill never be in a place of complete forgiveness..Ill never be able to unflinchingly watch stuff like GOT again....but the very most important thing to aim for is my relationship with me. ?.

 

[Emotional girl]

@Sietz. I have exactly the same problem and I completely hate myself as a person.
I can have compassion for others but I find it very difficult to have any compassion for my self.
I think that people who go through trauma are brainwashed and conditioned to believe we are these are evil /bad people who should hate ourselves and it is really difficult to change that mind set.
I think therapy can help but we also have to learn to help ourselves.

 

[grit]

One of the ways I started my healing was acknowledging that many parts are created in response to my situation as a child trapped in a violent relationship.

I hope the part that is noticing this wounded part can do more and take care of that part. Personally, I do not believe we can cut off parts just as much as we cannot cut off a physical part hurting too. But the fact you are 'noticing' and 'acknowledging' this wounded part and you are able to observe and articulate without being engulfed says perhaps you are having an spiritual awakening or you are under a deep stress and you are seeing some form of disintegration which IMHO can also mean, you can see disintegration in sober you are able to integrate by full force of compassion for the wounded parts.

In short, I am truly happy for you to recognise the parts that may have been operating below the surface and hope you make friendship with them. They have been struggling for a long time to get your attention for soothing.

 

[ILoveLife]

Thanks everyone :)

@grit I've been working with parts for a while now. Sometimes one still pops up out of the blue :)

This part is willing to heal, I think I may have jumped the gun on the evil judgement. I'm trying to understand if there are deeper things to this as in more facets of her or if shes two dimensional this way. She seems automated in her responses which clearly points to internalized abuse instead of intention.

 

[Abstract]

If she wants to heal she isn't evil. Even achnowleding that change is something worth looking at shows that. It may just be what she knows.

 

[ILoveLife]

It may just be what she knows.

I think so. Like a landfill of others judgements and invalidity maybe?

 

[NaeNae75]

This thread is super helpful. This buzzes through my head almost constantly sometimes. Then when I can keep myself "functioning" and occupied and succeeding at getting things done, I can squash it down. This is what I often refer to on here as my self-hate speak.

I don't have much to add since my brain feels more like mush than formed at the moment, but thank you for starting the thread.

 

[PreciousChild]

I'm a little late to the conversation, but I can relate to intense self-hate. I do like Walker, but I wanted to add what I remembered van der Kolk saying or at least my interpretation/memory of it. Self-hate aids our survival as a child because it suppresses the needs and feelings that provoke our caretakers' anger, threatening our survival. We learn to hate those behaviors our parents dislike and try to behave in ways that our parents approve of. When we deviate from that, it triggers critical voices whose actual job ultimately is to keep us safe and functioning. But like Walker said, when we don't get our natural needs met, we get angry (he calls it the protest emotion), but when we still don't get our needs met, our true needs and feelings get buried and that same anger is now directed to ourselves and keeps that buried self from resurfacing. The problem is that the buried self contains our authentic needs and feelings. So this causes a conflict in which authentic feelings become tied with feelings of shame, hate, and badness.

When I was in junior high school, I remember one time I caught my reflection on a tv screen, and for a split second, I didn't connect the fact that the image was me right away. For the split second before I realized the image was me, out of the corner of my eye, the image emanated an intense energy of evil and ugliness. I thought "witch!". When I realized the image was a reflection of me, I was horrified.

When I started on the path of healing from ptsd, I remember reading these passages in van der Kolk and Walker and I decided that I was going to embrace my authentic self and I was going to integrate it back into the world of light. I could picture myself as a child bearing the scars of trauma, living in the dark and I imagined her walking into the light and hugging her. For like 7-8 months thereafter, my head was like a constant open wound. I opened up feelings of hate, ugliness, stupidity, awkwardness, etc. etc. that just stayed with me in a nagging way. I just felt crappy all the time. But I told my critical voices that "she" was not going away and that I loved her and wanted her. I did reparenting stuff and did a lot of reading and reflecting during that time. At some point, that constant feeling of shame and hate dissipated. I have not healed completely by any means. But I feel like that was an extremely fruitful process for my healing.

 

[Angelsea]

Such a helpful thread, thank you all so much.
I've gotten a lot of help from reading Pete Walker and Bessel van der Kolk - the latter I also watch videos of, from long talks to short clips, which I can recommend.

I just want to add, about the part: I find it helpful, like others here, to understand my "mean to me" part as having come into being in order to help me survive. She was created in the mind of an awfully young child, so no surprise that, a) it feels like not the world's best strategy, and b) it usually doesn't help to try and reason with her.
But it's been helpful to realize: even though she is so mean to me, it has been (was) a very good strategy, because: It worked. It got me this far! It's really helpful, for me, to approach her with gratitude for that. Kind of like, "Thank you so much - now I'll take over from here." (I think that was mentioned above too.)

I saw a great webinar talk from a Dr. Richard Schwartz (developer of the IFS model, internal family systems), who talked about dialogs with his clients' various mean parts, and how you can even (after a lot of work) talk with them about talking up different tasks. "I appreciate all you've done for me, helping me survive up to now - so if I don't need that any more, what might you do instead?" I guess it's also about freeing up energies so they can be put to positive uses.

Along with van der Kolk and Schwartz (above), I've found it helpful to watch clips of Dr. Allen N. Shore - especially interesting if you're interested in the neurobiology of childhood trauma. In many clips, he puts it in ways that are interesting for a lay person, I find - not overly "science-y".

 

[NaeNae75]

I'm a little late to the conversation, but I can relate to intense self-hate. I do like Walker, but I wanted to add what I remembered van der Kolk saying or at least my interpretation/memory of it. Self-hate aids our survival as a child because it suppresses the needs and feelings that provoke our caretakers' anger, threatening our survival. We learn to hate those behaviors our parents dislike and try to behave in ways that our parents approve of. When we deviate from that, it triggers critical voices whose actual job ultimately is to keep us safe and functioning. But like Walker said, when we don't get our natural needs met, we get angry (he calls it the protest emotion), but when we still don't get our needs met, our true needs and feelings get buried and that same anger is now directed to ourselves and keeps that buried self from resurfacing. The problem is that the buried self contains our authentic needs and feelings. So this causes a conflict in which authentic feelings become tied with feelings of shame, hate, and badness.

When I was in junior high school, I remember one time I caught my reflection on a tv screen, and for a split second, I didn't connect the fact that the image was me right away. For the split second before I realized the image was me, out of the corner of my eye, the image emanated an intense energy of evil and ugliness. I thought "witch!". When I realized the image was a reflection of me, I was horrified.

When I started on the path of healing from ptsd, I remember reading these passages in van der Kolk and Walker and I decided that I was going to embrace my authentic self and I was going to integrate it back into the world of light. I could picture myself as a child bearing the scars of trauma, living in the dark and I imagined her walking into the light and hugging her. For like 7-8 months thereafter, my head was like a constant open wound. I opened up feelings of hate, ugliness, stupidity, awkwardness, etc. etc. that just stayed with me in a nagging way. I just felt crappy all the time. But I told my critical voices that "she" was not going away and that I loved her and wanted her. I did reparenting stuff and did a lot of reading and reflecting during that time. At some point, that constant feeling of shame and hate dissipated. I have not healed completely by any means. But I feel like that was an extremely fruitful process for my healing.

Thank you for this post, it was enlightening!

 

[shimmerz]

It's been my experience for myself that any self harm, self hate, etc has had to do with a 'get myself before they get me' type of deal. It was a way for me to keep 'safe' relatively speaking of course, or let's say safer than if I had left it up to someone else to admonish/punish me.

I would generally ask the question of 'What happened to me that is having me thing that this is making me safer'?

It's like not asking for help when one really needs it. It is kind of self defeating not to ask for help but mix in the elements of trauma such as, I need to be invisible; I need to not need a thing; I need to not inconvenience others; I need to keep my needs to myself unknown so nobody can get to me because of them'; I need to keep silent about my needs so that people don't pay me back for inconveniencing them' and so on.

There was this whole narrative that was going on in my head that was anticipating all of the dreadful things that would happen to myself and others if I dared to express my needs. A horrible f*cking way to live.