Self-hate

[ms spock]

Really becoming aware of the self hatred self talk. It is hard going.

 

[vtap]

Really, will it ever go away if it's a lifetime feeling? I'm 56 and have felt this since I can remember. It comes and goes...but ALWAYS comes back like tsunami! It waits and comes when I am not watching for it!

This is what I fear also. For me the childhood thinking patterns of self loathing are jammed in my head and now as an adult it keeps coming back. You might want to look at metta meditation to feel positive emotions about yourself.

 

[ms spock]

My self hatred has been coming up a lot and that is really challenging for me.

I realise I have been sitting in the helplessness and the hopelessness and there is nothing to do but do stuff and think stuff to refute this. I just have to do things. I just have to organise myself. I just have to think differently. I have to make those choices more and more.

I had been doing that and a higher level of anxiety came up so I have to just keep going.

I have to not carry around the self hatred with me or the feelings of failure or the feeling bad about myself. I have to focus on other things. I have to do things. I have to front up.

I have to stop carrying around the reactivity with people as well. I have to make an effort to get out of this.

No matter how I feel I just have to keep doing things and that is that. I have to keep pushing through.

 

[maddog]

I have been reading, just today, about learning to love yourself. Apparently, it's a choice, you just *decide* to love yourself, and then you do, faking it until you make it. In other words, you just adopt behaviours and practice feeling emotions that equate to self-love, modelled on those you feel and display towards the person you love most in the world. Learning to love yourself is about accepting that you are not defined by what you do, but who you are, and that who you are is inherently ok. It involves forgiving yourself for your mistakes, through a process of accepting that mistakes are merely the ways in which we learn and modify our behaviour, and that they reflect our actions and not who we are.

As I read, I felt... utterly disgusted and hopeless, for a long long time. Most of me thinks it's all ridiculously simplistic and unrealistic for those of us who truly, deeply, feel bound by our self-hate. It all sounds so simple that it seems insulting.

A small part of me suspects that really, that's just my self-hate talking. Maybe it really is that simple, maybe it is possible, maybe at some point you can rally the inner resources of determination in order to do just that and to somehow habituate yourself into self-love. I truly don't know, and suspect I can't trust my instincts. I want to say I'll try, but I don't know ifI can, or not more than fleetingly. It just feels so foreign and strange.

Maddog

 

[Abstract]

I hate myself. It's such a bore.

 

[ms spock]

It does get old Abstract.

 

[maddog]

Utterly unbearable here right now. No words.

 

[nomedic1]

A cold dark hand around my heart

 

[presentjoy]

I feel this so deeply that I can barely breathe. But I even hate that I'm not breathing well.

I can sometimes convince myself that the fight in me isn't a reason to hate myself (no, it's a sign of self-love). Nor is the weak, withered, scared person (that person deserves compassion). But one hates the other? I can't tell. But a very strong self-hate permeates. It feels easy to go from self-hate to having no hope. Or at least, it's quick, sometimes.

It's hard to be with this.

 

[shell]

My self hate was a product of all the things I believed about myself as a result of what my abusers told me. I no longer listen to my mothers voice, the critical voice that condemned me constantly, because it just wasn't true.

When I wrote down the thoughts, the beliefs I had carried ever since I was a young child who knew no better, I started to realize just who was the liar, and it wasn't me.

When I really analysed those beliefs, they didn't hold up. Writing down my beliefs, my self talk and working on them made me start to accept myself, I may not like myself yet, but accepting myself is a long way from hating myself.

My mother's favourite way to make me feel like crap was to threaten to kill me, tell me she wished I was dead in many ways, so I twisted it and carried it around to being, I deserve to be dead, I wish I was dead, at every instance that I was triggered and felt useless (another of her common expressions) or that I couldn't do anything right.

When I listened to my self talk, I was down right nasty, and I sounded exactly like her. I no longer carry around my abuser, my mood is brighter, and I am starting to be kinder to myself and consider that maybe I am not the person she told me I was.

 

[ms spock]

When I wrote down the thoughts, the beliefs I had carried ever since I was a young child who knew no better, I started to realize just who was the liar, and it wasn't me.

When I really analysed those beliefs, they didn't hold up. Writing down my beliefs, my self talk and working on them made me start to accept myself, I may not like myself yet, but accepting myself is a long way from hating myself.

When I listened to my self talk, I was down right nasty, and I sounded exactly like her. I no longer carry around my abuser, my mood is brighter, and I am starting to be kinder to myself and consider that maybe I am not the person she told me I was.

That is a tremendous amount of hard work that you have done there Shell.

How long did it take you?

How did you do it?

 

[shell]

Actually I have probably only spent about 3 months on it, but that it came after I was in a really bad place and it made such a huge difference in my life, it made me very motivated to work hard on it.

It is all I have focused on, but the difference it has made in my life is enormous. I went into therapy last week with a smile on my face, and I really meant it. After three years of feeling like I wasn't getting anywhere, even though I was but in small ways, this has made the biggest impact in my life.

Truly I never thought it was possible to accept myself, because hating myself, and isolating myself due to my self hatred is all I have done for the last twenty years.

Listen to what you tell yourself when you are triggered into self hate, write it down.

Would you say that to your best friend, if not, then it's not okay to say it to yourself.

Is it really true, and I mean really,logically is it true?

Who told you it previously? Are you repeating the words of an abuser?

Abusers rely on making us feel bad about ourselves so we keep their secrets, they feed our shame, and eventually we become our own abusers.

Now I recognize the critical voice as hers, I am very motivated to tell it to get lost, and I just don't listen to it when triggered.