We think of certain behaviours as functional and of others as dysfunctional, constructive vs destructive, adaptive vs maladaptive. Generally we consider attitudes and actions that help us move closer to happiness, peace, abundance as good. While behaviours that sabotage us, create fear and anxiety, harm our chances of love, belonging, success are bad.
There is the sense that healthy behaviours are essentially an expression of self-love and self-respect, while anything that comes from a place of self-judgement and self-hatred is unhealthy. Feelings of guilt, shame, humiliation, anger fall within that latter bucket.
To build a good life, we focus on fostering the constructive behaviours and preventing the destructive ones. We blame the absence of sufficient happiness, freedom, money and peace on our dysfunctional behaviours. We see them as harmful, and we fight against them looking for ways to overcome them. We try to adopt a more loving approach to ourselves and to life and get rid of any attitudes or behaviours that are aggravating and disruptive to ourselves.
As far as I’m concerned, living in love and peace is the ultimate purpose. I don’t condone any harm or hatred. But sometimes the only way we can get to love is by realising that our lack of love for ourselves is an expression of love.
Self-judgement is not the obstacle to living a more peaceful life, it’s a coping mechanism for the absence of peace—and a strategy for finding peace. On the surface level it seems counter-productive—but on a subconscious level we do cherry-pick the methods that produce the best results for the person we are.
My experience with self-hatred
I’ve been on the receiving end of self-hatred for most of my life. I intimately know the tyranny of living from this place. I’ve been in a constant state of fight or flight for years, impacting my relationships, work and health.
I’d be very critical, judgemental and harsh on myself. I’d obliterate myself with inner criticism over the smallest of things. I’d feel that I didn’t have the right to relax or have fun, I’d set unreasonably high expectations for myself—and berate myself if I didn’t meet them.
Last year, I decided to run six days a week, first thing every morning. I ran over 2,500km by the end of the year, without having much prior experience of running. I ran in snow, rain and hail. In the last quarter of the year I was doing about 10k per run, and I wouldn’t let myself take a day off even on days when I felt very tired or unwell.
The breakthrough: the unlovable is an expression of love
I considered my self-hatred to be at the root of the issues I had in all areas of my life—my relationships, my work, my health. And, of course, that only made me hate myself more. I hated myself for hating myself. My self-hatred was not only creating a heavy, oppressive and hopeless experience of living, it was ruining me and my life.
I then asked myself what I was trying to achieve with my self-hatred and realised that, ironically, I was trying to protect myself. My self-hatred wasn’t the problem, it was what I, subconsciously, was using to solve the problem.
By virtue of my experiences, I believed that the world was dangerous, I wasn’t safe, and I must keep myself safe. I also believed that I didn’t have what it took. In other words: I needed to protect myself but I thought I wasn’t good enough to protect myself. Self-hatred was a method I used to equip myself with better skills to survive.
Self-hatred is an attempt to control. And we need to control when we’re scared, when we’re in danger, when we’re not safe. Self-hatred is an attempt to explain the world in an ego-centric way which give us the comfort that we can be steer the events of our lives.
Self-hatred is a coping mechanism for dealing with an underlying problem, not the problem itself. It’s a method of survival, not destruction.
In all of its forms—self-judgement, humiliation, shame, guilt—self-hatred is a coping mechanism in response to an underlying lack of safety. We subconsciously choose to use it with the ultimate purpose to help ourselves, not to harm ourselves.
All we do is in search of our true nature
On the most primitive level, we’re all just trying to survive. This is our most primal driver. All we seek and do—love and belonging, security, financial stability, peace, happiness—is so that we can increase our chances of survival.
And no matter how disruptive we may judge some of our behaviours to be, sometimes they are the best strategies we can use to protect ourselves.
There is lightness and freedom in this realisation, because it enables us to step outside of self-judgement—and realise that we aren’t part of the problem, but a part of the solution. Everything we do, we do to help ourselves to align ourselves with our real nature of love, freedom and belonging.
Our dysfunctional behaviours are as much an expression of self-love as our functional ones. We’re just trying to take ourselves to safety.
Self-hatred is an expression of self-love. It’s the inner scared child that feels unsafe in a dangerous world, fighting for its protection.