A Picture of My Childhood Self
Self-hatred is a funny thing. For some reason, the psyche developed so that when you’re a kid, you learn to feel shame and hate yourself instead of being who you truly are and risk losing the love of your caregivers. If I think about it a bit more, it actually makes total sense. When you’re a kid, your survival completely depends on your caregivers, and if being yourself means your parent will abandon you, the better solution for survival is to simply abandon yourself. Evolutionarily, it’s the perfect way to cope with a brain that’s developed the ability to have consciousness.
That doesn’t change the reality of the burden that self-hatred places upon us. Self-hatred is an abyss that pulls you in, and even though you’d love to escape it, there’s a part of you that cuts off your own wings and sends you hurtling into self-hatred’s depths. It doesn’t matter if your malignant superego is rebuking you for doing something as painful as sabotaging a friendship or something as simple as forgetting to get a piece of food from the grocery store. The condition of self-loathing means having lenses glued onto your eyes that turn the world into an endless display of your failure and incompetence.
I’ve seen every attempt at remedying self-loathing on the internet, a lot of which is crap. Writing affirmations won’t change the underlying pain. The law of attraction won’t save you from the consequences of your self-sabotaging behavior. There’s no painless way out of this mess. I know it feels horrible, and it’s unfair that this happened to you. You didn’t deserve it. But this is the hand you’ve been dealt, and it’s in your best interest to play your cards as well as you can.
Self-hatred and rage was the fuel I used to move my life forward for years, until last fall. Sometimes I used it consciously, which involved berating myself and telling myself I’m a piece of shit and that I need to do better. And sometimes it happened unconsciously. For example, my grandiose fantasies of becoming a billionaire startup founder, fantasies which I weaved in my senior year of high school and sedated myself with throughout the first half of college, covered a festering feeling of worthlessness and a desire to escape myself. Believe it or not, I got a lot accomplished by drinking this poison. The dissatisfaction with my unathletic self in high school pushed me to put on a lot of muscle and become strong. Suddenly I was able to wear the bravado of a gym rat to cover up for the insecurity of feeling like a nerd. Similarly, I was able to whip myself into putting in the long hours to read math and physics textbooks in high school so I could take tougher courses when I got into college. It was a working strategy.
At least until it wasn’t. In fall 2019, I felt that I’d gotten everything I was looking for in life. A relationship, meaningful work, physical fitness, and a good group of friends. It should have been smooth sailing for me. Unfortunately, one doesn’t escape the abyss when the abyss lives inside of them. The self-hatred came roaring back with more fury than I’d ever felt before. This spiraled into behaviors that led to the disintegration of my relationship, my plunging into a period of serious depression, and self-harm. All of this when I should have been thriving too, at least by societal standards. The self-loathing grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me into the ground. I was convinced that I needed to suffer for my life to be worth anything because I’d built my identity on suffering for so long. I had to reckon with the reality that at the core of my identity, I felt that I was somebody that deserved hatred.
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These kinds of feelings of lack of self-worth are pretty common for those who suffer from CPTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). This condition is something that can develop from a traumatic childhood. If you’re particularly sensitive, it puts you at greater risk of developing it.
Realizing that I was suffering from CPTSD this for most of my life changed how I viewed myself and my struggles. Suddenly, a lifetime of shattered memories that felt like a broken jigsaw puzzle was being put back together. After about a month of being pulled into that depression, I escaped. While life wasn’t perfect, I felt that I’d made progress. Pretty soon, I learned about CPTSD and all of its symptoms. Though it was hard to come to terms with this reality, I was able to resolve to overcome this burden.
Today, a year later from that breakdown, and 9 months after learning about CPTSD, I feel freer than ever. I feel happy most days and my life is incredibly functional. While things aren’t perfect, and will never be perfect, I’m satisfied with life and the way it’s going.
Feelings of self-hatred still visit my mind at times, but I’ve learned that self-compassion can diffuse these unwanted visitors. My meditative practice has helped me catch myself when I spiral into those feelings, so I never wallow in the feeling for more than maybe ten minutes at a time. My life isn’t fueled by these toxic emotions anymore, instead, it’s powered by a desire to give myself the best and create joy. Clearly a huge improvement from where I used to be.
The puzzle of my life is less convoluted. I can understand why I’d developed those feelings of self-hatred in the first place, between a stressful home life and going to a school where I was outcast by my peers. It’s become simple to link specific events that have been burned into my memory to the emotions I feel in the modern-day. In those cases, showing myself compassion and empathy digests the emotional charge and allows me to grieve the pain that I went through and the positive experiences I missed out on back then so I can live a better life today. But sometimes simply showing my present self compassion doesn’t work.
I keep this picture of myself when compassion alone doesn’t work. It’s a picture of me at the age of 3. It’s easy to loathe the adult versions of ourselves. It’s second nature to say that the reason we’re in pain is that we’re fundamentally a fuck up, and every dysfunctional action we take ends reinforces our belief of this false reality. I can’t say this to my child self though. Because I know in reality, all of these emotions of self-hatred came from a kid abandoning himself when he deserved love and compassion. While I can’t change the past, go back in time and make sure I got the emotional nourishment I needed, I can end this cycle of pain by putting down the baton I’m beating myself with and let my heart open up to the child in the photo, realizing that at the end of the day, that’s me.