Self-Healing vs Self-Hatred, Self-Punishment, Self-Coercion

Human culture has evolved to be
almost entirely coercive.

(I.e. built on negative reinforcement and punishment as the primary means of motivating behaviour).

Don’t eat your greens? Go to your room. Don’t go to school? Go to detention! Don’t perform well enough at work? You’re on performance review! You’re depressed? It’s your fault!

Never are we asked…WHY don’t you want to go to school? How do you feel?

Often the punishment is hidden or implied behind a facade of relative niceness.

Like going to school. The teachers can be nice, but if you don’t go…they will literally drag you there kicking and screaming. And everyone knows this, but no one says it.

What happens is that we then INTERNALISE the punishing voices of these various authority figures.

And how we move ourselves through life starts to operate on the same basis: self-hatred, self-punishment, self-coercion.

We feel like we HAVE to start to hate ourselves, in order to make ourselves ‘belong’ in the institutions of family, school, work and society.

The self-hatred is a cunning survival strategy to crowbar our being into the shape we imagine others will accept. And thus to gain their love.

While the experience of hating ourselves is astonishingly painful, we also get the PAYOFF of feeling like we maybe have some control over ourselves, as well as the HOPE that comes with the idea that one day we will be able to perfect ourselves and will be loved as such.

The hope of being able to hate oneself into perfection and loveability!

But this promise is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You’ll never get there. You just have to keep hatin’ on yourself until the end.

So when we start to enter the world of self-healing, we just do what we always have done! Try to hate ourselves into healing perfection. Comparing ourselves to others, feeling ashamed or guilty if we backslide in any way, trying to rigidly hold ourselves to various disciplines.

All in the hope that ONE DAY we can hate ourselves into loving ourselves as we are.

Ouchy.

A key milestone in the healing journey is when it moves from being negatively motivated (“should, should, should”) to being positively motivated (where healing happens from a space of curiosity and openness with less attachment to a mental roadmap of what should be happening).

Strangely, the way forward is not to TRY too hard to love yourself in a kind of lovey-dovey, overly-positive way.

The self-love is always there in the background, we need to instead investigate the OBSTACLES to that self-love in our direct experience.

As Rumi had it: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Underneath the self-hatred is a well of hurt that has never been seen or felt. Hurt from long ago.

We need to turn towards that part of us that was forced to swallow down the hurt of being punished by those we loved. Helping that hurt and outrage to be seen and heard and felt as fully as we are able.

This is a long-term process.

If you need a hand to ‘seek and find all the barriers within yourself’...that’s what I help folks to do. Give me a shout with any questions.

(This article inspired by and with thanks to Dave Pollard).