How We Learn to Hate Ourselves

Maladaptation? Maybe. Delusion? Definitely.

You know that moment when your charming new friend says something like “god sorry I’m talking so much” and you just want to grab their face and scream “I’M INTERESTED IN HEARING YOU TALK. THAT’S WHY I INVITED YOU FOR COFFEE”? Maybe you’ve had an experience where you made a mistake and the first thing out of your mouth was “I’m so stupid.” I’ve certainly been that person, so hyper-vigilant about my own behavior that I’m compelled to account, unprompted and out loud, for my imagined failings.

Self-hatred and low self-esteem express themselves in any number of ways, most of them internal. They can present as an overabundance of self-consciousness, as in the examples above. Sometimes you can tell that maybe the person you’re talking to is overanalyzing how they “seem” to you and they want to solicit feedback or exert a little control over how they’re coming across. Sometimes the person clearly just wants to ask “hey you don’t mind that I’m like this, right?” but they won’t address it so directly. Other times, someone is suffering so deeply from overwhelming self-consciousness that they never seem at ease around others and constantly deride themselves.

Whatever your specific experience, you’ve probably been plenty self-deprecating. It can even be polite in some situations. Still, genuine low self-esteem and self-hatred are undoubtedly detrimental, even debilitating. But as I discuss below, expressions of self-hatred don’t usually make much sense or align with reality. So what brings us to these low places to begin with?

In a Psychology Today article Anna Katharina Schaffner points to the idea that humans, as an altricial species, are completely dependent on their caregivers for much longer than other animals. Thus, from a young age, “we are aware of our abject dependency as naked and helpless infants”:

Consequently, the thought that there might be something wrong with our parents—that they might not have our best interests at heart, that they might be lacking in their capacity to care for us, that they might be unloving or even behave actively aggressive and destructive toward us—is existentially threatening. In fact, it is so terrifying that we defend against it with all our might. Our psychological apparatus does all it can to keep us from knowing and feeling this truth.

When you’re a child trying to make sense of the world around you, it is far easier to internalize your mistreatment as shame and blame yourself than it is to name and cope with it as such. It may sometimes be safer too, because, absent the means to escape or otherwise change our circumstance, we might avoid further harm by adapting our behavior to the vagaries and preferences of our caregivers.

We can expand this idea even further. If you were excluded from a particular social group as a child, you might have viewed this as a reflection of your personal worth or value. After all, how’s a child supposed to know that other children might just be capricious, shallow, and spiteful for no reason? Looking back as an adult, you can easily acknowledge that bullies are miserable idiots. Still, this knowledge doesn’t always make the feelings they engendered go away. Once we narrativize our experiences like this, it can be difficult to change our outlook, even if it opens us up to further mistreatment. When a primary means of understanding our treatment by others is not why did this happen to me? but rather what did I do to deserve this?, we begin to position our social reality as the only reality. We’ve acquired a maladaptive lens for parsing reality, one that developed to keep us safe, and our brain is loath to give it up..

Things don’t get much better when we become an adults, either, even if we have more knowledge and experience to inform our self-perception. As a social species, human beings need love, companionship, and community with other people. Thus, we all must bend to social and cultural expectations to some degree in order to get our needs met. Unfortunately, adults are also frequently capricious, shallow, and spiteful to greater or lesser degrees, and exclusionary behavior is normative.

This dynamic is most obvious in dating, where people routinely abuse themselves and each other, obsessing over weight, height, genital appearance and size, haircut and color, clothing style, education, and wealth. Never mind that you really wouldn’t want to date people like this, much less be one yourself—rather than being expected to shrug off these vapid criteria, the dominant cultural expectation is that you go out of your way to meet them. You’ll even see these norms justified by dubious appeals to “human nature,” evolutionary biology or any of a number of other dipshitted ways people try to reify their enculturation. Young adults growing up under such circumstances are bound to come to harmful conclusions about their and others’ worth.

Meanwhile, there are multi-billion-dollar industries who know this game all too well. Advertisers have always loved to target young people. Now, children are being exposed to targeted ads from a very young age. Combine this with the proliferation of influencers, and you get an endless stream of messages that induce want, cultivate lack, and inspire comparison. Rinse and repeat for every stage of your life.

So we’re all conditioned and reconditioned from birth to death into the norms, habits, and neuroses of the cultures and kinship groups we inhabit. We learn to accommodate, ignore, and propagate them as they suit us or the people and institutions we desire access to. In many untold ways, we incorporate these normative prescriptions into our identities. They become integral to our emotional lives. Gender is, famously, normative prescriptions all the way down, but for many, it’s still a fundamental aspect of their self-conception.

Choosing not to acquiesce to cultural norms is not a neutral choice, either. Again, you need look no further than gender. From disapproving looks to fatal violence, individuals and institutions have developed methods for ensuring adherence to prevailing norms. People will live a lie for their entire lives to avoid social sanction, choosing instead to blame themselves. That way, at least, the world makes some twisted sense.

On the flip side, what ways of being and behaving are granted the authority and legitimacy of “normalness” constitutes an urgent sphere of political and social action. “Normalize x” is such a prominent feature of online discourse it’s become its own genre of joke:

What the people who go online and tweet “normalize eating your lunch alone” are really asking for is to be left alone about it. This among other things is one desire behind expressions of gay pride. These days we pity the queer people who for some reason won’t treat their own existence as a normal, beautiful expression of human diversity. Obviously queer liberation is not solely a mental-emotional struggle, but rather a material one. Still the first and most important battle for every trans woman is the one in which she establishes that she exists, despite what she’s been and will be told for her entire life.

There are no ways of being that are intrinsically better than others, because value is not an intrinsic property of things. There are only ways of being that are more or less valuable/acceptable/useful to people. When you can fully live this truth, there is nothing short of violence that can stop you from being whatever ridiculous kind of freak you want to be. Might that have social costs? Sure! And you can respond to that however you’d like. Having a pragmatic relationship to how others see you is one thing. Castigating yourself for not being someone you’re not—that’s a prison of social fictions, and only you can get yourself out. Ultimately, self-hatred is delusional.

Again, human beings have social needs. We need other people in big and small ways for our entire lives. But I think we must able to distinguish being unwanted from being unwantable, because this confusion only harms us.

When I first transitioned, it was at the end of a long process of dodging my own feelings and indulging my worst fears. I knew my parents would stop speaking to me. I feared I’d never be loved and desired. I was certain nobody, especially my students, would take me seriously anymore. I was disgusted with myself, even if I didn’t feel that way about other trans women, whom I idolized. But in the end, I leaned on the people who had come before me, who had suffered all that and more. They were kind, happy, intelligent people with beautiful relationships. They were there with me as I made a new life for myself.

Still, I was a mess. My mother said to me some of the most hurtful things I’ve ever heard, and we didn’t speak for years. I didn’t go out much. I was afraid of harassment or violence and felt paranoid about the judgement of others. When I started to work in retail, I was exposed almost daily to the exact treatment I feared. People made shitty comments about me, both to me and to others. They ridiculed my name, my clothes, my ways of speaking and gesticulating. I was shouted at on the street. Strangers asked me invasive, insulting questions.

Yet strangely, I became more and more confident in my own way of being. A classic realization: if all those voices had been wrong about this for so long, how many other things had they been wrong about? I started to go out more and wear whatever I wanted. I stopped self-censoring as much. My friends went on loving me. My relationships were more fulfilling than they ever had been. I even began to take a perverse, oppositional pleasure in the abuse I received from others.

I became someone who was notable not for my reserve and avoidance but for my confidence, kindness, and candor.

I still hated things about myself. I fixated on my lack of accomplishment relative to my peers. I coveted the happiness I projected onto the lives of others and blamed myself for not having it. I no longer relied on the approval of others, but I was still blaming myself for my unhappinesses, for the fact that my life was not constantly overflowing with joys (even when, objectively, it was).

How could I not? Life is painful, mundane, and full of disappointments. In a great many ways, we are taught that if your life isn’t what you want it to be, you must be doing something wrong. You haven’t purchased the right things, accomplished the right goals, made the right friends, or dated the right people. Surely, we think, there must be some lasting happiness out there, if only I could find it, if only I wasn’t such a fuck up.

I humbly submit that even this kind of petty self-loathing is an extension of the maladaptive urge to blame ourselves for what happens to us—a misguided way of punishing yourself for the unhappiness and dissatisfaction at the core of being. That is, human life is characterized by want, dissatisfaction, and decay. We lose everything we obtain. We want only what we don’t have. We try vainly to make an indelible impact on the world, as though that could grant us happiness and peace in the present.¹ This suffering is not circumstantial, but inevitable.

Maybe that’s a hopeless thought to you, but it doesn’t have to be. One day, when our earth everything on it is just so much interstellar dust, you will always have been nothing more than an animal among animals, destined to die. For now, you exist, and existence is value neutral. It may take work, but you can decide for yourself the meaning, value, and purpose of your life. If mind-forg’d these manacles be, perchance you need only wiggle your little mind hands free.

Wishing you peace and insight on your journey <3

1. Once again, I’m grateful to the Zen Buddhist teachers and their students who have given me the language and framework for thinking about these things. In the Buddhist worldview, what I’m describing are known as the three marks of existence. The most relevant here is dukkha, or “standing unsteady.” Also translated as “suffering.”