“Self Hate” is a Garbage Concept.
By: Thomas P Seager
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Self Love, Leadership, The Body Keeps The Score

Yoga is a fantastic alternative to beating your self up. Quit hating on yourself for not doing enough of it. (Photo by kike vega on Unsplash).

“Self Hate” is a Garbage Concept.

Love the child. Challenge the adult.

There’s so much self help advice along the lines of “self-love” these days, it’s practically an epidemic of emotion — particularly among the yoga-loving, post-modern hippie women of Instagram, where there are over fifteen million posts tagged “#selflove.”

Now, I love yoga more than most men. I practice regularly. I’m in touch with my feminine side. So I’ve been giving considerable thought to this idea of “self love,” researching it for over a year and talking it through with my therapist.

What a bunch of crap “self love” is.

The problem with the idea of “self love” is that whenever you experience a negative emotion, it leads you to the conclusion that you have failed at self love, and must therefore be practicing “self hate.” The obvious remedy is to stop the self hate process and get back to the process of self love, whatever that is.

Typically, it means more yoga. Which is great, but isn’t enough for me.

You see, I don’t just practice yoga. I also do a ballet workout, a little barbell work and occasionally mix in some martial arts. I do ice baths at least once a week. And I practice intermittent fasting.

Every single one of these practices is hard and some of them are painful and you know what gets me through the hardest parts?

It’s not self love.

What gets me through is telling myself what a worthless piece of shit I am. That if i can’t bust out just one more pushup, I’m not worthy of the beautiful woman of my dreams. That my pain is irrelevant, because I’m useless.

In fact, what gets me outside of comfort and into my growth zone sounds an awful lot like really negative self talk of the very type that those people preaching self love say that I should avoid.

So what is it with all this self love/self hate crapola?

Then I figured it out.

I don’t need self love. I don’t need your love. I don’t need you to “be kind” to me or for you to wish me a nice day.

I’m a grown man. I’m educated. I’m tenured. I live in America and I love my job. And I’m sort of Ok with myself? I’m happy, even if I’m not satisfied.

To paraphrase Louis CK, I’m beyond the point where you can even hurt my feelings.

And if I don’t need this self love/be kind bullshit… then who does?

I’ll tell you who… it’s the memory of the little child, the 8 year-old version of me that I still carry around inside. The one that is convinced he’s a fuck up and that he always will be. The one that couldn’t figure out how to get his needs met, and was pretty sure that was his fault. Because he doesn’t belong and he never did.

That kid in my memory needs my kindness. He needs my love.

“Self hate” is a garbage idea. We don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over because we hate ourselves. We do it because that’s the way we learned to cope when we were little. When we were facing what seemed like impossible and traumatic situations, our clever and resourceful brains figured out ways to survive.

Although we probably didn’t think of it that way at the time, these survival mechanisms would be called solutions. Yet, there’s a whole chapter in the 2017 book The Body Keeps The Score called “When the solution becomes the problem.”

What happens is that unconscious parts of ourselves remembers what solved our problem when we were little, and we keep reenacting those solutions with the expectation that they will work for us now as they did then. Except they don’t, because we’re not kids anymore.

We don’t “hate” ourselves. We just haven’t discarded that part of our identity that formed when we were clever, resourceful, stressed out little kids.