Hating yourself hurts. Unfortunately, it’s become quite normal these days for people to secretly hate themselves.
You think if you could just figure out why you hate yourself in the first place, you could be free of it. And you can. It just doesn’t happen all at once.
Learning to love yourself, slowly
People do a lot of crazy things, in hopes that they will learn to love themselves. Some people go on fancy vacations or put themselves in exciting new adventures.
Others decide to go the clinical route with therapy and psychiatrists. Still others try new hobbies.
The fact is, there’s no one path that will lead you to self-love. Learning to love yourself (or even to stop hating yourself) is a process. It’s a series of lessons and decisions that jump off of each other until one day you realize that you’re mostly free.
That being said, it might help you to understand why you hate yourself. So here are a couple of different reasons as to why you might hate yourself right now. Maybe you only have one, maybe you have a mix of these that made a twisted web. Let’s see which ones apply.
You don’t know who you are
Not knowing yourself is the first reason people hate themselves. It is very common in puberty, think back to all the vicious bullies in high school and understand that they hated themselves much more than they seemed to hate you.
There is a long road to knowing yourself, or rather, a long road back to knowing yourself.
It’s said that when we are born, we know who we are. Children interact from this place, and are continually conditioned by society to behave a certain way or to present as a specific kind of person. We condition each other so much so that we, at some point, stop knowing who we are. We forget.
If we don’t know ourselves, how are we to love ourselves? For most of us, our initial response to the unknown is fear and hatred. The same goes for ourselves. So if you find that you don’t know yourself as well as you could, get started on it. I promise it will lead you further down on the road to self-love.
You focus too much on others’ opinions
Others’ opinions, oh boy. I think we’ve all heard from time to time how painful that focus can be. It leads us to hating ourselves, and as we begin to hate ourselves, we tend to do it more.
But why are we so susceptible to this? Well, first of all, most of us are trained from a very young age to behave, to be obedient and not cause trouble. We are used to having people tell us what to do at every turn and when they don’t, we seek out opinions from others. In fact, I think in some ways, what makes a “good kid” can also be what makes for a struggling adult.
There is also a fear. We fear we won’t be loved or accepted if we just live our lives on our own terms. There is a truth behind this fear, as not everyone will support you in your dreams and goals.
But unsupportive people being around is not good enough value for the price you have to pay by not living on your own terms. Because they will be unsupportive of you no matter what. And then you’re stuck with negative companions and no achievements, wondering how you got there.
Other people’s opinions, when taken before your own, are poison. Or if you prefer, it’s like taking a vitamin on an empty stomach. Vitamins themselves are not bad, but you need something in you before you add them in.
You need your own opinions in you before you take someone else’s. Or else you won’t be who you want to be—who you should be. There isn’t a lot that’s worse than looking in the mirror and hating the person staring back at you.
Don’t agonize about how you got here, marvel at who you chose to become.
You don’t pursue your goals
You may not feel the difference between different sorts of self-hatred, but pure blowout self hatred can manifest a little differently than self-resentment.
If you continually fail to pursue the life you want, or to stand up for your own boundaries and feelings, you will begin to resent yourself as well as your life.
Now, how do we know if this is what we’re doing? You can catch it in your thoughts. If you hear yourself saying things like, “I’m so lazy”, “I’m not good enough” or anything like that, you may not be allowing yourself to go after your own needs and wants.
How can we change this pattern? It’s quite simple, though not easy. Instead of insulting ourselves and resigning to self-hatred, we must pursue our goals and demonstrate faith in ourselves. In other words, we have to act and prove ourselves wrong. Because guess what? There’s only one cure for laziness, and that is taking action and not being lazy anymore.
When we start to act on our goals, we see little progress that we are making, which in time lends itself to big transformation. And when we see astronomical transformation within ourselves, we stop the hate.
You haven’t learned how to take care of yourself
There’s something to be said about self-care and self soothing. If you neglect it, you’re only reinforcing to your subconscious that you don’t deserve it in the first place.
Many people are not taught how to care for themselves. They think, either consciously or subconsciously, that caring is something only others can do for you.
The problem with this perspective is that it is more or less just learned helplessness. If you’re in pain and can’t fix or manage it yourself, you will always be at someone else’s mercy.
You feel guilty
Maybe you hate yourself because you’ve done something wrong. Or maybe you’ve done a lot of bad things. Listen to me very carefully. YOUR PAST IS NOT A PRISON SENTENCE.
The first thing you need to do when you’ve done something you feel guilty about is try your best to make it right. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. If you can, then do it. You will feel better.
If you find your past is really eating away at you, check out my piece on being ashamed of yourself and your past. You can find it by clicking right here.
If you can’t make it right, it’s time to move on. You have to learn how to keep yourself in check. If you can’t make something right, and you wouldn’t do it that way again, then it’s not worth feeling guilty over.
It’s important, especially if you feel guilty, to devote yourself to becoming the kind of man or woman you think you ought to be. Even little steps toward your goal each day will help your perspective shift.
If you show yourself you are making progress toward what you want most in the world, you won’t need to prove to yourself or anyone else that you are a good person. You will see it. And if you see it, it won’t matter if anyone else sees it. You won’t feel the need to prove it to them.
How can I stop the hate?
As we touched on before, loving yourself is a journey. And a journey with different paths, at that. But there are different things you can do.
Ultimately, you want to learn how to become you, but the you that loves yourself. So it’s important to trust yourself. Ask yourself, “how would I react to this if I loved myself?” Trust your answer, and put it into action. The best way to start loving yourself is by practicing it. (If you want to learn more about the journey of self-love, check out this piece here, where I go more in depth about it.)
And remember, self love is not the opposite of self improvement. In fact, the lasting changes happen when you make self love the basis for your self-improvement.
It’s important to take responsibility for your life and begin to hold yourself accountable for who you are and your actions. If you find you are able to accept your mistakes while striving to do and be better in each little moment, then you are well on your way to true self love and lasting personal development.
