Self-Hate: Can Someone Hate Themselves If They Were Abused As A Child?

If someone is in a position where they struggle to feel good about themselves, their life is likely to be far harder than it needs to be. For one thing, they are seldom going to experience positive feelings.

As a result of this, they are likely to spend a lot of time feeling low and they might not believe that they deserve to experience life differently. In fact, it might not even occur to them that there is another way for them to experience life.

The Norm

Therefore, how they experience life will just be how it is and there will be absolutely nothing that they can do about it. If they don’t feel low, it could be because they have been able to disconnect from how they feel.

But, before long, their change in mood is likely to come to an end, with them falling right back down once more. This can be a time when they feel worthless, bad and they could experience self-hate.

Totally Isolated

When they feel this way, they might do what they can to be by themselves and avoid others. While being supported by another during this time would serve them, this could be the last thing on their mind.

Reaching out might not ever cross their mind but if it does, this could be seen as too much of a risk. Based on how they feel, they could believe that reaching out and opening up about what is going on for them would cause them to be rejected and abandoned.

Trapped

If they felt this way when they were around another or others, they could still keep what is going on for them to themselves. During this time, they can hide how they feel and their need for support and understanding and create the impression that everything is fine.

Or, if this doesn’t take place, they might not be completely transparent about what is going on for them. Consequently, they will be free to express themselves, but it will be as if they are living in an invisible prison.

One Option

When they do fall right down and are loaded up with a pervading sense of badness and hate, they might believe that the only way that their life will change is if they end it. This will then be seen as being far better than reaching out and being ostracised and left to die.

Keeping how they feel at bay when they are around others and handling this pain when they are by themselves is going to take a lot out of them. So, to try to cope, they might often end up drinking, taking drugs and/or overeating.

A Helping Hand

Ultimately, they will engage in one or all of these things as well as others to make themselves feel better. By not having access to the love that is inside them, they will need to look towards external sources to soothe themselves.

What will also play a part is that they don’t feel comfortable reaching out to people, so these options will fill in the gap, so to speak. If, for example, they do reach out to others, this could mean that they will have casual encounters and this still won’t be a time when they actually open up.

A Miserable Existence

What is clear is that the sooner they are able to reach out for support, the sooner they will be able to put an end to the hell that they are living in. The trouble is that due to how they feel about themselves, they won’t feel worthy of experiencing life differently.

However, there might be a small part of them that doesn’t believe that they are worthless and that there is another way for them to experience life. This part of them can then allow them to co-create an experience that will allow them to change their life.

A Step Forward

If there is and they do have an experience that allows them to see life differently, they could end up wondering why they are this way. They might see that they have more or less always felt bad, not liked themselves and had the need to hide who they are.

What this can show is that their early years were not very nurturing but, as their brain has blocked out what took place to protect them, they are unable to join the dots, so to speak. This may have been a stage of their life when they were abused and/or neglected.

A Brutal Time
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Thanks to this, they would have been deprived of the nutrients that they needed to grow and develop in the right way. How they were treated was a reflection of how wounded one or both of their parents were but, as they were egocentric, they would have personalised what took place.

It was then not that one or both of these people were deeply damaged; no, it was that there was something inherently wrong with them. The hate and disdain that was around them would have been internalised as would their abusive parent or parents.

A Natural Outcome

As they were deprived of what they needed, they won’t have developed a felt sense of safety, security, worth, deserving or love. Instead, they will have developed a felt sense of vulnerability, insecurity worthlessness, undeserving and being unlovable.

The pain that they experienced throughout their developmental years will have been automatically repressed and it will now be held in their brain and body. For them to transform their life, they will probably need to work through this pain, and this will take courage and patience and persistence.

Awareness

If someone can relate to this and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.