Self-hatred and low self-esteem: ‘The liberating day I realised I hated myself’

(approx five minute read)

X’s realisation that his anxiety was rooted in some form of self-hatred was difficult to take. But in time, the realisation has led to a calmer, more peaceful mind. Here X shares how the realisation occured.

Image by freepik

I was just about to turn 37. So it had taken a while.

But it’s a day I certainly look back on as a positive one, even if hating yourself doesn’t feel like a nice thing.

Reflecting on those 37 years, I’d always felt like I’d had a positive sense of self. Doing well at work, good friends, lovely family. 

I’d had periods of time in my life where pretty intense anxiety had taken hold. But I’d always rationalised the anxiety being down to a certain moment or ‘thing’ going on at the time.

It was actually during a period of anxiety in lockdown where I was reading a book called Anxiety by The School Of Life to try and make some sense of it all. I was trying to understand where my inner critic had come from, why anxiety had been a fixture in my life over the years.

A particular line in the book struck me. It suggested that the route of anxiety was self-hatred. 

‘No’, I thought, not me, my anxiety isn’t down to that, I like myself. I thought about that line for days after, suddenly questioning for the first time in my life if I had low self-esteem, if I hated myself.

Fast-forward another year or so and the anxiety was back. I decided I wanted to look at more practical ways to try and manage it, so I signed up to a two-month mindfulness course. 

A couple of weeks in and we get onto the session about noticing your thoughts. The process of seeing a thought, acknowledging it and ideally letting it go. Nice in theory I thought, in practice, not so.

Initially, what happened was rather than noticing my thoughts and then being able to let them go, I started noticing all the negative thoughts I was having about myself. 

At that period of time in my life I was being particularly unkind to myself. Not outwardly, you wouldn’t notice, but in-between my ears.

‘You’re not very good at this’, ‘you screwed up at work’, ‘you’re not coping very well with life’, ‘what’s wrong with you’, ‘why are you so fucked up’. It was constant, very little respite throughout the day. 

.Image by freepik

At times I felt like I was running into a gale force wind of negative thoughts.

Suddenly, proactively being more aware of my thoughts felt very uncomfortable. I really was being very unkind to myself. If I’d heard someone talking to a friend like that there’s no question I would have called that person out for bullying. 

Naturally, I found this very difficult to manage and for a few weeks I felt very down and anxious. Clearly, on some level I did / do hate myself, which after 37 years of not thinking that was quite hard to acknowledge. 

The mindfulness course continued and week after week, listening to others talk, I realised I wasn’t the only one. In fact, out of the 30 or so people on the course, everyone at some stage was demonstrating unkindness to themselves.

‘Perhaps everyone hates themselves on some level’, I thought. Not all day every day, but at points.

When I started to accept that I wasn’t alone, and actually it seemed fairly normal, the mood lifted that bit more. As the negative thoughts came I started to be able to see them, say hi – and wave them goodbye.

The whole thing became rather liberating, realising that there was some self-hatred there, and I was able to start to accept that, made my mind more peaceful. The realisation was a positive one.

I’ve no doubt that in the weeks, months and years ahead that I’ll have periods where I talk to myself like I’m a piece of shit. But hopefully I can cling onto the fact that most of us, if not all, probably feel a sense of self-hatred at times - even if most of us probably won’t admit it to ourselves or even be aware that’s what it is.