SELF-LOATHING IS NOT A GOOD CHANGE STRATEGY.
There is a popular cultural rhetoric that insists, “if you don’t hate it, you won’t change it.” It relies on the belief that hating something with enough intensity will somehow motivate us to fix it—whether that “thing” is a personality trait, your body, your job, or a relationship.
While the phrase “if you don’t hate it, you won’t change it” holds anecdotal truth for some, for the rest of us it leaves us paralytic, drowning in our own self-loathing and pity, and ultimately worse off. I have sat in deep ditches with people who hate the thing and themselves, and the hate leaves them feeling more stuck and powerless.
Self-loathing is described as a hostility and anger weaponised against oneself. It’s fuelled by a deep disgust and desire to reject or kill off the part of oneself that is loathed. It is consuming and often without discernment. It’s interesting because my experience and observation is that when you hate something it’s hard to even look at it, let alone be near to it or understand it. So how does one get close enough to ‘the hated thing’ to work on it under these conditions.
I wonder if we fall into the trap of thinking that if we hate something intensely enough, we can—through sheer magical thinking—force it to change, or that our disgust will somehow bully it into submission. Beyond the fact that this approach is deeply harmful, I seriously question its efficacy as a strategy for lasting change.
Reasons self-loathing is not an effective and sustainable change strategy:
The critical lens
When you operate from a place of self-loathing it is challenging to view things accurately. The lens through which you see the world and yourself is critical and judgmental. As a result, you are less likely to accurately see your strengths or progress. You are less likely to accurately assess what is working and needs adjustment, and more likely to engage in cognitive distortions such as all-or- nothing thinking, disqualifying the positive or magnification. Therefore, any attempt towards change can feel insufficient, leaving you feeling discouraged and ultimately less motivated and hopeless.
Self-blame
Where loathing exists, there is little room for understanding and empathy. Therefore, any imperfect attempt towards change will likely be met with blame and contempt. In the same way that blame shuts us down and creates defensiveness in relationships with others, it shuts us down in relationship with ourselves. Self-blame is not likely to inspire an energy of risk-taking and growth. It is more likely to feed feelings of inadequacy and contribute to a loss of motivation.
Rumination
Rumination is defined as repetitive, obsessional thinking—a state of being trapped in a web of negative thinking and feeling. Rumination causes significant distress, it impacts our sleep, mental health and general functioning. When we ruminate on the thing we hate, we are likely to find and create more reasons we deserve the loathing. As we spiral deeper and deeper we ‘confirm’’ an identity, making it harder to move from it.
Numbing and distraction
For all of that blaming, criticism and rumination there is understandably a need for reprieve from the self-loathing that fuels it. This is often sought through numbing and distraction strategies like hyper-productivity, substance use, binge eating etc. These numbing strategies offer immediate relief but tend to feed the self-loathing soon after and often sabotage efforts towards change.
Self-loathing is a breeding ground for shame, shame that places the badness inside of us. How do we move towards something better when we are the bad thing?
Self-loathing creates these ditches of – self-blame, judgment and numbing- that we continually fall into, ultimately sabotaging our momentum toward change. For these reasons, I maintain that hatred doesn’t inspire growth; instead, it simply manufactures evidence that we deserve our suffering, unhappiness, or complacency.
Soft Landings 