07.16.09
Being Hated, Feeling Hated, Overcoming Self-Hatred
Posted in DID/MPD, Depression, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Family Members of Trauma Survivors, Self Injury, Therapy and Counseling, Trauma, sexual abuse, trauma therapist tagged Abuse, AbuseConsultants, AbuseConsultants.com, abused children, Abusive Parents, Boundaries, Burning, Compassion, cutting, DID/MPD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dysfunctional Family, emotional pain, Feeling special, Feeling Suicidal, Hate Crimes, Hated by Others, Hatred, Hatred of Self, Healthy Boundaries, I hate myself, Kathy Broady, Kindness, Loneliness, Neglected Children, Sadness, Self Harm, self hate, Self Injury, Self-hatred, Self-loathing, sexual abuse, Sexually Abused, Sexually Abused Children, Social Isolation, Suicidal Behaviors, Suicidal Thinking, Trauma Survivors, Trauma Therapy, Worthlessness at 4:45 pm by Kathy Broady
Practically every dissociative trauma survivor that I have ever spoke to has said to me at some point in time or another, that they have felt hated, truly hated. What’s worse, they didn’t feel hated by strangers — they felt hated by their loved ones. They felt hated by their mothers, their fathers, their siblings, their spouses, their children, their friends. They felt hatred from the very people they cared the most about.
What effect does feeling hated have on someone?
How does this experience change someone’s life?
It’s a natural human response to want to feel liked, loved, cherished, treasured. Children very much want to be the in the spotlight for their parents, the apples of their eyes. They each want to feel special, and to be treated like they are the most important person on earth. This is normal for children. It is part of a natural, normal, healthy development.
What happens if a child does not experience a positive sense of self in early childhood?
What happens if that child feels hated instead of loved?
What if the only time the child feels loved, accepted, appreciated, wanted is during times of sexual abuse?
What happens when abusive parents treat their children in such consistently abusive and neglectful ways that the children are left with feelings of self-hatred instead of self-love and self-acceptance?
What are some of the effects of being hated?
- Inherent sense of badness and worthlessness
- Long-term self-hatred and self-loathing
- Loneliness and Isolation
- Sadness, emotional pain, emotional scars
- Self-injury, self-destruction, and suicidal behaviors
Children that are treated with hatred internalize that hatred. Children find it difficult, if not impossible, to blame their parents for their hateful behavior. Instead, children will blame themselves. Children decide it must be their own badness, their own poor behaviors, and their own inadequacies that forced their parents to not love them.
With each violent assault, abusive parents spoke hatred to their children. Even if the words “I hate you” were never said, it was understood clearly enough by the children. In order for their loved ones to purposefully cause so much hurt and harm to them, their parents must have hated them. It is not hard for children to figure out that people causing physical injuries and emotional wounds are acting in hateful ways. Children will feel that hatred to the very core of their being.
Children tend to internalize that hatred as if they deserved it. They decide that they must be bad, they must be worthless, they must “need to be punished”, they must “need to be abused” because of their badness. Children cannot blame their parents — so they blame themselves.
The more the children are treated with hatred, the more the children hate themselves.
They may learn to hate the parents / abusers eventually, but their first response was learning to hate and despise themselves. And the self-hatred isn’t something they just grow out of or leave behind the way they might leave the actual abuse. Self-hatred can continue to affect them for all the years of their life. It is a fundamental part of self-injury behaviors. Without intense self-hatred, survivors would not be nearly so prone to cutting, burning, overdosing, or any other number of self-destructive and suicidal behaviors. It’s not uncommon for trauma survivors to carve or burn “I hate myself” messages into their body, sometimes scarring it for life. I dare say, most survivors that commit suicide were able to do so because of their incredibly deep sense of self-hatred and self-loathing.
People that truly hate themselves don’t want to live with themselves.
It’s equally difficult for people that hate themselves to be in long-term positive relationships. Trauma survivors often find it easier to love someone else more than themselves, but part of being in a positive loving relationship is comfortably accepting the reciprocal love-caring-compassion-support from others. People that inherently hate themselves find it very difficult to believe that they could be loved / lovable. This belief will ultimately (and repeatedly) be noticeable. It will cause problems in those relationships, and it will absolutely undermine the strength of those relationships.
The emotional pain connected to feeling hated digs very deep within the core of the person. It is hard to battle on an intellectual level, and it penetrates into the deepest layers of the person’s being. The emotional wounding caused from feeling hatred is one of the most difficult traumas to heal. Layer upon layer of years of blame, guilt, shame make the self-hatred feel locked into place. It’s just soooo hard to feel differently.
But part of healing from trauma involves healing from that self-hatred. Survivors may not be able to change the behaviors and actions of their perpetrator parents or any other abusers that have acted criminally towards them, but survivors can learn to separate themselves from such hateful people. It will take working with all the parts of the internal system, but then again, remember that healing for all the inside parts is important.
Learn to separate who did what, and what belongs to whom. The person that committed the hateful acts is the creator of the hate. That negativity belongs to them. Hateful people can project their own feelings of hate onto anyone around them. As survivors become old enough to think through the emotional process of their abuse, they can begin to build emotional protection around those kinds of hateful attacks.
Let the hate belong to the ones that sent it. Don’t take it in, don’t claim it as yours, and don’t let it apply to yourself. Picture a strong emotional, spiritual shield around you, and let that protect you from the barbs of the haters. Hold tight to your own feelings of kindness, compassion, caring, gentleness, and know that your own ability to love and to connect are coming from a different place than hatred. Recognize that your ability to genuinely care for your loved ones is proof in itself that you are not to be hated or considered worthless. Your ability to feel genuine kindness, gentleness, patience, and compassion prove that you are a good person, completely different and separate from the haters.
The haters will always be haters. Unless they work on their own deep-seated self-hatred, they will always project hatred onto others.
But you don’t have to accept yourself as a rightful target of their hatred. You don’t have to be one of them. You don’t have to shove hatred in the face of everyone else, and you don’t have to internalize it within yourself. You can be different from that. Let the hatred belong to the ones that it came from. Give it back to the abusers and let them own it for themselves. Don’t contain that for them. You don’t have to accept their hatred as yours when it came from them.
Spend your time in life doing things that you enjoy and let you genuinely feel better about yourself. Connect with the people and animals that you care about, and build bigger boundaries and stronger separations from the people that treat you with hatred. Give positive time and pleasant experiences to the people around you, and let your own behaviors define who you are.
Be a good person, and let the very fact that you are choosing good, positive behaviors define to you that you are not that hated person you once felt you were.
If you want to be a good person, you can be. You are not who your haters say that you are. Let their nasty ways belong to them. You can be someone very different from them.
You can be as good of a person as you want to be. No one else gets to define you — the final word on who you are belong to you, and only you.
__________
By:
Kathy Broady LCSW
missinginsight said,
July 16, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Kathy,
I feel this is an important and topical posts, but I also find it idealistic. Maybe it’s because I come from the viewpoint that I can not stop hating myself and causing self-injury.
I know I should be angry with my abusers and not myself, but I don’t hold any memory so I don’t know with what or him to be angry.
I once was pumped up and thought I felt angry and so I wrote a letter to one of my abusers. In the letter I stipulated I would no longer be his silent accompolice and I would create opportunities to tell the vicious things he did.
That’s all well and good, but so many years later, I’m deflated and still left with no clear memory.
So rah-rah-rah, let’s stop hating ourselves, blah, blah, blah. I’m down for the cause. I wish I could do that but there is something inside stopping me. It is a malignant cancer, consuming me and my life so that I am sentenced for the rest of my life to be angry because I don’t have the recall, intel, and memory needed to put the anger on the abusers rather than myself.
This is my reality.
Becca of Missing in Sight
haberlach said,
July 16, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Kathy,
How does this work if the person(s) who abused were outside the family. What if they didn’t know, or didn’t stop it, or the child was left to themself to deal with what happened? How have you seen the child carry hatred? i mean is it different if it isn’t someone you expect to care for you?
Thanks
Ivory said,
July 16, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Me, too. Same question as Haberlach. I was ignored and invisible and as a child, didn’t feel hated by my parents, just over looked. I feel hated by my mother now, because she treats me as if she hates me. Part of the reason is that she knows I was abused by a family friend – she and the rest of my family blame me.
I hate me, too, I have burns and scars to prove it. I have the loathing to prove it. I was never good enough. Why, if I understand this, and can spot it in my own behavior, does it not end?
andbenrow said,
July 17, 2009 at 5:42 am
My therapist often tells me of my strength/our strength as a system, and how my DID led me to survive when others would have fallen. I have come to hate this survival instinct. The self hatred is overwhelming. Hatred for who I am, inside and out, for things I have done or failed to do, for managing to survive or failing to die, for being the child who lived when so many others did not, all of these things and others too unspeakable to write, fuelling the vortex of hate inside my core that threatens to erupt and destroy the world with its intensity. My role is to endure the hate, to keep it contained, to protect the innocent. Carved into my stomach are the words not good enough, scars over 30 years old now and renewed on a frequent basis. I cannot give the hatred back to the haters. It is too dangerous, beyond my capacity to control and endure. I too feel it is like a cancer, hidden and malignant, slowly eating away the heart of my soul. Sorry, your blog covers so many subjects that I really connect with and today I just needed to vent. Please accept my appologiews and thank you for continuing to discuss issues that too many mental health professionals seem frightened to bring up.
mindparts said,
July 17, 2009 at 12:23 pm
This is an important topic, but I have to agree with some of the other comments in that it’s a bit idealistic. I don’t think I ever felt hated. I’ve done a fair bit of introspection over the years and I don’t think that. I know others who think like me too. So, I’m not sure it’s as clear as you think.
Your “solution” is kind of couched in finding ways to love inside. You do mention surrounding yourself with people who don’t hate you. But I think this is really the answer. We can only fix in ourselves after we model it outside ourselves.
Paul
davidrochester said,
July 17, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I also have the same question about abuse from people who weren’t family. In a way, it’s easier logically to accept that a child abused by family wasn’t a bad child, because it’s easier to see that the child was the obvious target for a parent’s hate. When a child is targeted by strangers, or by entire groups of people who aren’t family, it’s much harder to accept that the child didn’t attract or deserve it … obviously there must have been *something* about the child that attracted the abuse. It’s not completely random.
gobbies said,
July 18, 2009 at 10:47 am
I think a lot of our self-hatred comes from survivor guilt.
I don’t think I ever felt hated by my parents, but I didn’t feel loved either. I think maybe hate would have been easier to accept, but apathy? Like I was so bad they couldn’t even bother to care about how bad I was???
thelittlestsurvivor said,
July 18, 2009 at 4:55 pm
my mother hated me, and my father loved me…possibly a bit too much. they both abused me in different ways. i am constantly searching for and wanting people to love me. it is one of the main topics of my therapy, is that i want my therapist to love me, i don’t know why i want her to, i don’t know why she even would, but for some reason it’s really important to me that she does, and not that she just shows it, but she says it. i have to hear it. i don’t know why, and the thing is i don’t really love myself, i don’t really even like myself. I know i’m not a bad person, sometimes i’m so good and sweet i sicken myself. i am likable, lovable, people tell me. still i don’t believe it, find it hard..i don’t know..this is touchy…
juliewtf said,
July 18, 2009 at 7:32 pm
I figure it is what it is. I know that I am hated. Cant talk about it because then people feel the need to tell you otherwise or you look like you are digging for them to say something. It is just a fact of life, some people arent liked. Yes, it bothers me sometimes, once in a while I will wish it was otherwise, but its not. There is a reason for that hatred, it is not random.
So I let those little blinks of thoughts, the ones that hope for something else to exist, sit there for a minute. They will leave just as fast as they came.
Kathy Broady said,
July 20, 2009 at 10:37 am
Hi Becca -
Thanks for your comment.
I can understand how frustrating it must be for you if you can’t reach the memories of what happened. I don’t know why that information is blocked for you, but I can bet that block is a huge part of why its so very hard to get past the self-hatred. As you wrote — without having a clear memory of how you were hurt, and without knowing who hurt you, I do understand that the hatred is left to sit on you.
You’ve actually summed up the point of my post. When trauma survivors cannot get resolution and clarity for the way they were abused, the hatred is still left with them.
I hope that you can work very intensely on figuring out what that block is about. You have the right to know who hurt you, how they hurt you, and what they did to you. Internal system work will be the clue to that — there are people inside your system that know that stuff. The closer you can get to them, the more you can figure out what happened.
I wish you the best — I’m sorry you’re feeling so stuck (it’s sounds miserable!!!) — and please talk with your insiders. Let them know that its really really ok to tell….
Kathy