
If you were alive before the rise in social media / internet usage, you may have come across critical and shame-driven teachers or education systems that made you feel worthless or inferior if you didn’t meet their standards of success.Īny experience or environment that reinforced the false idea that there’s something wrong with you, deepened the amount of self-loathing you held. Other than the typical cases of bullying we see in schools, our childhood social environment (outside of the house) may have reinforced our self-loathing even more through the harmful effects of social media conditioning and the obsessive toxic comparison with others. And you don’t have to look very deep into society before you come across some real nasty shit.


Poor social environmentīuilding on top of a poor family environment is a poor social environment. Convinced that the fault lies in some intrinsic flaw, to which we are blind and helpless, we abandon ourselves. Unlovable, we are no longer in touch with our divinity, our specialness, our validity as human beings. Abuse makes us feel unlovable, and feeling defective only adds to our shame. Since we usually identify with our caretakers and their values, the way they treat us teaches us about our value as human beings. The love a child has for his or her parents ensures that their conscious or unconscious acts of mental cruelty will go undetected.Īuthor and therapist Anodea Judith goes on to explain: We took the blame for something they did wrong.Īnd thus, we have one major cause of self-loathing: it’s based on the misguided core belief that we adopted as children that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us.Īs psychoanalyst and philosopher Alice Miller writes: We felt that we were wrong, bad, and shameful for the way our parents/family members treated us. We felt there was something wrong with us. Therefore, instead of critically analyzing and condemning our parents (which young children don’t have the cognitive capacity to do), we turned the blame onto ourselves. To us, they needed to be right, to be safe, to be infallible because if we mistrusted them it would have been very hard for us to survive (emotionally, mentally, and in some cases physically). You see, as young children, we needed to see our parents in an almost godlike way. Why else would our parents or family members behave in that way? Why else would they harm us? Mommy and daddy are meant to love us, right?


When we’re raised in a family that is either (a) too smothering and possessive or (b) too neglectful and dismissive of us – or in some cases both combined – we internalize the idea that there’s something defective or wrong with us. There are three main reasons at the root of hating yourself:įirstly there is the poor family environment. In order to overcome your self-loathing, you need to understand why it happens and where it came from. And it’s more complex than it looks on the surface. Hating Yourself: 3 Reasons Why it Happens In most cases, self-loathing is the result of having a dysfunctional upbringing. It’s fuelled by anger, low self-esteem, and a distorted perception of oneself due to misguided thoughts and self-beliefs. Self-loathing is synonymous with self-hatred: it’s an extreme dislike of oneself.
