E177 | Why You Must Deal With Self-Hate

In this episode, Alex explores self-esteem, self-hate and self-criticism, not just as emotional issues, but as forces that can shape the quality of a person’s life.

He discusses how poor self-esteem can affect relationships, work, ambition, risk-taking and the ability to build a life that feels authentic. Alex also examines how people can develop a defensive “neurotic self” in response to fear, shame, anxiety or the stresses of life. 

Finally, he looks at what healthier self-esteem might involve: a balanced relationship with yourself built on both compassion and challenge.

Presented by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

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The question isn't, you know, what aspects of life does self-esteem affect, but what aspects of life doesn't self-esteem affect? It affects everything. Because if you have problems with self-esteem and self-hate, you're not going to make decisions in your best interest. The less you invest in your real self, the more that withers away. The more you invest in this persona, or what you could also call this more neurotic self, or this shield, this vehicle you use to ride around through life, the stronger that becomes. We're gonna discuss how to think about healthy self-esteem in a balanced way and how you can move towards that practical steps you can make towards more healthy self-esteem. Today we're gonna be talking about self-loathing, self-hate, self-criticism, and self-esteem. I'm gonna be making the argument that these things are very, very important to understand, not because they impact whether you feel good or whether you feel bad. You know, that's often how these things are talked about on the internet. I want to feel good about myself, not bad about myself. Yes, that is a part of it. But also, these things can really impact the material quality of our life. Self-hate, if you have poor self-esteem, can impact your work situation, your relationships, the kind of life you have, very much the material quality of your life. I think often these concepts are misunderstood, and you can tell that when you look in the self-help section of a bookstore, you can see how to some degree these concepts have been caricatured or made into certain extremes in quite a polarizing way and not always discussed in a very helpful way. Today we're gonna unpack these concepts a little bit, talk about the positive feedback loop that develops as self-hate becomes more intense. It can develop into a self-fulfilling cycle that gets worse and worse with time and with age. We're gonna talk about the more and less obvious ways that problems with self-esteem manifests, and we're gonna talk about red flags that might suggest someone has problems with their self-esteem. We're gonna discuss how to think about healthy self-esteem in a balanced way and how you can move towards that, practical steps you can make towards more healthy self-esteem. So, firstly, why do people have problems with self-criticism and self-hate? It's quite an odd thing if you think about it. We're complex biological creatures, we have instincts towards self-preservation and towards hopefully making our lives better and more successful. There's like a biological imperative that you could say, why, in fact, is it so common to have problems with self-criticism and self-hate? I think the truth is we're actually quite complex creatures, aren't we, human beings? There's many different facets to ourselves. One thing that's quite common is to discover, to share, you know, with other people what's true to you and what you care about is actually quite exposing. It's quite a vulnerable thing. Children do it naturally, so children will often be very, very freely expressive, they'll have no problems, free associating, they're happy to talk about what they like and what they don't like pretty endlessly. But children have to go through this process of becoming civilized by their parents. So this is something Freud talked about. One of the great pressures of life is you start off kind of innocent, not particularly trying to fit in, and then you encounter all these civilizing forces like your parents first and foremost, or primary caregivers, school, work. And it's important that this happens so that people can learn how to get along in a society, but it's also quite a soul-sucking process in some sense, the bit crushing the first time a child is in a classroom and realizes if they say whatever's on their mind, it can be quite exposing. They may get criticized or they may get made fun of for that. Again, part of that is useful in that it helps people figure out how to get along with other people. Part of that is not useful in that it can dull creative thinking, it can dull authentic self-expression. When people are in very, very harsh environments, so abusive parenting, and there's all sorts of ways parenting can be abusive, difficulties with school, bullying, harsh teachers that are unnecessarily critical. This what you call civilizing process gets too far. Young people feel too stressed out by it, it causes too much anxiety that there's something wrong with them inherently, and that that's crucial to self-esteem, that there's something wrong with them inherently, that they're not safe to make mistakes, that they're not safe to express themselves, that they're not safe to try things out. And so we have to develop other facets of ourselves that are less authentic. We have to find these vehicles to carry us through the world, or what Carlion called a persona. We develop a persona like a suit of armor that helps us go through the world, negotiate with other people, solve problems, it can help us form relationships, it can help us get an education, it can help us get tasks done, but often that persona is not who we really are. We may pretend to like people that we don't like, we may pretend to care about things we actually don't care about in order to get along, to please others and to feel that we have like a sense of belonging. A lot of kids at school they don't care about self-expression, they care about being popular, they care about being accepted, about being highly regarded, about being one of the tribe. So in young life, this is where this process often starts. Now it doesn't end there. This is the kind of thing that gets worse with time. So what you find with self-esteem and self-hate is this kind of a positive feedback loop that develops. So you encounter those initial life stresses, you feel you're not safe to express yourself, you're not safe to be who you are, again, to make mistakes, to experiment, to try things out. And so you slowly, slowly start to become a different self, develop that persona. And this gets much worse with time because these things are dynamic. It's not like you have a static real self and a static persona, but actually, these are dynamic processes. The more you engage with who you are really under the surface, the more that grows and cultivates and become can become vibrant. So, for example, if you really love music, the more you invest in that real facet of yourself, the more you learn how to play an instrument or just listen to tons of music or talk about music, you develop and cultivate that facet of yourself. But if you don't, the reverse happens, it tends to wither away, it becomes less prominent. If you don't love music, but you feel like loving music is the right thing to do to become popular in your school, you will be investing in that, and yes, you will cultivate it much in the same way. But the problem is it's incongruent with who you are, it's not real. So as the years go on, the less you invest in your real self, the more that withers away, the more you invest in this persona, or what you could also call this more neurotic self, or the shield, this vehicle you use to ride around through life, the stronger that becomes. And the more that happens, of course, the more the neurotic self or the persona is tempting to occupy because it's there, it's developed, it's cultivated. And so the process continues. And this is how you know milder problems with self-esteem can become, you know, quite harsh self-criticism, can become more profound disconnection with self, and then ultimately quite severe self-hate, up until a person might be in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and they've really lived a whole life that they don't like, a whole life that they don't identify with, and they haven't taken the time to cultivate a life that feels more meaningful, that feels more congruent with who they are. So it's important to understand there's this positive feedback loop which develops. Now, what does low self-esteem tend to look like with people? What does self-hate tend to look like? There's some ways which are more obvious and some ways which are less obvious. I find it helpful to divide this neurotic self into roughly three categories, and this is something I learned by reading Neurosis and Human Growth by Karen Horneye, one of my favorite psychology books of all time. And she would posit that when people become more neurotic, so to speak, it tends to happen in three directions, typically, maybe different ones at the same time, but overall, three directions this can take. Firstly, people can become more aggressive, more narcissistic, more vindictive. They can position themselves more as an aggressor, being angry at the world, positioning yourself as better than the world or better than other people, other people being below you in some way. The second way is you can become more submissive. You can become people-pleasing, dependent, overly needing other people and overly relying on other people because you feel it's very difficult to rely on yourself. I think this is the most obvious way that uh self-esteem manifests. I think when we see people who are a bit people-pleasing, who tend to put others before themselves, that's really the most obvious sign that someone has an issue with self-esteem. And then the third way, which I think is the least obvious way, is that people retreat from the world. They hide away, they don't want to engage with life. They feel that actually the risks of engaging with life meaningfully, making yourself vulnerable, trying things out, whether that's in a career or in a relationship, is just too much of a risk to take. So better to not engage with the game completely. These are people who might never leave their hometown even though they really want to, people who might never get married, even though they would like the closeness of a relationship. These are people who might fall into the trap of being cynical about the world, who might be cynical about other people taking risks. So we've got these three groups: people who are more aggressive, vindictive, narcissistic, people who are more dependent, submissive, people pleasing, and people who are more regressive, hiding away, reticent, not really engaging with life. What are some quick red flags that might not, you know, definitely confirm someone has self-esteem problems, but might give you the impression that maybe there are some problems with self-esteem or self-hate. They have difficulty handling failure. Uh conversely, they also have difficulty handling success or taking a compliment seems very uncomfortable. They are unwilling to take risks, they are unwilling or find it very difficult to handle criticism, they find it difficult to form and maintain relationships with other people, they have difficulty saying something that's a bit uh vulnerable or a bit exposing. Often, especially if they're in that aggressive group I talked about, they might often have a lot of negative judgments about other people, they might divide the world into winners and losers, they might have a negative worldview overall. I think important to mention, you know, if you're getting the impression that someone has problems with their self-esteem, whether they're in the aggressive group, the submissive group, or the avoidant group, compassion is the right stance generally. We want to be compassionate to people, even if their coping strategies can come across as a bit hostile. It's usually the case that people develop for a reason, and yes, at some point it's important to take responsibility for those problems and to take it into your own hands, which I'll talk about towards the end of the video. But I do think overall, the right stance when you get the impression someone might be having problems like this is compassion, obviously, also taking care to protect yourself because sometimes, especially with people in the more aggressive group, they can take advantage, but generally you want to be compassionate towards people like this. Now, how do these problems impact life? I think, especially at the more severe end, self-esteem and self-hate impact pretty much every aspect of your life, as you can imply from the things we've already talked about so far. At the more superficial end, they're gonna impact the decisions you make day to day. Because if you have problems with self-esteem and self-hate, you're not going to make decisions in your best interest. If you, for example, have health problems like you need to exercise or look after your nutrition, that'll be more difficult because you don't feel like at core you're on your side when it comes to choosing a career or a job. You might not choose a career or a job based on your actual interests or what's congruent with who you are, but rather you might choose it on what might impress somebody else, or what might protect you from risk, or protect you from vulnerability, or protect you, or what you think will protect you from the judgment of others. It might also affect who you date. You might settle for a relationship which doesn't necessarily meet your needs well, but because you lack self-esteem, you might be unwilling to take the risks that a more satisfying relationship requires, and really satisfying relationships do require risks and risk taking. You might have trouble doing things which require delayed gratification in order to take care of yourself in the future, like you might have trouble saving and investing money properly because on some level, on some deep, perhaps unconscious level, you don't feel you're worth it. You might have trouble in your friendships because you have difficulty exposing who you really are to your friends, and even though you might spend a lot of time with people, you might feel very isolated and lonely as a result. So the question isn't, you know, what aspects of life does self-esteem affect, but what aspects of life doesn't self-esteem affect? It affects everything. And the more severe it is, just like any kind of medical condition, the more severe asthma you have, the more asthma kind of defines your life. The more severe problems you have with self-esteem and self-hatred, the more that can come to define your life if it goes too far. And many, many people you know suffer with these problems, and by the time they get older, 50s, 60s, 70s, it can be very, very crippling and disabling psychologically. Now, what is healthy self-esteem? And importantly, what is not healthy self-esteem? Again, there's a lot of controversy about this. If you look at this at the self-help section of the bookstore, what you'll find is there are a lot of self-help books that hate the concept of self-esteem. They feel it's too soft, or people with who focus on self-esteem don't challenge themselves enough, don't push themselves enough, and actually they think they would benefit from more self-criticism. There's a grain of truth in that. You also have the other extreme, people are all about self-compassion, everything you can do to feel good right now, and and safety is a priority, and challenge is not, and there's a grain of truth in that as well. What I've landed on is that healthy self-esteem, what it looks like is a positive self-regard, a healthy relationship with yourself. And just like a healthy relationship with someone else, what that tends to look like is a mixture of compassion and challenge. We're compassionate towards the people in our life, but we also want to challenge them because we know that friction helps them do better. We want to have the same orientation towards ourselves. We want to be, I think at the basic level, nice to ourselves and compassionate towards ourselves and to be on our own side, especially in a more individualistic culture in the West. I think it's actually quite important to have this healthy relationship with self. But also we need to challenge ourselves and we need to understand that friction is important, friction helps us grow. So I think a healthy self-esteem and a healthy relationship with self, what that tends to look like is the same kind of orientation you'd have as a healthy parent towards their child or a coach or a teacher. Yes, a foundation of set of niceness and safety. And I think it's good to like yourself at a basic level and to and to feel like you have a place in the world and that you deserve good things. And then on top of that, what do you need? What is the friction you need to encounter? How do you get out of your comfort zone in order to get the life that you want? So I think this is what a healthy relationship with self looks like. I think what you'll find with people who tend to have good self-esteem is obviously all the opposite to what I talked about earlier when I talked about problems with self-hate. So people with healthy self-esteem, they will be okay at taking a compliment. They can take a compliment, they can take a reward. Uh, they can also handle failure, they can handle some judgment, they can handle some criticism, it doesn't dismantle who they are to get some negative feedback. They're willing to try things and experiment in the career world, they can try something new, they can try a new project without feeling it has to be the be-all and end all. People with healthy self-esteem can recognize that failure is just part of the route to success. Generally, people with healthy self-esteem will have uh more stable relationships, friendships, romantic relationships. They can tolerate conflict a bit better. Conflict doesn't have to disrupt or destroy a relationship, but conflict can be uh a reasonable means to actually get what you want out of a relationship. And people with a better sense of self-esteem can take emotional risks, they can open up to friends and people in their life, and they can live a life more on their own terms, you know, maybe not completely on their own terms, because who lives a life completely on their own terms? But they can choose a job and a place to live and a romantic partner, maybe cultivate some hobbies and interests. They love music, so they listen to music in their spare time, maybe they play an instrument, maybe they work in a field that's related to music, like sound engineering or something like that. They can build a life that's roughly aligned with who they are on the inside. And I think the more self-esteem you have, the easier it is to take those risks to live a life that's more in keeping with who you are on the inside. I think that's one of the most important features. Now that we understand what healthy self-esteem tends to look like, how do you get there? I'm sure a lot of people watching this video are watching either because they themselves or perhaps clients that they work with have problems with self-esteem. Maybe they do have some of those red flags or some of those deeper signs I talked about earlier. How do you get there? I think you kind of reach there's lots of different tools, you know, there's different people you can work with, therapists, coaches, even just a good friend or someone in your personal life, apps or pieces of software that can help. But irrelevant of what specific tool you're using, I think there's two principles that you should think about when it comes to developing a healthier relationship with yourself and more self-esteem. Principle one is introspection. You need to find out who you are. If this is a problem you've suffered with for some time, it may not be obvious to you who you are and what kind of things you really care about and what kind of things you really value. It can be helpful to even think back to when you were a child, perhaps before you encountered some of life's most harsh stresses. What kind of things did you gravitate towards when you were five or ten years old? What did you want to be when you grow up? That kind of thing. And even if you have trouble remembering that, it's important to introspect now. Like, what do you find yourself naturally gravitating towards? What do you admire? What are the kind of things you want to bring into your life? If you could live your perfect day, what does your perfect day look like? What does your perfect Monday look like? What kind of work do you find yourself fascinated by quite naturally? What kind of work would you find yourself happy to do for free? What kind of people do you like to be around? Who do you like to socialize with? What kind of relationships do you want? How do you want to spend your spare time? And it's important to take a lot of time to introspect. And then so that's principle one, introspection, and then principle two is action. So it's not just about uh sitting in a room by yourself and thinking about what kind of life you want, then you still have to start to live it. And I think with both of these things, introspection and action, it's about taking small steps consistently, it's not about radically changing your life in a week, it's what introspection can I do this week, and then how can I put that introspection into action? So you may love music, but you've never really cultivated that love of music. You may figure out through thinking about it, maybe doing some journaling or talking about it in a therapy session. You might think, actually, I really love music, but I've never been able to cultivate that. And then how do you put that into action? Simple examples. You may start listening to music more in your spare time. You may start to look at research certain artists, find certain albums that you like. You might go shopping at a record store, you might pick up a musical instrument, you might try that out for a few times, you might start to take lessons. Again, all of these things are experiments, and maybe it'll work, and maybe you might find that when you do this stuff, you're already feeling like, wow, I feel really engaged with this. And it's important to cultivate that sense of alignment. When you find yourself doing something that's congruent with who you are, it's you're gonna feel it in your body. And it's really important to look out for that feeling, that feeling of this is where I'm supposed to be. I'm doing something that I feel truly engaged with. I think one of the dangers of living our lives online, which happens a lot now, is we don't we we often miss that feeling because we're not doing enough things in the real world with our time. So we're gonna be introspecting, we're gonna be experimenting and acting on those introspections, and we're gonna be looking out for that feeling of fascination and engagement. Crucial to keep in mind, it's all just an experiment, nothing in particular has to work out. But the more you go through this process, the higher the likelihood that you're going to find out what moves you and what kind of life you want to live, again, in terms of work, hobbies, relationships, etc. But also the higher likelihood that you're actually gonna cultivate these things and bring them into action, take them out of your head and bring them into reality. Now, as I mentioned earlier, lots of tools that can help you get there. You might work with a therapist, you might work with a coach, you might just buy a simple psychology workbook online that helps you work through these things, but overall you're gonna be acting on those two principles: introspection and action or experimentation. I want to emphasize again, this is a slow process. This isn't something it's easy to say, it's easy for me to talk about on a 15-minute YouTube video. You want to give yourself months to years of doing this, and what you'll find is firstly, it will feel good on the way. It's not like if you're into music, you need to become an orchestral musician to feel good. The nice thing about finding out what kind of things you're truly congruent with is you will feel good at every step. You'll feel good at your first music lesson, you'll feel good all along the way. There will be discomfort as well, I should say. There'll be discomfort and making yourself more vulnerable can make you feel anxious. But pushing through that anxiety and actually persisting will make you feel good and make you feel aligned. It's not like you have to be really accomplished in what you're doing. A sign that you're doing something that your neurotic self wants is that you're just relying on the accomplishment and the achievement and the end result. Whereas a sign that you're doing something that you're more congruent with is that you're enjoying the different steps along the way. But definitely important to give yourself time. You will enjoy the different steps along the way. Um, the process of self-criticism and self-hate takes a long time to set in, but and it also takes a long time to unwind. And different tools you can use. So therapy is one, coaching, journaling, lots of different ways to try that out there. This is just a general introduction to self-esteem, and hopefully from this video you've gotten a sense of A, why self-esteem is not a luxury, B, self-hate is something to be taken very seriously. C, the different ways that self-hate can manifest, including the obvious and less obvious. And D, what does self-esteem actually look like and how can you start to move towards that? I hope you found this helpful. Aside from working as a psychiatrist, I also do work as a coach. So if you're interested in working with me on this kind of thing or something related, specific problems when it comes to work, relationships, other psychological difficulties, you can email me at alexcurumetherapy at gmail.com and just put coaching in the subject line. In the meantime, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.