Key Moment: The Three Faces of Self-Hate

This is an excerpt from: E177 - Why You Must Deal With Self-Hate.

Low self-esteem doesn’t always look like insecurity. In this clip, Dr. Alex explains three patterns of low self-esteem and self-hate: becoming aggressive, becoming submissive, or becoming avoidant. Drawing on Karen Horney’s ideas in *Neurosis and Human Growth*, he explores how poor self-esteem can show up as narcissism, people-pleasing, dependency, cynicism, avoidance, difficulty with criticism, and trouble taking risks.

Low self-esteem is not just about feeling bad about yourself. It can shape what you tolerate, what you avoid, who you choose, and whether you feel able to act in your own best interests.

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

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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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. 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.