Healing My Self-Hatred-The Journey To Being More Present And Alive

I’m in the thick of healing at the moment, presenting as adrenal fatigue but I’m working through the layers as to how I got to this state. It’s not all about being in an earthquake zone.

I’m also doing Rose Rosetree’s 30 day empath empowerment plan and I’m on day 4 and today I had a huge realisation. The exercise was about closing your eyes for a minute and just being aware where your consciousness is and bringing it back to being about yourself. Noticing yourself.

Well I’m aware of myself but usually in relation to other people or places or things or what I was feeling that usually was in overflow.

When I left my consciousness on myself SO much self hatred came to the surface. I sat with it and let it be there and not try to make it go away or avoid it by doing something or shifting my focus outside of myself.

What came to light then was that the feelings I have about myself were very much based on being a person in this world, a world which is all about image and beauty and here I was: scarred and flawed and damaged goods.

When I was 18 months old I was in hospital for nappy rash and it had turned into ulcers. I was probably lactose intolerant but in 1962 they probably didn’t know about those things. I was in quarantine because they didn’t know what it was.

When I was 8 I was hospitalised so they could cut skin off and have the affected areas not appear so burnt looking, well of course then it left a scar which I think looked worse than before. The trauma of being in hospital in the 60s and the way they treated kids in those days was long lingering. Not a lot of support.

I was then hospitalised at 10 to do a patch up job where a lump had formed.

You can imagine my childhood feeling scarred and feeling like nobody would like me. As if there was something wrong with me. Kids can be cruel when someone looks different. Not that it was obvious but I had already identified with being different really early on. I remember a girl in my class having a cleft palette and saw how cruelly she was treated, I felt I was lucky that I could hide my scars. But it was always something I was scared of people finding out.

I worked out so easily how to hide my upper legs but I was always having to encounter situations that made me turn myself into a pretzel. Like swimming at school and having to wear rompers at PE.

I recall being in kindergarten and wetting my pants on the mat everyday because I was too scared to line up and go to the open doored toilets. I must have already worked out at age 4 that something was wrong with me.

Of course as an adult I have no issues doing swimming and you can barely see the scars but all that damage and avoidance and beliefs about myself had already been cemented, especially through my teen years.

My best friend did modelling and I wanted to as well. Or I wanted to act. But that wasn’t going to be for me.

Bottom line core belief that I think has gotten in the way of healing myself in my current situation and affected my self esteem and so many areas of my life is “Whats the point of doing anything to my body/making my body better/ being well/ being in a body when I’m just damaged and I can never have the choices that everyone else has anyway.”

I had many hiding places so my consciousness could avoid myself. Many excuses, like oh that’s the past, my legs aren’t important now, but that teen is very much alive inside me and still using her old coping mechanisms.

I never made peace because I never wanted to go to the self hatred, I blamed, ate, disassociated, settled for less, got sick, got depressed, anxious, fearful , spiritualised, fantasised, intellectualised and minimised how important having a body was.

I think you have some sort of survival mode that you go into when you get close to your self hatred, afterall it feels like you may as well die because you are so not worth being here.

I think a lot of people feel the self hatred but act it out in various ways as to not feel it fully and move through it.

The idea is to move through it, not stay in it. That happens organically by just feeling the feelings. I could never turn around that the worlds standards are wrong instead of thinking I was wrong and knowing I wasn’t going to be able to fit in.

In what ways are you not facing your self hatred?