Why Self-Hate Can Feel Safer Than Self-Love

Most of us don’t realize we’re living inside stories.

Stories like:

• “I owe my parents my success.”

• “Bad things happen to me because I’m a bad person.”

• “If I’m not the smartest, I’m nothing.”

These narratives don't just affect our thoughts. They shape how we see ourselves, what we think we deserve, and how we make decisions—often without us even knowing it.

We’re going to talk about 3 different narratives

1. The Immigrant’s Narrative

2. The Self-Hate Narrative

3. The Gifted Kid Narrative

My name is Sean I’m a mental health coach I see 40+ clients a week and I have a 98% satisfaction score from over 1600 ratings. All of the things I’m going to talk about today are things that I have seen good results from in working with clients. Let’s dive in:

The Immigrant’s Narrative

Your parents worked really hard and sacrificed a lot to give you the life that you have…and they never let you forget it. Every day they are reminding you of how much they sacrificed for you and how grateful you should be. If you fail a test in school it is disrespectful to all the hard work that they put in to give you the opportunities you have in life.

What this results in is you end up feeling indebted to your parents. You feel like you need to pay your parents back for all the sacrifices they made. Usually the way that you’re supposed to pay them back is by getting a high paying job—like a lawyer, doctor, software engineer, etc.

And you might think to yourself “Well that’s not so bad. I mean they did work really hard for me and it does result in me getting a high paying job and being relatively successful.” The problem is the way that these narratives work. They are like looping lines of code that run forever. So even when you are making the big bucks as a doctor the code of “I’m in debt I need to pay my parents back for all they have done for me” keeps running over and over again.

So the goal post simply moves again. Now it’s not enough that you got a successful high status career so that your parents can live vicariously through you, now you need to be able to save enough money to retire your parents. And what it ultimately boils down to is that no matter how many mountains you summit—it’s never enough.

And when you get to the top of those mountains it’s not satisfying, because you didn’t climb it because you wanted to. You climbed it to pay off your debt. Your life ends up not feeling like yours at all.

So here’s the question I would ask you:

If a credit card company sent you a bunch of luxury items that you didn’t ask for and then expected you to pay for them all plus interest—would you? Because that’s essentially what your parents are doing. You never asked for them to make all those sacrifices. And providing food, shelter, clothing, etc. for your child is kind of just part of the deal when you sign up to be a parent. It would be like if you were a bus driver and you expected every person who took your bus to give you a ride any time you wanted. “Well I drove you around the bus!” Yeah because that was your job…

Don’t get me wrong. I think you should absolutely be grateful to your parents. They have genuinely done some amazing things for you. The problem is when they begin to weaponize that gratitude. Imagine someone other than your parents. A friend helps you move and then holds it over your head and tries to guilt you into doing what they want. Pretty toxic relationship dynamic right? Just because they are your parents doesn’t make it any less toxic.

This is the first step in narrative navigation (a part of my coaching process). Starting to clearly see the narratives that have been written for you and go “wait a second—I don’t want to live that story.” Let’s look at another narrative.

The Self-Hate Narrative

The most common root of this narrative is abandonment. Maybe you grew up in a household with a single parent who had to work constantly so they were never around. Or maybe they were around and provided for all your physical needs but your emotional needs went completely unmet. It was a household where feelings were simply not talked about.

In either case, the problem with this is that when you are a kid your brain is still developing. It doesn’t have all the capability as an adult brain. So a big part of a parent’s job is to help their child process things that they go through because they can’t do it by themselves. But when you grow up abandoned, you don’t have that which inevitably makes life a lot harder. It’s like if you were playing a game for the first time on the hardest difficulty. You’re going to get hurt way more. The same is true here. All of these bad things happen to you because your parents aren’t there to protect you.

And our brain’s job is to make sense of things. To see patterns and come to conclusions to help us navigate our life. So as all these bad things start happening to you your mind comes to a tragic conclusion—the reason all these bad things are happening to me is because I’m a bad person. If I’m not a bad person then why does everyone keep leaving me? If I’m not a bad person then why do all these horrible things keep happening to me? I must deserve this in some way.

It becomes your ontology—your belief system. It becomes how you make sense of the world. And this is why self-hate is so hard to shake off. You don’t realize that it is the foundation of your understanding of the world. If you don’t hate yourself then why? Why didn’t my parents take care of me? Why didn’t anyone want to be friends with me? Why was I bullied? Why?

I know it sounds crazy, but your self-hate becomes protective. It makes the world make sense. So we can’t just throw it out the window you would have a mental breakdown. It would be like if suddenly all of the laws of physics just stopped working. You would have no idea how to navigate the world around you.

So instead, we have to start little by little…slowly but surely…building a new ontology. How else could you make sense of the world around you? What other explanations are there for what has happened to you? And that can be extremely painful because sometimes it can mean accepting that your parents didn’t show up for you in the way they needed to. Even though you can justify and understand why they made the decisions they made, it still doesn’t change the fact that your needs went unmet. It can mean grieving who you wish your parents were. How you wish your childhood was. And placing the responsibility back where it belongs.

But to start, just think about this idea of self-hate being how you make sense of the world around you. Does it resonate, or just logically make sense? In order for real change to occur you have to be able to feel it. If you can’t feel it, thread hunting can help.

The Gifted Kid Narrative

You have always been smart. You never really had to study in school. Everyone always told you how much potential you had. Your intelligence is one of your main sources of pride. But at some point you reached a level where your natural intelligence couldn’t carry you anymore. You couldn’t just take the test and pass without studying. And suddenly you were in a world of hell.

You like to do things you’re good at but you can’t really motivate yourself to do much else. And anytime you try to do something you’re not good at you either just don’t or you feel an incredible amount of shame.

The reason why is because you never built up the muscle of getting good at things. So now when you try it’s uncomfortable. Just like if you were to run a marathon without training for it. But what makes this far more difficult is our good old friend the ego.

Because not only were able to do things naturally but you were praised for it. It’s what made you feel seen…recognized…loved. And so it became a part of your identity—I’m the smart kid. I shouldn’t have to study, that’s what stupid kids do. And this becomes increasingly restrictive. Because as life gets more and more challenging the things you are able to do gets more and more limited. Until all you have left is your identity. I may be miserable and not doing any of the things I want to do in life but at least I’m still the smart kid.

It’s sort of like if you were stranded out at sea and holding onto a plank of wood. That plank of wood is keeping you afloat but if you want to make it to land eventually you’re going to have to try to swim to shore. Which is terrifying because it means letting go of the plank of the wood. Or in this case, it means abandoning the identity of “the smart kid.” It feels like it’s all you have and you have to let it go?! This is why this narrative is so sticky!

So to start, do something feels uncomfortable but safe. Try something new that feels like it has low stakes. I know it sounds crazy, but you have intentionally do things that you are going to be bad at. In doing so, you will start to build that muscle of learning something new—climbing up that learning curve.

These stories were written for you—but they’re not set in stone. The moment you start to see them clearly, you gain the power to write something new.

With care and service,

Sean

P.S. If you’d like help navigating these narratives let’s have a free 50 minute session.