PREVIOUS: ACoAs & Self-Hate #1

BOOKs — Highly Recommended :
• “Compassion & Self-Hate ” ∼ T. E Rubin

• “So the Witch Won’t Eat Me – Child’s Fear of Infanticide“ ∼ Dorothy Bloch (Especially the Intro

WIC = Wounded Inner Child

1. DEFINITION (Part 1)

2. SOURCES of Self-Hate (S-H)
a. In CHILDHOOD:
i. Being abused, abandoned, mistreated & neglected by our parents & other caretakers
✶ To any small child, parents are experienced as all-powerful “gods”. These gods were supposed to take care of us & only punish for good cause or to teach lessons, SO when we were continually hurt by these beings we concluded that we definitely deserved it!

Unhealthy parents & other adults – repeatedly acted like or told us that we were “lazy, a pain in the a@@, good for nothing, selfish, stupid, unacceptable, weak, ugly, ungrateful, unlovable”…..

We clearly got these messages:
• INDIRECTLY, by all the ways they did not patiently, lovingly nurture & take care of us, guide, listen, mirror, be good role models…
• DIRECTLY, by saying things like : “You’ll be the death of me yet, Why did I have to have a kid like you?,   No one’s ever going to love you, You’ll never amount to anything, Kids always lie, You’re too sensitive, That’s not what I said”…..

ii. OUR OWN child-centered point of view
All little kids think the whole world revolves around them, AND have the universal power to make everything happen – good, bad or indifferent.
Therefore, when bad things happen to us at home, or to anyone else in the group (like our parents getting divorced), we’re convinced we must have caused it / been somehow responsible.
In the child’s ‘logic’:

• Since I’m bad / unlovable, then any suffering / punishment / verbal abuse I got must naturally have ‘fit the crime’.
RESULT: I have to work even harder to win back their good graces,
OR just give up & BE bad.

• BUT — if we tried really hard to be good & still were neglected / belittled / manipulated / battered / violated / tortured….
naturally we concluded it was our very essence that was at fault, & therefore hopeless to correct!
RESULT: since there was nothing we could do to fix ourself, we ended in a total rage, anxiety, depression & wanting to be dead.

WIC’s Thinking : A young woman was in an ACoA therapy group – a very intelligent lawyer, somewhat stiff & ‘all logic’. She knew she was sitting on a lot of rage at her repressive parents, who lived in another state. She admitted she was terrified to express those feelings out loud in the group, & never did, because her WIC was convinced that simply letting that rage out (here) would literally kill them (there) – magically at a distance.

b. In the PRESENT – the surface reason (deeper ones in Part 3)
i. I.C.’s CONVICTION – we keep telling ourselves we’re never good enough or worthy to get our needs met. We believe we’re powerless to change that, & being powerless feels much worse to an ACoA than being ‘bad’ – so we continue to believe we’re ‘bad’.

The TOXIC BELIEF that creates anxiety: On the one hand we’re powerless – over everything, while at the same time we try to control everything! We try to prevent people from leaving us, because if they do, we’ll die!
Can you hear the inner kid screaming?

ii. Negative INTROJECT tells us we’re wrong, stupid, evil…
• we hate that part of ourself, which is so much like our parents – just as judgmental as them, making the same mistakes, picking the same kind of mates, sounding & reacting just like them….
We swear we’ll never be like them, yet can’t help but be a carbon copy – it’s our genetic heritage, as well as our experience of them

• we can actually feel the bad voice, like a baseball bat, pounding away at us, & we just want to kill it off (one reason for ACoAs being suicidal), yet completely believe what it’s saying , even finding it a familiar ‘comfort’.
We don’t know how to get rid of it without killing ourselves, yet we protect it with every fiber. What a bind!

NEXT: ACoAs & S-H, #3