The Collapse of Self-Hatred
El Colapso del Odio Hacia Uno Mismo
A reflection on how childhood suppression of anger can calcify into chronic self-directed suffering, and how feeling what was originally unfelt allows the entire structure to dissolve.
The Collapse of Self-Hatred
A reflection on how childhood suppression of anger can calcify into chronic self-directed suffering, and how feeling what was originally unfelt allows the entire structure to dissolve.
If I got angry with my father, even if I was simply frustrated at the dinner table, he would bring his energy and intimidate me and ridicule me. It was not okay to express anger with him, so I learned to suppress it. That suppressed anger turned inward, toward myself.
When the strategy begins to collapse
When this structure started to fall apart, I felt rage toward my father. I was very surprised by that, but it felt very real. Something about it felt releasing, felt good. I was not expressing it to him directly, but it was coming out. As that whole strategy collapsed, the suffering started to fall away: the suffering of contraction and self-hatred. What I felt now was something more real. I was angry with him.
But then even that anger burnt away, and what I felt underneath it was pain. Immense pain. This went on for many years, deep and immense pain in many shapes and forms. After all of that, the whole paradigm of compulsive thinking and identity, the entire world I had created, the stressing and the trying to be a certain person, all of that stopped.
Why psychological work matters
This is just one example, but it illustrates why this kind of psychological work is so important. The pain I had as a child with my father was something I could not feel at the time. It was too painful, too scary. Once I grew up, I was able to feel it.
What I want to point to is this: what I had come to experience as being crazy, my mind running nonstop, the contracted suffering that seemed to be happening to me with no way out, the sense of being a complete victim of that state, all of it was in service to one thing. It kept me from feeling rage, pain, and fear. Once I was able to feel those things directly, the entire structure was no longer needed.