When we experience psychological trauma our sense of self, the ‘I am me’ gets fragmented. The deeper and more painful the trauma is, the more fragmented we become.
Self-hate is often our last option to gain control of a situation in which we otherwise feel powerless. Hating ourselves can validate and even justify what we have experienced along the lines of ‘we deserved it’ or ‘there must be something seriously wrong with me’.
The part of us which carries the pain of the trauma is silenced and rejected by the part of us which is self-hating. The trauma part is consistently being retraumatised each time it gets rejected and hated by the self-hating part. It’s a vicious circle.
So we need to end this one-sided war and work towards restoring the connection between the two. I imagine there is a connective tissue between them and that this connective tissue represents the part of us which didn’t understand what the fuck was going on, which couldn’t get it’s head around what happened. Why we were bullied, rejected, abandoned, abused, put down, etc?
For me, the part of us which didn’t understand was unable to stay true to our intuition, our gut-feeling, our inner knowing. In other words, it couldn’t validate and own what we sensed and felt as our inner truth, that there is something not right, it doesn’t add up, it’s not fair, it’s not right, I don’t deserve this, this is aggressive or nasty, this is seriously violating all of my boundaries etc.
In effect we end up sacrificing our inner knowing that there is actually something damaged and hurting in the other person which is causing them to directly or indirectly damage and hurt us.
When the other person does not take accountability for their actions we, as children, resort to blaming ourselves. We then trade in our inner knowing for self-criticism which leads to self-hate if (the) trauma continues.
Understanding how we shut down our inner knowing is extremely valuable as this is the first step in igniting the connective tissue between the part of us which carries the pain of the trauma and the self-hating part.
It’s about restoring the connection between our mind and our body so we can learn to listen to and trust our inner truth again. It’s about being empathic and compassionate to the part of ourselves that had no other choice than to self-hate.
It’s about allowing our restless mind to ground itself in our body and be guided by the infinite wisdom of our body. Owning the pain of your trauma and truth, however painful that is, is always a million times better than denying it.
The healing which takes place is a process of integration, a natural effect of re-aligning the fragmented pieces.