337 Holly Worton ~ What To Do When You Don’t Like Yourself

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Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 337. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today, I am going to talk about what to do when you don’t like yourself.

Now, oftentimes, podcast topics are based on something that I have been thinking about or working on in my own life, this time it was different, it was a little weird, I had just gone to bed, this was a couple of weeks ago, and I was settling in when the actual exact title for this episode just popped into my mind. I actually got up and wrote it down because I didn’t want to lose it because while I am not going through this currently this is definitely something that I have experienced in the past. So I think this is a really timely topic for this episode because we are at a new year and it is a great time to start thinking about what we want in our lives, what we want to change in our lives and how we want to do things differently. Of course we can do that any time of the year, but this is a time when people are traditionally thinking about this kind of thing and talking about this kind of thing and making New Year’s resolutions and goals and plans and things.

So, for starters, Happy New Year, Happy 2020 and happy new decade!

I wanted to start out by saying if you don’t like yourself, I am really, really, sorry about that, I know how this feels, it is so shitty. But, there is help, you can help yourself, you can get help, there are so many easy things that you can do.

So today, what are we going to talk about? I am going to talk about what self-hatred is, I am going to break it down into little bits and pieces. We are going to talk about why we hate ourselves, why do we dislike ourselves.  I am going to discuss the effects that self-hatred has on ourselves, or self-dislike. I am going to talk about how to stop hating yourself and start liking yourself, and practical things you can do today. And finally, I am going to cover how you can create your own personal emergency toolkit for when you are feeling down.

So let’s get started, what is self-hatred or self-dislike? Self-hatred it feels icky to say it, is such a sad concept, I know I have definitely been in this place before. I remember when I was a teenager just wishing I were anything but who I was and fantasising about being someone else and having these extended daydreams about me living this other life, as this other person, that was just so much better than me because at the time my self-esteem, self-worth, was really low and it continued to be low for a great deal of my life, and I think that has been kind of my default coping mechanism for much of my life. When I was down, when I was feeling low, when I was feeling like I really hated myself, or disliked myself, my coping mechanism was always to fantasise about me having this fantastic life as this other person and, of course, the person had my name you know it was like a better version of me. I would get into these really elaborate kind of daydreams, extended daydreams, probably could have written a whole novel about this other Holly, because it just felt so crappy to be me and you know I turned that around through years and years of working with myself on stuff that I didn’t like but for a long time it felt like crap.       

So, what is self-hatred or self-dislike? In my opinion, self-hatred is a combination of low self-worth, low self-esteem, low-or-non-existent self-trust, a lack of self-love, lack of self-acceptance, lack of self-confidence and just not valuing yourself and all of this leads to not liking you as a person. You know, there are people in our lives that we like, there are people that we don’t like, but when one of the people that you don’t like is yourself that’s really hard to deal with, ‘cos you can’t get rid of yourself, except obviously suicide which I don’t recommend and if you are in anyway thinking about that, fantasising about that, planning it, please stop this podcast now and get professional help. Get help, however you can, wherever you can, if you think you can’t afford it there are free services out there, get help. So if things are so bad that you are thinking about that again, get help, if they are not, good, but you are still not in a great place. So, it is worth kind of picking apart your own personal flavour of self-hatred or self-dislike and working on it yourself because again this is absolutely something that you can turnaround. It is nothing more than a poor relationship with yourself, but because you are with yourself 24:7 it feels like crap because, again, you can’t get rid of yourself but you can change yourself, you can change the things that you don’t like about yourself and you can change the way you see yourself, the way you value yourself, and you can eventually like yourself and love yourself.

So, this is something that takes work, like any relationship and I am sure you are aware that any kind of relationship in your life whether it is friends,family, partner, it takes work. It doesn’t have to be hard work, it can be easy work, but it takes some effort. So, in the same way that you invest time and effort into your relationships with other people if you want to have a good relationship with yourself and that includes letting go of self-hatred and starting to like yourself, you have got to cultivate that relationship with yourself and realise that just because you are you and you are yourself doesn’t mean that you automatically should have a good relationship with yourself. Lots of people do not have a good relationship with yourself so I think it is important to point out that this is in no way another thing you need to beat yourself up for, this is very common, I think the vast majority of people have disliked or hated themselves at least once in their lives and if not for extended stretches of their lives or the vast majority of their lives. So this is common, it is not just you and it doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you and it doesn’t mean that that is another thing you have to dislike yourself for, just know that it is something that can be changed. It is a poor relationship with yourself and it can be cultivated into a good relationship with yourself, again takes time and effort.

So I think it is important to explore why do we hate ourselves?  Why do we dislike ourselves? And again this comes from low self-wroth, low self-esteem, low self-confidence and where does that come from? It oftentimes comes from stuff that happened when we were little kids and we were growing up. It can come from parents, family members, teachers, usually from authority figures in our lives. So you might have had a teacher that told you that you were stupid or siblings that told you that and it kind of went beyond regular sibling teasing and it really made you feel bad about yourself, or it could come from your parents. A lot of times when we were children we hear these negative things about us whether we hear them directly or we overhear adults talking about us, and we start to form a negative self view. And we start to think: oh there is something wrong with us, we are not good enough, we should be different, but we are not, we are who we are, so I guess we are awful people. And if we hear these things that can spark a lot of negative self-talk of just beating ourselves up internally, I am so stupid, I can’t do this, I am always a failure, I am not good at learning, I am not good at school, I am bad at sports, whatever.  And, we start beating ourselves up internally and this has a really negative effect on our lives because the more we dislike ourselves, the more we hate ourselves, the more we beat ourselves up inside, the more we cultivate this negative mind chatter, negative self talk, it is like a downward spiral into just everything getting worse and worse and worse and this is something that we need to recognise and recognise that it is something that we can change, because the more negative thoughts we have, and the more negative thoughts we have about ourselves, it is just going to make everything worse in our lives. We are just going to start taking actions that are worse and worse and worse and end up in this downward spiral of negativity.  Again, we can stop this pattern at any time. It takes work, it takes time, it takes effort. We can stop it at any time we want, today, you can stop it today.

So how to stop hating yourself and how to start liking yourself? I think there are a lot of different things you can do and discuss ten or so different things, maybe take notes as you are listening to this and see what kinds of things appeal to you, because not everything I talk about is going to appeal to you. The things that I mention might give you ideas for other things that I can do, but even if there is only one thing that I talk about that you think: oh, I could do that. Do it. Stop and do the things because if you keep on the track that you are on, if you keep on the path that you are on, on a downward spiral of negativity, what you need to do is stop and turn and make a different decision and take a different action and that will start putting you on the upward spiral that I am always talking about.

There are some things you can do to stop hating yourself and start liking yourself, today, tomorrow, this week. Try to get a new perspective so ask yourself: would you treat your best friend or your favourite family member the way you eat yourself? So when you think about how you beat yourself up internally, negative self-talk, telling yourself that you are stupid, that you are an idiot, would you say that to your best friend? Would you say that to your favourite sister or aunt or whatever? And if you don’t have a best friend or any friends that you consider good friends or favourite family members, if you don’t have that support network,just ask yourself: do you like the way you are treating yourself? Do you like the way you are talking to yourself? Does it feel good? Probably not. Maybe do some journalling about that and do some reflecting about that and realise that you have been mistreating yourself and you have been treating yourself in a way that you don’t want to be treated. Also another way to twist the perspective, if someone else treated you the way that you are treating yourself, if your friend or family member or a random person, said the things that you say to yourself, or treated you the way that you treat yourself, would that make you feel good or would that make you feel bad? Would you say something to them about it, would you protest? Oftentimes people say, ‘you are your worst enemy’ and that is a time when you need to pay attention to why they said that, what are you doing to yourself? If you are your own worst enemy that is not good. So think about the things and the way you are treating yourself and try to get that perspective because it is really not ideal to be treating yourself that way.

And notice your negative self-talk, write it down. This is the kind of thing you could journal about if you are out and about just send yourself an email, whenever you hear yourself saying: oh, I am stupid, I am an idiot. Write it down and if you can get it out of your head onto paper, and then turn it around and then instead of believing this thing about yourself, instead of saying this thing to yourself, what do you want instead, what would you rather say instead? Then maybe say that thing to yourself, the nice thing and then the more you become aware of negative self-talk the easier it will be to let go of it because you will start to realise how often you are treating yourself badly internally, it will be easier to quit. And again, once you start to become aware of it, turn it around, make it positive, give it that twist of the thing you wish you heard, or the thing that you wish you said to yourself, that is going to give you a different mindset of its own because it is going to get you from where you are which is where you don’t want to be to the thing that you want to have instead or you want to be instead. So that can be really useful.

Next, be kind to your self. When you realise you are beating yourself up, stop it and quit. Force yourself to say something else, force yourself to focus on something else, stop and distract yourself with something else. Another thing you can do is to let go of perfectionism, oftentimes when we hate ourselves, or when we dislike ourselves, we are comparing ourselves to others and we think everyone else is so perfect or certain people are so perfect and I am not, I am a loser, I am terrible, I am an idiot. Let go of perfectionism because there is no such thing as perfect, you are never going to be perfect, no one else is ever perfect, no one is perfect there is no such thing so just let go of striving for perfectionism. I think it is really important to, when we do things, to be the best that we can be at what we are doing, to always do things as good as we can but without expecting perfectionism.

Next, let go of regret, because you can’t change the past, all you can do is learn from those experiences. So if you made decisions that you regret, maybe do some journalling about that again, stop and think about what you did “wrong”, what you did that you didn’t like, what was the outcome that you didn’t like, how would you have liked to handle that? So that if you were a similar situation in the future, you know what you would want to do instead. What would you rather do instead? How would you rather handle that situation if it comes up in the future? You can’t change the past, but you can change things from today onwards, so stop beating yourself up over the past and start learning from your mistakes or learning from the decisions that you weren’t happy with, so that you make different decisions in the future. Mistakes are just learning opportunities, if we allow them to be, if we stop and we analyse them and we think about what we would rather do in the future, they are learning experiences. Otherwise they are just excuses for you to beat yourself up about. We absolutely can learn from our mistakes and we absolutely can learn from our “failures”, which again I am putting in air quotes because I don’t believe in failure, I do believe in things that don’t turn out right, that we often dub as failures, are just learning opportunities. I did this things, I made this decision, I had a shitty outcome, I am not going to do that again, here is what I am going to do instead. I am going to make this different decision and I am going to take this different action and do something differently. So failures, mistakes, not something you want to be regretting, but it is something that you want to learn from. So accept your failures and learn from your mistakes and do things differently.

Forgive yourself, forgive yourself for your failures, your mistakes, your bad decisions, your ‘whatevers’. There is kind of a process called Ho’oponopono that I am going to link to in the show notes that is really easy to do, you might think it sounds silly when you do it but it is a really easy way to forgive yourself and just keep doing it as much as you need to do it. Every time you are starting to beat yourself up over something, stop and do the Ho’oponopono thing, again I am linking to that in the show notes, it is a thing that I have often mentioned, try it, even if sounds silly.

Next gratitude lists, I know a lot of people resist gratitude list, I don’t do them all the time, I only do them once in a while, but if I am feeling really shitty, that is one of the things I will do, make a gratitude list, in your journal or on a piece of a paper, just write a list of 10 things you are grateful for every day. We all have things to be grateful for: you have a house; you have food; you have a flushing toilet which a lot of people don’t have; you have clean water. There are so many things that you have even if you feel that your life is the absolute shit there are things you can be grateful for and if you resist this, try doing it one day and see how it makes you feel and pay attention to how you feel before doing the gratitude list and how you feel after. This is something that really turns things for me when I am not feeling well, emotionally, so make a list of the things that you are grateful for.       

Finally, keep a self-worth folder, this could be something on your computer or a folder in your inbox of nice emails or comments from people or testimonials or social media of people saying nice things to you, or saying nice things about you, you can print it or put it in your journal or have a special notebook for it.  I think it is really useful to have a folder where you have just nice things that people say about you or you could put it in Evernote. Sometimes when it is hard for us to find kind words for ourselves it can be useful to read nice things that other people have said about us and maybe you are thinking: oh but no one ever says nice things about me, I am sure you have got something somewhere, even if it is just one thing, a card your grandmother sent you, I don’t know. Get it out and look at it, re-read it, and that can help turn things around.

So there are all little things, try one, try them all, see what works for you, you don’t have to do all these things every day, you probably won’t have time to do all these things every day, try doing something every day, even if it five minutes. Do you have five minutes, everyone has five minutes free, write a gratitude list in five minutes, you could write three things, five things, just spend a little bit of time every day trying to turn this around.

The next thing that I think is really big, and I talk about this a lot, I will link to the other episodes, I have talked about self-knowledge, knowing yourself is a really good way and I think this is the core way of moving from self-hatred to self-like, is to know yourself. And I know this may sound counterintuitive, because you know if you don’t like yourself then why would you spend time getting to know this person you don’t like. Who the hell does that? But no one is 100% good or 100% bad, you have good qualities, as well as qualities you don’t like, and I think that it can be really helpful to just get clear on who you are. So maybe make a list on what are your good qualities? Maybe you think you don’t have any good qualities, I don’t know, get really basic, like, I am good at personal hygiene, I take a shower every day. I am a good friend; I am very loyal to people. I am good with my dog; I don’t know things like that — go for whatever you can go for. Maybe it is just one thing, maybe you can only think of one thing, spend the time, if you are listening to this, you have at least one good quality, so spend the time thinking about that, and just dedicating the time to this again can often turn things around. And as you are looking for good qualities, your mind, if it is in a shitty place might just vomit up all the negative stuff hat you have been used to hearing about yourself. And that’s why you need to accept yourself as you are now, this is who you are today, right now, just as you are today, today in this moment. Five minutes from now you could start making changes to change yourself, you could say: this is who you are right now, this is all changeable.

That leads me to the next point, to figure out what you can change and do it. Maybe you don’t like that you are lazy, okay, what does that mean? Maybe to you being lazy means you get up really late, you don’t have a job, you sit around the house, you play games all the time, I don’t know, random example. What can you change about that? Get up earlier. So if you are used to getting up, I don’t know, afternoon, one o’clock, tomorrow get up at noon. Next day, get up at eleven, the following day get up at ten, or maybe if that is too much of a stretch get up at 12:30,11:30, 11:00, bump up the increments by 15 minutes, half hour, an hour, so that you can little-by-little start to change your habits. And then just start doing things differently, go for a walk around the block, any little tiny thing to change your habits and routines that aren’t making you happy will shake things up and will help you to become the person that you like. And, I talk a lot about personal development and changing, this doesn’t mean that you are inherently bad or wrong, what this episode is about is about you, us, anyone, having a poor relationship with ourselves and not liking ourselves. The fact that you don’t like yourself does not mean that you are inherently bad, you don’t like yourself so we are talking about changing yourself so that you do like yourself. Again, talk about the things that you do well, make a list of your skills, and your experiences, and your talents and focus on things, just knowing the stuff that you do well can start to value who you are, and start to increase your sense of self-worth.

Finally, I think it is important to have an emergency toolkit for when you are in a really bad place and you are really feeling like shit about yourself, again, pick and choose from these things, some of these things will appeal to you, some of them won’t. Make a list, so when you are feeling down and you are feeling shitty you have this list to refer to. One thing is to get outdoors, go for a walk around the block, go for a walk in nature, go to a park, go for a walk in the garden, get outside, getting the fresh air but getting out of your house into a radically different environment which is outdoors, that can make a big difference in yourself, that can start to shift your mood. You can write in your journal, however, be careful about this and maybe write a letter on a piece of paper and burn it instead. I have found that journal-writing can be really useful but if I am in a really bad place, it can make things worse. It just kind of gets me engrained in that downward spiral, I remember five years ago, I was in the habit of doing the morning pages practice and writing three A4, or letter-size pages, a day. Kind of a mind dump of all of the stuff that was going on in your head first thing in the morning and I was not in a good space for that year that I was doing those, and I have actually just thrown all of the journals away because it was just so negative and awful and it really kept me in that downward spiral of crap of feeling bad about myself. So, be careful if you are going to do journalling. Maybe write one page of mind dump and then turn it around with gratitude exercises and more positive-enhancing things, be mindful of how you journal.

Get some exercise, go for a walk, go to the gym, move your body, do some yoga at home, exercise or yoga or stretching or something, but moving your body can actually really help change your state of mind. Have a happy music playlist that can make you feel good or life you up. Go on Spotify if you want but have music that you know will lift you up and change your mind. Have some go-to websites that make you laugh, I remember years ago there were certain websites that I really liked, that just made me good or made me feel good and so I would go to them when I was feeling down. So have those website that you know can make you laugh. Self-care, take a bath, take a shower, read a book, just have little things that you enjoy doing that make you feel better about yourself, that make you feel like you are caring for yourself. Another thing you can do is learn something new, read a book, watch a video that teaches you something on YouTube, sometimes learning something new can not only distract us from how crappy we are feeling, but it helps us grow, it helps us change. So that can help stimulate change in other areas of our lives. And finally get support, get help from others, friends, family, professional help, get help when you need it. Again, professional help doesn’t have to cost money, there are free resources out there, get help when you need it. But I hope that you write down these things, these ideas, for your emergency toolkit to remind yourself because sometimes when we are feeling really, really, down it is like we forget the little things that we can do to change how we feel about ourselves, to change how we like ourselves and that can help turn things around.

So I hope you find this useful, I think moving from self-hatred to self-love is a long journey, it doesn’t have to be a journey, but it is a journey that takes time and effort and attention and you have got to want do it, obviously, but I think it starts with just one step. Just doing one thing differently and then doing one thing everyday, one new thing everyday or doing one thing that makes you feel good every day, it doesn’t have to be every day but doing something different from what you are doing now, that will help turn things around and that will help you to start realise that you are worthy and it will start to help you boost your self-worth and self-esteem and trust yourself, it will help you develop that sense of self-acceptance, self-confidence, eventually self-love and then your life is going to be totally different to what it is today. It starts with one step, if this sounds too big for you just pick one thing and do it and if you think you don’t have time trust me you have five minutes.

So, as always, I hope you found this episode interesting and useful, please drop me a line, let me know what you thought about this week’s episode, you can find me online and get in touch there. I would also love for you to find me on Patreon so if you find this podcast useful, if you feel like it is helpful in any way, I would love for you to support me on Patreon, if you head over to http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton you can join there for just $1 a month. And thank you so much for listening, again happy new year, happy 2020, happy new decade, please if you are not in a good place, take one new action today to start turning things around. If it is the end of the day, if you are about to go to bed, stop, take five minutes, and write down three things that you are grateful for or pick something from the list. Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening, happy new year and remember to visit http://HollyWorton.com/337 for the show notes on this episode, thank you, thank you, thank you.