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Self-hatred - Coggle Diagram

- - - - (...) if love is in more restricted supply, the picture grows more complicated. The child knows it is in grave danger; (...). At this point, our biology initiates a desperate yet darkly logical process. The young child starts to try a lot harder. It redoubles its efforts to charm, to be good, to do what could be expected of it, to smile and to ingratiate itself. It wonders what may be wrong with itself to explain the disapproval and harm, and doesn't feel any alternative but to search in its own character and behaviour for answers.
        
        (...) the child resists what might from one perspective seem like the obvious move: to get annoyed with and blame the adults in the vicinity who are not looking after it as they should.
        
        It is far more intuitive to wonder why we are horrid than to complain of being treated unfairly and unkindly.
        
        To explain the lack of love from the paragons of parenthood, it must be that the child is an awful person, they must be stupid and mean, selfish and slow, physically repulsive, irritating and shallow.
        
        Liberation awaits us when we take on board a highly implausible idea: that our self-hatred, far from being inevitable, is an internalisation of early deprivation and that far from needing to revere and admire those who denied us love, we are in a position to understand, to question, to be annoyed and to mourn what we did not receive. We are not so despicable after all; we've just lacked any better ideas to explain why we didn't manage to charm those who should have been on our side from the start.
      - Emotional neglect: the abuse that flows from absence.
        
        The adult who emerges from such a complicated, veiled childhood is likely to be in a confused state. On the surface, they may experience only a continued desire to please their early caregivers. But deep within themselves, they may feel lacerating doubt, paranoia and self-contempt.
    - - What happens in emotionally nurturing families? What does it mean to be properly loved and looked after, and how do people turn out differently when they have been?
        
        In a loving childhood, the offspring can expect to be granted a sense that it truly pleases its own parents—not by anything it does, but by its sheer existence.
        
        From this, the child acquires a basic trust in itself and in its right to be. It won't feel meek and cowed. It won't have to apologise for its appetites or hold back on expressing its wishes. It won't get stuck with sadistic or inconsiderate people; it will know how to exit bad relationships quickly. Without any sense of entitlement, it will believe it has a place in the world—and if things ever go seriously wrong, it will know how to take its own side against fate with necessary compassion and tolerance.
        
        In a loving childhood, an offspring benefits from sympathetic interpretations of its behaviour and motives.
        
        :pushpin: The loving parent knows not to make the child the villain of the mishaps that come its way.
        
        When it doesn't want to share its toys with another child, it isn't a 'selfish rascal', it is expressing a legitimate attachment to its property, no different from what an adult would experience if it had to give up their car or spouse to a random stranger.
        
        A loving parent knows that a certain amount of awkward behaviour belongs to every life and they don't shame the child for slipping up for being sometimes in a tricky temper and fed up with everything for a while.
        
        A loving parent gives the child the sense that it is capable of interesting discoveries and ideas of its own.
        
        :old_key: In a loving childhood, the offspring isn't incited to admire its parent or caregiver more than would be good for its own confidence.
        
        Through close-up acquaintance with such flaws (the parent's or caregiver's), a child can in time outgrow the adult and feel able to take their place alongside them in the grownup realm.
        
        If these emotional ingredients are transmitted in the course of an upbringing, then their recipient can in their adult future be counted upon to know how to be straightforward about their needs, sympathetic to their errors, ready to escape the clutches of unkind people, able to love others and, most crucially, free to direct compassion towards themselves for their own less than perfect but always still adequate lives.