Why Unloved People Hate Themselves

What happens to a child who isn’t loved properly? The answer one might expect is that they start to hate the person who doesn’t give them the love they need. But far from it, the reality is that the child becomes filled with shame – a sense that it’s profoundly unworthy, dirty, soiled, sinful, ugly, embarrassing.

The child is unable to redirect the blame outwards; it doesn’t ask: what’s wrong with my parents for not loving me adequately? It simply wonders in a forlorn way: what have I done wrong in order to have ended up on the receiving end of my parents’ disapproval?

The child prefers to attack itself for being bad than to confront a yet more awful possibility that it’s entirely dependent for its well-being on inadequate and unkind parental figures. The child searches for explanations for the lack of love it has to endure and comes up with all the wrong answers. It concludes “I’ve not been impressive enough”, and therefore it undertakes enormous efforts to prove to itself and outsiders that it does, nevertheless, deserve to exist.

At school, this kind of child might try seven times as hard as any other to show that it’s clever and good. Or else, a child may go down an antisocial route and graffiti the nearby underpass as a desperate way of giving outward form to a feeling of badness it’s tortured by inside.

There is so sadly no way out from the burden of shame – available either by trying to be extremely good or extremely bad. The only solution is to work against the grain of forgetting in order to perceive, for the first time, an awful possibility that one could never perceive as a child; that one has done nothing wrong at all; that wrong was done to one.