Where Bloggers Live: You Can't Hate Yourself Better

Welcome back to the monthly edition of Where Bloggers Live! I am lucky to have joined a terrific group of bloggers who give a peek into the places and spaces where they spend their time.

Today's topic is My Best Advice...and it's quite simply this:

You can't hate yourself or punish yourself or berate yourself into being better in any way.

Any flaws you think you have, or any areas of life in which you'd like to improve, you're simply not going to hate yourself into a positive change. It just doesn't work! There is no mechanism by which you can channel self-loathing or self-disgust or self-contempt or shame or malice toward yourself into creating a new and improved version of yourself that you will then love.

You probably know that beating up on a child damages them. That abusing a pet turns them afraid/mean. That despising or belittling a partner or friend hurts them. None of these hateful acts cause the victims to sustainably change in a good way. At best, you may temporarily scare them into outward behavior that looks compliant, but not meaningful improvement.

But I think that at some level, it's surprisingly easy to believe that you can hate yourself into being better. That somehow making it very clear to yourself just how terrible you are, how unacceptable you are, what a failure you are, how fat, how lazy, how disgusting, how stupid, how this, how that...somehow this is going to give you the push you need to change into a different type of person. Like all you need is to be motivated enough by your current horribleness and this evolution will just somehow occur. And when the improvement doesn't happen, it means you're even more of a failure than you thought and you double down on the self-hatred and you fail again...and on and on the downward spiral goes.

The end result of all this isn't self-improvement. With all this practice and repetition, you just get really, really, really good at hating and punishing yourself. You are so expert in self-hatred that it happens automatically, all the time, with zero effort. This is not what you set out to accomplish.

I mean, after so much investment in and experience with self-loathing, even if you did somehow by some magical mechanism become this person you previously wanted yourself to be, are you going to start loving yourself now? No...because you've become too good at finding your own smallest flaws, at judging yourself and finding yourself unworthy. You think you'll love yourself when you've gotten good enough...when you've lost the pounds, gotten the promotion, stopped doing Y, started doing Z...but you'll never be good enough for the severe self-critic you've created in yourself. You couldn't possibly be good enough every single day in every single way to satisfy the scathing fault-finder within you who only knows how to hate.

I can't promise that practicing self-compassion will lead you to make the changes you want in your life. This path can lead to many different places, based on luck and the choices you make. I just know that self-hatred is a guaranteed path to misery, and it's not something we would want for someone else. So my best advice is to treat yourself with care and generosity and love whether you think you "deserve" it or not.

Thanks for joining me in a short discussion of the best advice I have to offer.

Next month's topic is How I Do Sustainability...and that's a theme with a lot of potential avenues to explore.

In the meantime, visit these lovely bloggers as they share their best advice:

Bettye at Fashion Schlub

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks

Em at Dust and Doghair

Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings

On vacation this month--Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style

Leslie at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After

What is the best advice you ever got? What is the best advice you have to give?

Blogs I link up with are listed here.