Why children end up hating on themselves (and why we still do it as adults)

Clarifying a confusing point that is very important

Dear Jackie D and Judith (and everyone else, too),

The two of you asked some excellent questions in response to my “Therapy Tidbit” post from a couple of newsletters back. I thought I’d address that now. But first of all, thanks so much for asking your questions—it really got my brain immersed in examining these issues, and I enjoyed putting into words concepts that I discuss more generally but have never yet had the chance to set down on paper.

(For anyone else following along, in my “Therapy Tidbits” series, I consciously try to write down little nuggets of insight encountered during a typical day of being a therapist. These are things that, because therapy is a somewhat dissociative event where I sit with clients purely in their context, if I don’t write down, are often lost to me. Each little burst of insight could each merit a longer essay, but I find that they are useful tidbits in and of themselves. )

You both had questions about the same Tidbit. Here is what it said:

3. Being othered in any way,—in families, friendships, relationships, or by broader systems of oppression—or having your humanity disregarded on any level, is what teaches us that we are unlovable. It’s what convinces us to disregard our inborn knowledge of our static worth. Every instance in which we feel degraded as a human being by another human being (or group of human beings) teaches our limbic system to remember our unlovability as a matter of survival. It is life threatening. And it is so painful that we often then start degrading ourselves before others can do so. Reversing these patterns and remembering our inherent worth is, at its core, the basic work of all useful healing models. It is the healing work of a lifetime.

Jackie D had this to say:

I have to admit I'm confused at this part.

"Every instance in which we feel degraded as a human being by another human being (or group of human beings) teaches our limbic system to remember our unlovability as a matter of survival. It is life threatening. "

How does feeling unloved help us survive? I would think it does the opposite, make us quite literally want to die.

And then

Judith Montel asks this:

Request - could you write more about the details of the process you describe in point number 3? What othering is or can look like? What the steps are (or what they might be) between being degraded by others people to doing it to yourself as a survival mechanism? It sounds relevant to me but I couldn't make the leap of understanding.

Many thanks in advance!

These are some really excellent thoughtful questions and I hope I can do them justice in my response here!

First, “othering” as a phenomenon is something that has been written on quite extensively (here is a pretty good article in The Guardian) and honestly, I simply don’t have the spoons to do a thorough analysis here, but suffice it to say that what we are talking about here (or what I was trying to talk about in my little therapy tidbit) was the concept of dehumanization, or reducing another human to an object that does not require or immediately evoke empathy.

We are an empathetic species inherently. When we see others hurt, we can imagine that hurt as being inflicted on ourselves, and this motivates us to both care for the injured as well as to not be injurious. But, because human brains are, by their very nature, reductive in order to conserve energy, these nuggets of mass in our heads have found a way to bypass the empathy response. And that is by reducing another person, mentally and subconsciously, into either not-a-person, or not-a-whole-person, or at very least not-a-good-person. When we do this, instead of empathy, our brain is able to have a rejection response. Seeing them as “other,” or as different than us in a categorically relevant way, or worse, when we are able to convince ourselves that that person is not even a legitimate and real human being at all, but instead an “animal” we are able to bypass our empathy entirely. We are able to inflict profound hurt and degradation upon others. We are able to tolerate horrible things happening to that “kind” or “class” of person.

the other

This is no fun for that person.

And sadly, one of the most dehumanized and othered populations in our species is children. We so soon forget the reality of childhood—how we perceived things with vibrant and totally-relevant clarity—how we experienced the exact same level of conscious awareness and contextual emotional response as when we are adults. We often see kids as inferior and less worthy of respect in our society. Thus we treat children inhumanely often. And this is the set-up that so easily begets an internalized sense of low value that lasts for decades, often even until we die. This is one of the reasons why nearly all of us benefit from therapy, and why we all have some work to do in reparenting and showing love to our inner children! We have all been degraded during childhood. It’s built in to the system, sometimes in ways that are almost unrecognizable at first. (Spanking? Many folks feel this is an okay part of childhood. But when you think about it for even a moment in the context of the child, it is actually an act of profoundly terrifying violence inflicted by people much stronger and more powerful than us. This literally degrades us as a person. This is just one of a bazillion examples.)

Because we are a social species, and our social groups are necessary for our survival, we have a tendency to do this weird thing when we feel “othered” or “dehumanized” in these ways—or when we feel reduced to a non-human status through abuse, mockery, or other types of degradation. (This is especially true when these things are inflicted in response to what the in-group deems an infraction of “appropriate” social behavior which, again, is particularly common with children.) To help maintain our belonging in the group, we develop a pattern of instinctively trying to signal to the group that we already know when we have done something taboo, or acted in a way that risks being ostracized by the group. It is much more tolerable to our psyche to self-degrade than to feel the horrible shame and ignominy of degradation from the group as a whole.

Thus, when we do something that has generated a dehumanizing response in the past, instead of waiting for the response of othering from each other, or from our social group, we degrade ourselves.

This is an attempt to continue our own survival. Our brain remembers the early moments of humiliation and then inflicts them on ourselves any time we infract social norms in an attempt to appease the cultural group we are in, and convince them (and ourselves) that, even though we have made a group-infraction, we already know that the mistake was bad, and we are still fit to be a part of the group. This is a subconscious response.

Don’t worry, I’ll just put myself in time out… thanks

Sometimes it involves the group as a whole. We stand up and take responsibility and bow our heads and say we’re so sorry in an obsequious rolling-over-and-exposing-the-tummy kind of way. However, it is much more common for us to do this when nobody is around. We do it to ourselves, for ourselves. We inflict the same hate, the same ruthless impatience, the same shaming dehumanization that we learned early on onto ourselves, often even using the same languaging we heard in those early years, or have heard used with others. Common phrases are things like “you’re so stupid; you’re so dumb; why are you such an idiot?” A very potent one I hear a lot (both from clients as well as sometimes in my own head, even though I’m pretty sure nobody said this to me directly in childhood) is I am a piece of shit or I am a piece of garbage or even flat out: I am worthless.

Weirdly, this behavior, while obviously maladaptive, truly is an attempt to adapt to a social world where degradation of this kind exists. It is an attempt to survive and keep us safe. It is our limbic system trying hard to keep us in line so that we don’t risk the ultimate “death”: rejection from our pack/tribe/family/society.

This is what I was trying to get at when I (somewhat inaccurately) said that othering “teaches our limbic system to remember our unlovability as a matter of survival.” It’s not that it is remembering our actual “unlovability.” It’s that our limbic system begins to identify and detect any actions that we perform that are similar to ones in which we have been treated like we are unlovable in the past. And then, even if nobody is around to repeat this othering or dehumanizing through chastisement or mockery or abuse, we find our limbic system repeating the words, phrases, feelings, and humiliation we felt in those moments of degradation. Gotta make sure we never forget! Gotta make sure we stay fit for the in-group! Sadly, we do this even when we intellectually know the thing we did was actually okay.

One behavior in my own life where this response tries to show up a lot is lateness. As someone with severe ADHD and time blindness, I am very frequently late to things. My sense of time is extremely flowy, and I caught shit for this in early years, teen years, and up to adulthood.

“Hi yes, my perception of time is… NOT GOOD.”

Much as I “worked on” the behavior, it never “went away” (because it is literally how my brain works, and also because degradation leads to fear response, and fear response leads to a lack of regulation, which leads to a higher probability for mistakes). This was perplexing and frustration for a long time. Over the years, though, I have not only begun to accept this as reality of my neuro-type, I have also come to really love and appreciate this part of myself in many ways I couldn’t see for a long time.

Not only does it lead to incredible moments of connection and insight and fun that strict adherence to time stricture would have precluded, it is also, I have come to learn, a direct act of rebellion against colonialism, capitalism, and grotesque (and often racist and ableist) societal standards meant to keep the gap between upper echelons of society separate from lower ones.

Just think about it—the CEO showing up late for an important meeting is immediately forgiven, his lateness assumed to be merited (when really he was distracted on his phone in his jet), while a server at a cafe showing up late to the job that supports her entire family because she is an undocumented immigrant and a single mom who relies on public transit, and her second bus transfer broke down on the freeway and she had to wait for the next bus 30 minutes later, is fired on the spot with no chance to explain. This disparity in the group reaction to lateness based on social status is why our highly capitalistic society emphasizes timeliness in the obsessive and almost contemptuous way that it does. (Other cultures have relationships with time much more similar to my natural brain-setting.) Our society is less concerned with the doctor running behind on her rounds, or the important artist showing up late for a gig. It emphasizes machine-like timeliness for the lower rungs—the rungs that are perceived more socially as cogs in the capitalist machine—involving the work that is least paid, while also being the most important to the running of a society (cleaning, child- and elderly-care, food prep—all the things that keep things running, and that our society attempts to hand over to women to do for free whenever it can). It is also a way to disallow disadvantaged folks from receiving the aid they most require. Showing up late for court, for a meeting with your court-appointed attorney, for social or welfare services, or for more “menial” (aka essential but assigned primarily to women) jobs is dealt with cruelly and punitively, often with a cry of “time is money! How dare you (someone on a lower rung) not respect my (someone who feels their time has more “value” in the system) time by showing up late!” So, I am glad my brain, by its very nature, bucks the societal hold this issue has upon us. It’s caught me a lot of shit, but it is taught me a lot about what and who our society deems valuable, and why.

Anyway, even knowing all of this, I often feel the dread of failure when lateness sets in; I feel the deep and immediate feelings of self-loathing if I am not paying close attention to the clock. And if I’m not especially conscious, the litany of self-flagellating language can start under my breath without me even being fully aware of it. There are times where it sets my body onto a course of fight/flight chemicals that can affect the rest of my entire day.

But as I become more aware of this and actively choose to soothe my inner child, assuring him that we are good, that we aren’t wrong, that we are allowed to be ourselves, little by little these responses soften. Slowly, I become more and more self accepting. An unexpected byproduct of this self-acceptance is, ironically, that I am often more able to be on time, because my system is less panicked and my mind less avoidant of stimuli it views as scary. (CLOCKS! TERRIFYING!!!!!)

Anyway, thank you so much for asking this excellent set of questions. It was a pleasure to be able to articulate some of what was densely packed into that little tidbit.

And if either of you (or anybody else reading) finds yourself being cruel to yourself as a matter of survival, subconsciously proving you already know how “bad” you are so others can’t beat you to it, remember that there are ways to overcome this. Becoming consciously aware of this as it’s happening is a huge first step. Beginning to reparent and show kindness to your child-self is another.

A million years ago I created a self-compassion journal that I have found to be really helpful in transforming these kinds of thought processes into something much more soothing and appropriate to a situation. I offered it as a free bonus for signing up for my profesh newsletter back on my old blog (and you can still get it there—it’s a pop-up when you get to the page if you just wait three or so seconds.) I’ve never, ever written one installment of the newsletter (go me!) but I will start using it more soon, because I am almost done with an e-course on ADHD/neurodivergence and couples and I will be using it to help publicize that puppy. So snag the journal here and get on the list if you’re interested in that! Or just go get the free self-compassion thingamabob then unsubscribe from the list, lol. No harm no foul ;-) Either way, the journal template has helped me truly find self-compassion in moments I would normally have defaulted to self-chastisement. It’s so odd how slowing things down and becoming intentional can really shift the way we perceive what is happening within and outside of ourselves.

I hope both of you (and anyone else reading along) have an incredible Spring day. I know I plan to go on a some walk with my doggie, and on another one by the Puget Sound once I get to my office, to take advantage of this uncharacteristically bright PNW day!

Much love,

Joshua