Coping mechanisms are strategies or behaviors that are designed
to mitigate, manage, and decrease or eliminate
the level of distress
that is being caused by any particular experience.
If we cope with something,
it implies that we already decided that we can't change something,
and so it has to be dealt with.
We would all hope for a world that does not have to be coped with.
Alas, that is not the world that we live in today.
And so it must be said that there are some coping mechanisms
that are more dangerous and detrimental than others.
And perhaps nothing is more dangerous than the coping mechanism of self-hate.
At first glance, it may be hard to understand
how self-hate could possibly be a coping mechanism.
How could it possibly decrease stress?
To understand the answer to this question,
we have to travel back to the genesis of the coping mechanism of self-hate.
When we look at a dysfunctional home,
what we find is that
at the root of each person's self-concept in the family is shame.
This feeling of shame has been passed down from generation to generation.
It is the primary stressor in the household.
Everyone has to find a way to cope with that shame.
And the ways they cope with that shame set up the dysfunctional family system
and determine what role each person will play in it.
To understand how self-hate develops, we have to understand that
when a parent has a baseline self-concept of shame,
any difference that a child exhibits,
anything the child can't change about themselves to mirror the parent,
will automatically cause shame within that adult.
Essentially, this child will automatically, just through their existence,
invalidate that parent's identity.
This will cause them to feel threatened by this child.
This is why the golden child in a family copes by throwing away their identity.
They lose all their boundaries.
They become a mirror image or a mini-me
of the parent that they need to feel safe with,
the parent who they have to conform to
in order to belong at all in the family system.
Now, that creates its own dysfunction.
But what we're looking at today is
how genuine self-hate as a coping mechanism develops.
And this often develops in the child that couldn't cope.
Sometimes a child cannot adapt to that environment and to that parent
by throwing out their identity.
There are many different reasons for this.
I'll give you an example.
Maybe that what we're dealing with is a sensitive child
who maybe has a different nervous system.
This child, even though
they may want to please mom and dad and conform, actually can't.
Because their nervous system becomes overwhelmed with emotion.
So that failure to adapt then makes them the target for that parent.
Essentially this child is so upsetting to the self-concept of the parent
that the parent will subconsciously turn against the child.
They may say "I love you." to this child and try to do loving things for them.
But the truth of how they feel
is not what they are presenting on the surface
and the truth comes out in all kinds of ways.
Their only way of avoiding the shame they feel,
and the shame this child triggers in them,
will be to emotionally disown the child and deflect that shame onto the child.
And that child then becomes the family scapegoat.
It is to say "I'm not bad, you're bad. And you are my problem.
And now I'm the victim to you
and so is everyone else in the household."
The family can then hide all of their dysfunction respectively,
all of their own shame
underneath the guise of a smokescreen of this one child in the household.
They will then switch.
And they will start to approach this child,
this problem person in the family who's not really the problem,
as if they're the one that needs to be fixed.
And now they get to be the good guys.
Because their whole life is about trying to fix this family problem.
This is when most therapists see what's called "the identified patient",
which is just the scapegoat
who has now been brought into therapy as the family issue.
Nothing is actually wrong with this person.
What is wrong with them is that
everyone in the family has turned against them.
But the other people in the house sure as hell can't see this.
The experience of being turned against by the very people
whom you need love from the very most,
is beyond describing.
There is no way to deal with this situation
in a way that actually benefits any member of this household.
It is absolute torment.
This makes it so this child has no way to feel safe.
And that's the conditions that
their own nervous system is in fact developing under.
And a nervous system that develops
under the constant feeling of being unsafe in a household
develops differently.
This child feels hated by their family,
especially by the parent who is playing the main antagonist,
the one whose self-concept is threatened the most by this child.
This child is growing up with an antagonist,
but an antagonist upon whom their life depends.
And the way that they cope with this may help them in the short term,
but completely destroys their life in the long term.
A child who is put in this type of a position in life
pushes themselves away.
That's the natural reaction that we have
when someone upon whom our life depends rejects so much about us.
We push those parts of ourselves away.
However, we can't actually physically do that, can we?
No.
So what happens when we push ourselves away
is that our consciousness splits.
To understand more about this concept,
watch my video called "Fragmentation (The Worldwide Disease)"
Their consciousness splits.
And one half contains the aspects that their parent hates about them
or that they perceive the parent hating about them,
and the other half becomes a mirror image of the parent themselves.
It's basically the internalized antagonist.
And it takes over the job of hating those parts within the self.
This internal antagonist takes over the job of hating them for the parent.
It becomes the one that's constantly
shaming and criticizing the parts within the person
that are seen as wrong and bad by the parent
and now as a result by the person themselves.
This makes the hurt not only controllable, but predictable.
And the child believes that by doing this,
they might just be able to change the things that are so detestable about them.
The person has become their own abuser and hater
so that the antagonistic parent is never given the occasion to do it.
To understand why this coping mechanism works,
I want you to imagine that
you're super angry and hateful towards somebody
and so you decide you're gonna go up to them and beat them up.
I want you to imagine that person starting to hit themselves.
What would instantaneously happen is that
all of your desire to hit that person would drain out of your embodiment.
Either you would feel like "Oh my god.
Something is so seriously wrong with that person.
I should probably help them.",
or you would be like "Oh my gosh.
I guess they agree with me.
Yeah, damn right, now I feel validated.
You are right for doing that.
I was gonna do it to you anyway."
Either way, it would strip the wind out from underneath your sails of antagonism.
It's at this point that this child in the household
that has developed this coping mechanism,
is usually turned into the family identified patient.
Why?
Because the parent, subconsciously now,
gets an extra boost of self esteem by switching into the false healer,
by "Aren't I such an amazing person?
Because this child of mine has so many problems
and I'm gonna help them fix it."
So as you can see, this self hating aspect, the genesis of it,
is actually a part of you that's trying to save your life from this parent.
So it's not really against you, is it?
Even though it may seem like it.
Now, what's really important to understand about this aspect
that's self critical or self-hating to the extreme,
is that it holds all of the answers about
what really matters to this person in their life.
Here's an example.
Perhaps what the parent hated about the child was that she was so sensitive.
The self-hating part will constantly criticize and shame her for being too sensitive.
Because the thought is that with enough disapproval of it,
she will either stop being that way or be motivated to fix it.
And this will get her the sense of belonging and safety she wants.
We can then tell that the truth that this self hating aspect holds
is just how important belonging and safety are
and how much she needs those things.
Ideally we need to figure out these valued and needed things
that the self hater is holding the truth of
and try to get those things directly in the places that we can get them from.
Self hate is a coping mechanism that is so incredibly dangerous.
Because it's a coping mechanism
that even though it saves you from the external antagonist,
it means that you're going to be living in a life
of complete and constant anxiety,
because you are now living with an enemy within your own skin.
Not only that, it leads to all kinds of behaviors
which are detrimental in the long run;
things like abusive relationships, things like risk-taking behavior,
things like self-destructive behavior, self-injury, and even suicide.
When you find this part within you,
see the benevolent reason for its existence.
See that its strategy,
though genius while you were living in an abusive environment,
is now destroying your ability to live a life that is worth living.
See that the parts of you that this part has turned against
needs to be accepted and loved instead.
Go directly for the things you were trying to indirectly get
by trying to hate these parts of you away.
Give them to yourself and get them from others.
The life that you genuinely want to live
is just on the other side of wanting to be you,
instead of agreeing with your antagonistic parent
that you should be someone else.
Have a good week.