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  Indeed, there would be no hatred of others without hatred of self. If we truly felt good about ourselves, we would have no interest in wasting precious life energy resenting or attacking anyone. The urge to blame others arises only out of feeling bad about ourselves, which originally developed out of not feeling truly seen or honored by other people. Self-hatred is the hidden underbelly of all the violence and nastiness in the world.

  Self-hatred may seem like too strong a word to some. “I have a little self-doubt,” you may say, “but I don’t hate myself.” Yet if you doubt, judge, or criticize yourself at all, this indicates some dislike or aversion toward yourself as you are. Or if you have a hard time spending time alone, undistracted by work, phone calls, television, computers, or other forms of busyness that pull your attention away from yourself, this also suggests that you may not like being with yourself all that much.

  Unfortunately, the difficulty you have in loving and accepting yourself affects you even more profoundly than anyone else’s lack of love. Whether you have a mild or an extreme case of self-hatred, it affects how you feel inside and how you experience your life every hour of every single day. It influences the thoughts you have, the choices you make, the actions you take, the lovers you select, and the relationships you create. In our culture, self-hatred is epidemic, infecting almost everyone to some degree, even those who manage to conceal it under a veneer of success or looking good.

  Basic Goodness and Shame

  It’s not hard to see where the sense of bad self originated: not measuring up to other people’s expectations. Maybe you were a shy, quiet child but your parents wanted their child to be more outgoing. Maybe your teachers expected verbal excellence but you were more interested in art, music, and dance. Or maybe your full-bodied exuberance scared off the boys, who were looking for someone who didn’t threaten them.

  Nonetheless, the bad self is only a thought in the mind, nothing more. It develops through taking it personally when others don’t see or appreciate us: “What’s wrong with me, that no one really sees or appreciates who I am?” This pattern became established when we were young: “Why are my parents so angry or neglectful toward me? There must be something wrong with me, that’s why.” That is the only way a child can understand neglect or abuse. As a result, we wind up disliking who we are: “If only I were different, then I would be loved, and everything would be okay.”

  In this way shame—the feeling that the self we are is no good—takes up residence in the body and mind. Shame is undoubtedly the most painful of all feelings. That’s because it denies the vital truth—that our basic nature is intrinsically beautiful and good.

  This notion of basic goodness21 is not some New Age Pollyanna creed. Mystics and sages East and West, from Plato to Lao-tzu and the Buddha, have directly experienced the essence of human nature as a natural purity of heart, from which all positive qualities flow: love, caring, courage, humor, wisdom, devotion, strength. As an inherent quality of our nature, this good-heartedness is more fundamental than any notion we have about being good or bad based on our behavior or acceptance by others. An unshakable sense of our intrinsic value can only develop through coming to experience and know the essential purity and nobility at our core.

  By causing us to doubt our basic goodness and thus negating the truth of who we are, shame is paralyzing. It causes our nervous system to freeze up and shut down. And since this sense of bad self feels so painful, we try our best to ward it off. So, like the bad other, the bad-self image also falls into unconsciousness, affecting us in automatic ways over which we have little control.

  One way the bad-self image comes back to haunt us is in a stream of negative self-talk—what I call the “inner critic.” The critic is the voice that tells us that nothing we do is ever good enough. It dwells below the threshold of consciousness, waiting for the slightest justification to come out and go on the attack. A simple way to observe the critic in action is by looking at yourself in the mirror. How do you react to that face staring back at you? If you see signs of aging, how do you regard yourself? Do you feel kindness and unconditional acceptance toward the face in the mirror? Or do you judge yourself harshly for not measuring up to some standard?

  If you could peer into the thoughts in most people’s minds, you would find most of them revolving around a single preoccupation: “Am I okay or not?” This is what fuels the fixation “she [he] loves me, she [he] loves me not.” If she loves me, then maybe I am a good self after all—someone successful, attractive, likable, strong—and I can feel good about myself. But if she loves me not, then I am thrown into the hell of seeing myself as the bad self—someone inadequate, unattractive, unsuccessful, unlovable, or weak. And then I hate and reject myself.

  Thus an inner trial is going on in the background of the mind as we continually marshal evidence for one side or the other: “People responded well to me today, so I feel good about myself.” “People didn’t respond well to me today, so maybe I’m not okay after all.”

  Why do we allow the critic to live on within us, with all its painful consequences? To the extent that we don’t know we’re intrinsically lovable, we don’t believe love will ever just come to us on its own. We believe instead that we have to do something to make ourselves acceptable. So to push ourselves to try harder to be good, to whip ourselves into shape, we hire an in-house critic to keep tabs on how we’re doing. If we can prove that we are worthy, then maybe we will be loved.

  Unfortunately, this inner trial—“Am I good enough yet? No, I could still do a lot better”—is endless and fruitless. Trying to be good can never result in a secure sense of inner value because this very effort presupposes that we are not good enough and thus only reinforces our self-hatred. This sense of unworthiness also makes it hard to let love in, even when it is available. Not loving ourselves makes it hard to let others really love us. This frustrates those who are there for us, causing them to withdraw or leave. And then we use that as further evidence that there’s something wrong with us. In this way, the bad-self story becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Just as it was frustrating having to be a good boy or a good girl to win our parents’ acceptance—because then we never felt loved just as we were—so it is with trying to win the critic’s approval by proving we are worthy. The self-acceptance that can heal self-hatred and shame will never arrive through winning a favorable verdict in the inner trial. It can arise only out of recognizing and appreciating the being we actually are, in our unconditional goodness and beauty, where we know ourselves as something much more vast and real than any notion we have about good self or bad self.

  Acting Out the Wound

  Self-hatred also fuels grievance and violence against others in a fairly predictable way: We try to transfer our own bad feelings onto other people as a way to feel less bad ourselves. While this takes an especially grisly form in public displays of scapegoating and warfare, the same dynamic operates to some extent in most human relationships.

  Discharging aggression on others is a classic way of trying to alleviate the shame or self-hatred that comes up in relationships. It could be something as simple as a wife making a sharp remark about her husband driving too fast. If he hears this as blame, it may trigger his inner critic. Then, to defend against feeling like the bad self, he makes her into the bad other instead. He counterattacks, blaming her for nagging him. Now she feels like the bad self, and to ward off her own critic she in turn tries to make him the bad other: “Why are you always so defensive?” And he retorts: “Why are you always so critical?”

  This is what couples do all the time—tossing the sense of badness back and forth like a hot potato. No wonder marriage partners become so invested in being right, even if it destroys their relationship. Being right is a way of trying to deflect the critic’s attack, with its crippling self-hatred and shame. It is always very sad to see two people who love each other going at each other this way.

  One of the shortcomings of conventional religion is t
hat it often speaks in the voice of the critic, blaming people for their sins and unworthiness. Instead of castigating people for their faults, it would be far more compassionate and skillful to help people see how the so-called deadly sins are all symptoms of not knowing that they’re loved.

  Greed, for example, grows out of an inner sense of hunger, “I don’t have enough,” under which lies an even deeper sense of “I’m not enough.” Yet what is this inner poverty that we try to relieve through consuming and possessing, if not the emptiness of feeling cut off from love? Fire-and-brimstone moralists would have us believe that greed is proof of our sinfulness. But perhaps greed is only as compelling as it is because it promises to relieve our deprivation, yet without ever delivering the real goods, thus leaving us ever more prey to our hunger, which only the food of love can truly satisfy.

  Likewise, jealousy only arises out of lack of confidence in being loved: Somehow life is loving others more than me. Similarly, self-centeredness, arrogance, and pride are attempts to make ourselves important or special, as a way to make up for a lack of genuine self-love. Egocentricity is a way of trying to make the world revolve around “me,” to compensate for an underlying fear that I don’t really matter much at all. If we felt loved, it would of course never occur to us that we didn’t matter.

  And what drives people to seek power over others? Why would anyone want to spend this short, precious life pursuing the chimera of empire building or world domination? What’s the thrill in that? Power over others is a way of trying to prove that I am somebody, to force others to look up to me: “I’ll get you to respect me one way or another, even if it means torturing or killing you.” If I can show you I’m really somebody—the chief honcho, the dictator, the world conqueror, the filthy-rich magnate—then you will have to look up to me, and then maybe I can feel good about myself. But if I felt held in love, there would be no reason to try to set myself above you.

  Behind all the evils of the world is the pain of a wounded, disconnected heart. We behave badly because we hurt inside. And we hurt because our basic nature is wide open and tender to begin with. Thus all the ugliness in the world can be traced back to turning away from our raw and beautiful heart.

  When we recognize this—that the sins of the world are but symptoms of the universal wound—we can understand the words of the French spiritual teacher Arnaud Desjardins when he writes: “There are no bad people (including Stalin and Hitler, who were responsible for the deaths of millions)—only badly loved people.” Here the root of all evil is laid bare: There are no bad people, only badly loved people. If Stalin, Hitler, or Osama bin Laden22 experienced themselves as loved and lovable, what motivation would they have to kill? Feeling love circulating through you makes you want to celebrate and nurture life, not destroy it.

  Of course, dictators like Stalin or Hitler don’t realize what is driving them, because they have buried the pain of their wounding underneath many layers of grievance, hardening, and self-aggrandizement. No doubt it would take many years of psychotherapy to unpack the ways that they are bruised, badly loved souls in need of tender, loving care. “If Stalin had been truly loved,” as Desjardins points out, “he would not have killed twenty million people.”

  The same holds true for humanity as a whole. Imagine for a moment humanity as an individual. If this fellow called Humanity knew himself as truly lovable, as a wondrous being whose essential nature was to bring luminous love and wisdom into this world, would he need to continue blindly destroying the planet while indulging in senseless violence and vengeance? As long as Humanity fails to recognize his basic goodness, he can only act in pathological, self-destructive ways. And when he stops for a moment to look at all the havoc he’s caused, he can only conclude that he is a miserable creature indeed. Meanwhile, the news media serve as a mirror in which Humanity looks at himself each day, reflecting back to him lurid, degraded images of what he is. How can poor old Humanity come to love himself when, continually seeing through this glass darkly, he witnesses only his own pettiness, depravity, and ugliness?

  Humanity as a whole is still a child in need of healing, in need of knowing that it is beautiful in its very nature. In traditional cultures, art, mythology, religion, and ritual helped humanity remember its divine essence. But today, lacking tradition, each of us must heal the heart and wake up to our inner beauty on our own, for the sake of humanity.

  The good news is that all the things we are most ashamed of, all of our so-called deadly sins, are only paper tigers. Look behind the tiger’s snarl and you find a sad, lonely, desperate child who feels disconnected from love. This brings all the horrors of the world down to size. The heart closing itself off to love is the origin of all bad karma, sending out shock waves that reverberate around the world.

  Letting Yourself Have Your Experience

  Since we can never gain assurance that we are lovable through trying to prove our worth or hide our flaws, what we need instead is a way to discover our core nature as intrinsically beautiful, already, just as it is. This is what can free us from the whole bad-self/bad-other runaround.

  The journey from self-hatred to self-love involves learning to meet, accept, and open to the being that you are. This begins with letting yourself have your experience. Genuine self-love is not possible as long as you are resisting, avoiding, judging, or trying to manipulate and control what you experience. Whenever you judge what you’re experiencing—“I shouldn’t be having this experience. It’s not good enough. I should be having some better experience than this one”—you’re not letting yourself be as you are. This aggravates the core wound of “I’m not acceptable as I am.” And it sets you at odds with yourself, creating inner division and turmoil. The way to free yourself from shame and self-blame is through developing a more friendly relationship with your experience, no matter what experience you’re having.

  Letting ourselves have our experience can be quite challenging, since nobody ever taught us how to relate honestly and directly to what we were feeling. Instead, the conventional wisdom in our culture is: If you’re depressed or anxious, take a pill, go work out at the gym, or turn on the television—because the only solution to bad feelings is to get away from them.

  Often when I try to help people open to their experience, they say something like: “I’ve felt this sadness all my life. What good is it to sit here and keep feeling it? I’ve already had enough of this!” While this is understandable, the voice that says, “If I feel my sadness, it will just pull me down into a bottomless black hole,” comes from the helpless child who has never learned to handle his or her experience. For the child, it was true: Our sadness was bigger than we were because we didn’t have the knowledge or capacity to process intense feelings. So our only choice was to shut down our nervous system in the face of our pain. The problem is that we still try to run away from our feelings, even though as an adult we now have the capacity to do something different.

  So yes, we have carried our pain within us all of our lives. Yes, we have felt weighed down by it, and been at its mercy. Since the pain was bigger than we were as children, and we were helpless in the face of it, shutting down was the only way we could deal with it. So it’s understandable that we see no benefit in opening ourselves to such feelings. And it’s true: Passively becoming submerged or carried away by feelings is useless and futile. It is unconscious suffering.

  This is not what I mean by letting yourself have your experience. I mean the very opposite: actively meeting, engaging, and opening to what you’re feeling. Consciously touching a feeling—“yes, this is the feeling that’s there”—starts to free you from its grip. If you can open to your fear or pain and put your attention on experiencing the openness itself, eventually you may discover something marvelous: Your openness is more powerful than the feelings you’re opening to. Openness to fear is much bigger and stronger than the fear itself. This discovery puts you in touch with your capacity for strength, kindness, stability, and understanding in the face of whatever
you are going through. This is conscious suffering.

  If there is one thing I have learned in thirty years as a psychotherapist, it is this: If you can let your experience happen, it will release its knots and unfold, leading to a deeper, more grounded experience of yourself. No matter how painful or scary your feelings appear to be, your willingness to engage with them draws forth your essential strength, leading in a more life-positive direction. My work, both with other people and with myself, has thoroughly convinced me of this truth, which has become the bedrock of my therapeutic practice.

  Just as the depth and stillness of the ocean lie hidden beneath the stormy waves on its surface, so the power of your essential nature lies concealed behind all of your turbulent feelings. Struggling against your feelings only keeps you tossing around on the stormy surface of yourself, disconnected from your larger being. Tossing in the waves keeps you from going beneath them and accessing the power, warmth, and openness of the heart.

  Letting yourself have your experience, by contrast, allows you to ride or surf the waves instead of being carried away by them. In moments of allowing and opening to your experience, you are—you are there for yourself. You are saying yes to yourself as you are, as you are feeling right now. This is a profound act of self-love.

  How then to start letting yourself have your experience? How to make friends with your feelings, just as they are in this moment, no matter how difficult they may be? The key is always to start right here where you are, wherever that is.

  For instance, if you’re confused or disturbed right now by what I’m suggesting, you could start by simply acknowledging the confusion or disturbance without judging it as something bad or trying to get rid of it. Or, if you would be willing to tune in to the place of unlove within you, you could see how it feels in your body. Simply acknowledge the sensations in your body and touch them with your awareness, while staying aware of your breathing: “Yes, this is what’s here.” When you give up struggling to ward off your experience, you start to relax.