On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself (Lessons for Life) - Hardcover

The School Of Life

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1912891875 ISBN 13: 9781912891870

Publisher: The School of Life, 2023

Synopsis

"The School of Life: On Self-Hatred may be the most essential of The School of Life’s essential philosophy handbooks: it reminds us, yet again, that we are not alone, that much more connects us than divides us and that self-acceptance is one of the most important keys to peace of mind." - Emma Thompson, DBE British actress and screenwriter

A guide to emotional healing and living a more self-accepting life.

Behind many of our problems lies an often ignored factor: we don’t like ourselves very much. We are sufferers of self-hatred. We tell ourselves the meanest things. It’s because of self-hatred that we tend to neglect our potential at work and get entangled in unfulfilling relationships, that we lack confidence in our social lives and suffer from anxiety, despair and imposter syndrome.

This is a book that, with immense compassion and fellow feeling, investigates the phenomenon of self-hatred while giving pragmatic advice on how to overcome it. It asks where the feeling comes from, what it makes us do and how we might become kinder and more compassionate towards ourselves.

We have probably spent far too much of our lives disliking ourselves and attacking everything we say, do or feel, while not even realizing what we’re up to. It’s time to overcome our masochism and move towards a more self-forgiving and accepting stance. The School of Life: On Self Hatred is a guide to the more compassionate and gentle relationship we should have had with ourselves from the start, and can all achieve now.

• IDENTIFIES THE ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES OF SELF-HATRED: and provides advice for living a more self-accepting life.
• ENCOURAGES US TO DEVELOP ASSERTIVENESS AGAINST SELF-LOATHING: and gives us the tools to challenge our inner critic and deal with imposter syndrome.
• ACCESSIBLE AND PRAGMATIC: with a compassionate and realistic tone, outlining the importance of self-care.
• PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S SERIES OF GIFTABLE ESSAYS: other titles include: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, On Confidence, How to Find Love and Self-Knowledge.

About this title

About the Author

The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfillment.
The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.
The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 7 million YouTube subscribers, 389,000 Facebook followers, 174,000 Instagram followers and 166,000 Twitter followers.
The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Behind a lot of mental illness is an ingredient that we’re not used to considering on its own as an agent of our unhappiness: self-hatred. We may feel as if we are just worried about the future, unable to overcome regrets or uncomfortable around other people, but first and foremost we may be experts at hating ourselves. Self-hatred deserves to be recognised and studied as one of the greatest causes of our misery, responsible for more despair, loneliness and suicides than almost any other affliction of our troublesome minds.

Self-hatred is the bitter fruit of an ingrained sense of what we should be like. We hate the way we are because, somewhere in our evolution, we picked up some unyielding ideas about the way we should be: what we should have achieved, how many mistakes we should have made, how we should look, what others should be saying about us. We carry within us a gamut of expectations that remorselessly torment us and inflict on us some of the many symptoms of self-hatred: a tense spine, insomnia, malfunctioning bowels, a longing for but also discomfort about our achievements, a feeling of dread and, in the wake of crises, a desire to kill ourselves.

One of the reasons why self-hatred can be so hard to overcome is the belief that its opposite and cure lies with something called self-love, a belief that we will finally cease to hate ourselves when we learn to admire, delight in and cherish our own being. It sounds logical and kindly enough, and we are frequently nudged to do this: we are invited to look at ourselves in the mirror afresh and see the beauty in our features; we are encouraged to celebrate our strengths and our innate resourcefulness, creativity and power.

There is kindness in such advice, but the results can be paradoxical. Unable to locate the wonder that we are being drawn to contemplate, we may be submerged beneath a new and yet more vicious wave of self-hatred; we need to add a failure at self-love to our list of defeats. Or else, seduced into over-eager admiration, we may lose contact with important sources of self-scepticism and modesty. The cure for self-hatred does not lie in heightening self-love, but in fostering self-acceptance. Self-acceptance does not require us to overcome every vestige of self-criticism. It is compatible with a realistic appraisal of our strengths and weaknesses. While practising self-acceptance, we can remain in many ways sorrowful about, and suspicious of, ourselves.

A self-hating person not only dislikes themselves, they cannot get over their dislike; they remain tied to their hatred by the shortest of nooses. Every new day, they must return to self-recrimination: they cannot forget all the daft moves they made; they refuse to tolerate their appearance; they can’t let go of the idea of where they should be in their careers by now; they never forget the mean things others are saying.

Behind this repetitiveness lies not only masochism, but a manic attachment to the possibility of a perfect life. Perfectionism turns out to be a secret fuel for self-hatred. However modest the self-hating person might outwardly seem, inside they are in agony because they refuse to surrender their attachment to being potentially flawless, physically beautiful, morally pure, error-free and wholly successful in the eyes of the world.

Self-acceptance points in another direction: it starts with the certainty that to be human is to err, to fail, to be foolish, to have ugly sides, to make mistakes, to age, to die and, along the way, never to be far from ridiculousness, fatuousness and idiocy. These are not criticisms of any one person or matters for individual reproof; they are facts about the human race. The self-accepting person can take these bitter ideas on board with grace and a healthy measure of humour – the most sophisticated response to the gap between our expectations and our reality. The self-accepting are not surprised by evidence of where they have fallen short; they navigate the world with a strong sense of their inherent ridiculousness.

Ultimately we have to measure the worth of negative emotions by their power to keep us alive. By this standard, there is surely an occasional role for self-dissatisfaction and guilt, for regret and melancholy. But what serves no purpose is a long-term determined hatred of one’s own being.

We are all a bit awful – it is a fact of being human – yet however much this may have grimly fascinated and detained us until now, we should gradually let go of this idea in order to fulfil our true purpose on the earth, which is to be of maximal use to other people, in whatever way we can, in the time we have left. Self-hatred may have underpinned the past; it does not need to be our future.

Edition details

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1912891875
• ISBN 13: 9781912891870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144