Self-hatred CAN lead to healing...maybe

Do you think that, in order to change yourself (and I mean truly change, as in re-wire your brain to alter your perceptions and reactions to the world), that you must first hate yourself?

What prompted this train of thought was talking to my Aunt S. She recently caught on to the wonders of Buddhism, and she actually went on the yoga retreat with Shiva Rea. She considers herself quite enlightened. But I still sense a lot of anger, sadness, and fear in her. And A LOT of denial. She keeps telling me that I need to just let go, that I need to stop focusing any energy on the negative experiences I've had. I'm not sure, maybe she's right. But my understanding is that you have to deal with those issues. Those negative experiences directly correlate with the behaviors, thoughts, habits ect. (aka the borderline in me) that I want to change. So how can I change something I don't understand? How can you change something that you don't know inside and out?

I think too many people get caught up in the suffering aspect of the healing process, though--this is what my aunt is referring to. It's like being stuck on a rat wheel. But giving your past sufferings attention is only going to put you on a rat wheel if your not focusing forward. There need to be connections. Yes, my mom hit me so hard my nose bled, and the emotional abuse ran so deep that I immediately ran into her arms for comfort. I do need to validate that pain. I need to let my inner child grieve, I need to comfort that inner child, and I also need to let that inner child know she's safe now, because I've grown up and I am strong enough to protect her. I know now that incident made me run back to people after they mistreated me because I wanted to be accepted so badly. That's the suffering's connection to my present day behavior. So I deal with suffering...this is especially important to me, because I grew up with all of my suffering being invalidated by my aunts (my mom is the oldest of nine kids...) because my mother manipulated them (and almost all of them have BPD to some degree). And then, I transform the suffering. I turn it into forgiveness, into unconditional love, into genuine compassion. The trick is, I do all this while protecting my inner child. I will not let her get mistreated any more (okay, I'm working on it. Beth is my greatest teacher for this right now...), and I will set healthy boundaries (accomplished...my mom and I have a safe relationship right now!) that won't let her get hit over and over again. But I know I'm a wonderful friend. I know that I am the change I wish to see in the world, because no one ever gave me that second chance. If I made a mistake, that was it, I was bad. But that isn't right. People need help, people need forgiveness and compassion. They need someone who believes in the good in them, because sometimes its hard for people to believe in the good in themselves.

But back to the hate thing...I noticed that my aunt cannot admit to the emotional trauma she caused me. She flat out denies that incidents occurred. "You are mistaken," is what she said. But there were concrete incidents that she couldn't deny, and she avoided discussing them like the plague. She went off on all these tangents filled with anger, but mostly I saw that she was protecting herself. She could not deal with what she had done, with who she was, and it's probably because she'd hate herself for what she did to me.

My Aunt Patricia was murdered right after I turned a year old. For years, my grandma would just be sitting in the kitchen, crying. And I didn't know why. I was only three, four years old. And I remember asking Aunt S why she was crying, and she told me that it was because of me. I felt AWFUL. Or when I would make a mistake, she'd look at me with disgust and say, "What were you thinking??" I would fill up with so much hatred for myself, because I felt like I must be so inherently bad for screwing up the way I had. The worst thing she did was when I found out that I pregnant. My mom was too ashamed to tell anyone, so when I was planning the baby shower she wouldn't give any of our family and friends' addresses to us. So for the online registration, I didn't put her address as a shipping address...what I didn't realize was that made her not listed as a grandparent. Stupid, I know. But in her Borderline Rage, she couldn't decide whether to talk to me or shun me all together. So my Aunt S gave her my book, Understanding the Borderline Mother, which was filled with my annotations. She told my mom that she wanted her to have the book so she could see how much I hated her. That was absolutely incorrect guidance, because the purpose of that book was first to validate what I had experienced, and secondly how to live with her as she was. Why the hell would I want to learn to work with her disorder if I hated her? The love I have for my mother is unlike anything I have ever experienced. And so I was alone for my whole pregnancy, and the first nine months of having a baby. I didn't have my mommy.
But not once did I blame my aunt for this. All she did was talk about how I could go ahead and blame her, and never talk to her again, blah blah blah...and then it dawned on me. She blamed herself. And if she focused on that, she would hate herself, because what she did was awful. And she isn't strong enough to deal with that. She wouldn't be able to move past the hate. So she lives in denial.

All Borderlines hate themselves, deep down. A lot of us are aware of it. The trick is taking that hatred, embracing it, understanding it, validating it. And then, transforming it. Using that energy to learn from it. Hatred is just an emotion, just energy. When all that energy is redirected into healing, amazing things can happen. I'm seeing those amazing things every day.