Is self-hate a hate crime? A crime against humanity? Are there any or many crimes that don't involve some element of hate? Perhaps those that involve greed?
Back to self-hate...Hate crimes are crimes of pathological abstractionism. This pathological abstractionism is either learned through 'introjection' (such as listening and copying one's parents, or peers, or members of a particular group...) or through abstractifying personal experience. We have perhaps a very bad experience with one or a few members of a particular group of people who are then 'abstractified' by nationality, religion, culture, skin colour, sex, etc. And at this point, (y)our hate, instead of being perhaps justified towards one or a few people who actually hurt or traumatized us becomes unjustified towards a thousand or a million or more people who had nothing to do with your hurt or trauma. Such is the nature of hate crimes.
Now self-hate is abstractified hate turned inwards to the extent that we overgeneralize our perceived bad qualities at the expense of missing our perceived or unperceived good qualities, and then focus in on these bad qualities, crystalize them, stagnant them, make them our 'defining negative characteristics' and start to wallow in them (depression), rage against them (like raging against aging which we can only do so much about) or raging against some other characteristic or quality that maybe we can do something about, or maybe we can't -- or won't. Perhaps we have one of those characteristics that our 'Shadow' controls and 'throws us for a loop' every time we think we have things back on track again. Our 'Self-Saboteur'.
In the end, self-hate penetrates -- or can easily penetrate -- the gap between our self-ideal and our self-image. The larger this self-ideal to self-image gap is, and the more torturous and unrelenting our 'Critical Superego' is, the more we are likely to get caught up in the 'self-torture game', the 'self-hate game', except it is no game in any sense of the word 'game' meaning 'fun'. And the more we abstractify and crucify ourselves, obviously the worse this 'game' can get. And at the point of over-abstractification, and over-crucification, self-hate can indeed become a crime of hate...in the form of an ethcial and/or legal transgression against oneself...
How do you stop this process?
Well, we can do at least three different things or some combination of any or all of them.
1. You self-ideal or self-expectations are too high. Lower them. Make them less demanding. More tolerant. More human. Allow yourself the capability of error and/or the possibility of 'a lesser performance' than you expected from yourself' that might be relevant to unforseen circumstances that you did not anticipate, and/or simply to your being human and fallible;
2. Find one or more ways of 'raising your performance level'. Dig deeper. Find your way through or around the obstacle. Don't let the obstacle become your albatross, your 'ball in chains'... Persevere...
3. If your life is really dark and bleary...dreary...change it...radically if need be...or at least get out of your routine...as the cliche says, you have only one life to live so find one that you can enjoy...even if that means jumping from bad job to bad job until you find one that you can live with....and keep striving upwards towards that 'existential fit'...same with your relationship(s) if need be...again, find one that works for you, and/or shake up the longstanding one that may need a new 'facelift'...Relationships need to evolve just as people do, or else they will become 'living dead things'...
Enough for tonight...sometimes you need to experience your 'darkness' before you can get back to your 'light'...and sometimes you may even need to integrate some of your 'darkness' with your 'light'...your 'personna' with your 'shadow'...your 'topdog' with your 'underdog' in order to become a more 'vibrant, live person' again rather than that 'living dead thing'...or that person who has 'torn him or herself to shreds' in that nasty 'self hate and self-torture game'...I've given you three ways to get out of it...
-- dgb, Oct. 6th, 2010.
