Why We Attack Ourselves: Understanding Where It Started
We all know that sinking feeling of being really hard on ourselves. For some of us, we experience it as a gut-wrenching, overall sensation of being “bad” or “wrong” at our very core. For others, it’s a harsh internal voice that seems to stand at the ready to bring us down, just when we’ve worked up the courage to try something new, or something we’ve failed at in the past. Just as we’re poised to take a risk for our benefit, this internal voice tells us we’re “no good”, or “will never be enough, no matter what, so why try?”.
But what is this feeling, this voice? Why do we attack ourselves in the first place? Something that might surprise many of us: Self-attack is learned, and it often has good reasons. I don’t mean that our self-attack is right. I mean that we come by it honestly, and that there are good reasons we learned to do it. And appreciating this is part of healing.
Let’s take a moment to go back in time. Imagine yourself as a young child, or imagine a young child that you know. A teacher once asked me, “Is any child born thinking ‘I’m no good’ or ‘Something is wrong with me?’” I don’t know about you, but I don’t think so! Self-attack is something that children learn. But how and why do they learn it?
Go back to this child you had in your mind’s eye before. See how this child is totally dependent on their parents or caregivers to meet all their needs. Not just food and shelter, but emotional needs, too: the need to feel welcomed in this world, the need to feel seen and understood, the need to be loved for who they really are, the need to trust and rely on others.
I will go out on a limb here, and say that no child has all their needs, material or emotional, met perfectly by their parents. And not because their parents are bad, but because all parents are human beings: Like all of us, they are flawed. Environmental factors like war, economic hardship, and natural disasters also play a huge role.
So imagine this young child again, totally dependent on their caregivers and environment for everything. What happens when important needs go unmet? The brutal reality is often that parents, at that moment, in that particular place, were not capable of meeting their child’s needs. Maybe there was a war going on. Maybe their parents were carrying unimaginable burdens of their own that got in the way.
But if this young child were to accept this reality, it would create hopelessness. Parents or caregivers are a child’s whole world. How horrible would it be to accept that this world is simply not going to fulfill these needs they have at their very core?
This is the origin of self-attack. In my experience, children opt out of hopelessness, and instead tell themselves, “I’m not worthy of getting what I need.” This is painful, but it keeps hope alive. They think, “If I’m the problem, maybe I can fix myself. If I just try harder, or need less, then I’ll finally be loved the way I need to be loved.”
This was actually brilliant. It kept the child emotionally connected to their parents, even when the relationship couldn't hold them the way they needed. It meant maintaining hope in what can be a dangerous and unjust world. Seen from this perspective, self-attack was a brilliant strategy. It helped us to make it through, to survive situations in which the world couldn’t give us what we really needed.
But then we grew up. We no longer depend on our parents or caregivers, yet we continue to attack ourselves by telling ourselves we’re bad or wrong at our core, that we’ll never be good enough, etc. The strategy that once protected us now hurts us: It keeps us from going for what we want, it keeps us from feeling confident and lovable just as we are, it hurts us, and keeps us stuck.
This is a new perspective for many people: The self-attack that can feel like just “who we are” is really something we learned in order to survive, in order to protect ourselves from the harsh realities of the world.
Giving ourselves grace means aligning our inner voice with God's voice, extending to ourselves the same mercy God extends to us. As Paul writes, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). As parents, as people, we are all flawed. God knows this, and meets us with compassion, not condemnation, in our imperfect state. God sees belovedness, not worthlessness; a child learning and growing, not a failure who can never measure up.
Can we learn to look at ourselves the same way? Can we meet our own imperfection with the same compassion God offers us?
Hart to Heart is here to help you on this journey
