Confession: I was raised on Self-Hate.

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My parents didn't intentionally raise me on self-hate, it was the way they were raised. 

You see, back when my parent grew up, emotions were unimportant. Both of my parents came from big  families, my dad had ten brothers and sisters and my mother had nine. They grew up during the Great Depression and went through World War II and the Korean War.  

During their growing up years, life was very tough on my parents and grandparents. How they felt wasn't important to them. What was important to them was surviving.  

As a kid growing up, what I felt wasn't important to my parents, how could it be. What they felt wasn't important to their parents. Life back then was never about feelings, it was about surviving.

I never knew why I hated myself so much. I was good at hating myself. I was not only good at it, worse yet, I was a master at denying how much I hated myself. Denial of emotions is what people do when life is about surviving rather than prospering and thriving.

It wasn't until years later than I came to understand why I was such a good person on the outside yet hated myself so much on the inside. You see, I was raised up to follow the rules and become a good person and make my parent proud as my parents were raised up to make their parents proud. That's what was important back in the time of my parents, looking good, not feeling good.

As a result of my feelings not being important to anyone else, I had no permission to make them important to me.  The way I dealt with negative feelings was to deny them by hating my emotions. I did that until one day my feelings wouldn't be denied any more....  And when my feelings finally did rush to the surface, like an angry tiger released from his cage, I realized how much I hated myself. That explained why I was depressed for years and felt suicidal at times.

Once I realized how much self-hatred I had in me, I used those feelings as an ALERT signal to love myself instead. This required me to love everything about myself including loving my feelings of self-hatred. Not logical I know, but by loving my feelings of self-hatred to death, I literally loved them out of existence. 

If you want to know how I loved the negatives feelings in my life, out of existence, you can read my blog entry titled: How to Burn Off Negative Feeling Quickly

The Kindness Project (KP)

Being Yourself, Being a Person of Power