I wrote about how I have reached the anger stage in grief recently. But what I didn’t realize at the time is how difficult it is for me to process one particular emotion, and that is hate. No matter how I look at things that have happened, I still can’t say I hate my abuser, but I can hate myself, and that is confusing me.

When I look at the situation as a whole, in taking the step back, I automatically go into empathy mode and put myself in the shoes of my abuser. Why he did what he did. What must have been going on with him to push him to the acts of abuse? I’ve even watered down the events so that they don’t seem as bad as they actually were. And yet, I found it so easy to hate myself. To punish who I was.

Why was I never able to show myself that same empathy

When I turned 9 years old, the sexual abuse ceased. It didn’t mean the abuse as a whole stopped with it. I continued it by not being able to feel worthy. Not seeing the good within myself. I wasn’t able to see the good that others saw, and for years I spent blaming myself for everything that happened, until I struggled to even accept who I was as an individual and how I looked.

I have spent far too many years in the self-hate cycle. It became a habit. Anything that occurred, even if I wasn’t at fault, I would automatically hate myself for it. I’ve been stuck in those thought patterns. And that is where I find myself right now. Trying to process those feelings. The feelings of why I put all my energy in self-loathing and not directing it at the person who actually warranted it. My abuser.

All that happened when I continued that cycle was that I would feel bad. I would then beat myself up and didn’t focus on learning from the mistakes and improving. Then my need to show up and fix things overrides my self-hatred to the extent that when I couldn’t fix the problem, I hated myself even more. So I have been putting in the work to drop the self-hate and to focus on learning instead.

Learning self love is a gradual process

I have really been trying to pile on the compassion and kindness for myself even though it still feels foreign. It’s now going on 6 months since I started really putting in that work to stop the self-hate and instead flip it into self-love. It hasn’t been easy, and there have been days I would fall back into old habits and pick myself apart. But the small things have been becoming bigger things, and it is getting easier.

I can even now take a compliment without resorting to humor about my appearance as a way to deflect, and I actually believe it when someone tells me something good about who I am. My self-confidence in how I look has improved, and I have been less self-critical.

I can forgive and understand people who have done hurtful things and even embrace them in love, so it’s about damn time I did the same for myself.