The root of self-hatred?

I was doing a practice the other day that deepened my inner silence quite a bit. When I did this, something interesting suddenly came up.

It’s a fairly common phenomenon that when you reach some deeper state of fundamental wellbeing, some things that were going on that are not enjoyed, but aren’t resisted, suddenly start being resisted. As a result of this, I noticed something rather astonishing. The way I would describe it, which may or may not be accurate, is that every single time I “feel bad,” this is self-hatred arising.

I have a friend who did the Finders’ Course a couple of years ago, and after he’d done it, he reported that his co-workers found that he had suddenly become a bit abrasive. When we dug into this, it appeared to be the case that he’d been ignoring a fair few things that were bothersome to him: he’d been pretending that they didn’t bother him.

When he landed in a deeper state of fundamental well-being, this pretence dropped without him noticing it, and the result was the appearance to his co-workers that he’d suddenly become abrasive. Once we realized what was going on, he was able to manage the situation, but it caught us by surprise.

Yesterday I found myself getting really triggered by some issues around free time. These are issues that I’d been aware of before, but hadn’t risen up to the level where it was obvious to me that they were bothering me. Suddenly they surfaced, and I found myself reacting really defensively and unkindly.

This was pretty alarming, both for me and for the person who was the target of that reaction. I don’t want to be the kind of person who lashes out in response to being triggered by something. And yet this is a behaviour that I see myself engaging in often enough that it feels like it’s something that needs to be addressed.

So at first I was mostly just thinking about “how do I not do this again?” “Why did I do this.” I was feeling pretty badly about myself. After a while, I noticed a couple of things. First, I noticed that essentially all of the mental pain I was feeling was me punishing myself. That is, any mental pain I feel that’s connected to any mental activity or any external activity is necessarily coming from me, not from somewhere else. And so it must be my mind engaging in negative reinforcement, or, to put it differently, self-hatred.

This feels like a pretty radical view. If I take the position (which I do) that I don’t ever want to use negative reinforcement on myself, then that immediately renders every instance of mental pain I experience unskillful. I don’t mean that the identification of to what is going on as something to want to avoid is necessarily invalid (although it certainly could be). Rather, what I mean is that the response—the mental pain—is never justified, and never just “something natural that occurs.” It’s an activity. It’s suffering, plain and simple. Suffering is an activity, something I’m doing. If I want to change, if I want my behaviour to be better, I want to use some different method for changing my habits. Something that doesn’t involve mental pain. I need to learn to stop doing the activity of suffering as if it could stop my suffering.

As I was reflecting on this a bit, I noticed that my reaction—my lashing out—seems to be exactly the same process. It’s externalized, sure, but it’s the same problem. This is where the title of the blog post comes from. If I can get at the root of what’s causing this behavior pattern toward myself, which is really automatic, then this might also address this outward behavior that I really don’t want to see in myself.

It’s been obvious to me for a long time that trying to get people to stop doing things I don’t want them to do through negative feedback doesn’t work. But just knowing that hasn’t stopped me doing it. It’s genuinely a reflex. If you follow me on Twitter, you can see me reacting this way from time to time. I always feel bad about it afterwards. Which, ironically, is the same activity.

If they really are coming from the same place, then maybe this insight into what that place is is useful. I’m not sure how to turn this into a practice, but at the very least I’ve been noticing this self-punishing happening a lot now that I’m aware of the process. I’ll be curious to see whether this noticing really decreases the amount of self-punishing I do, and also whether it softens my tendency to do other-punishing speech on twitter.