Journaling Power: Losing Self-Loathing

Does it happen with you sometimes? Are there times when you just don’t like yourself? When you feel like a big disappointment to yourself; like you can’t do anything right; like you’re a colossal waste of material?

If you’ve never felt that way, you are very lucky. It’s really common to experience self-loathing at one point or another. Depression can bring it on in terrifying waves, but you don't have to be depressed. You may have brief spurts of disgust rather than full blown depression. Either way, it’s about as unpleasant a feeling as you’ll ever experience. 

It’s so critical that we love ourselves! But at times you not only lose self-love, you realize you actually despise yourself. That’s when everything falls apart. 

You’re going to need to change, or you’ll get sick. You’re without hope but you have to figure out how to go on. You don’t know where to start. 

Oh yes you do. You start with your journal. 

Self-hatred is dangerously debilitating, but it’s 100% preventable with journaling. 

1. Journal about the self-disgust you feel. Get into details about when it started, how it grew, how it makes you feel, what it makes you do. 

2. Write about loathing in general: describe what it is, how it operates. Give your self-disgust a name and an image. “Oh there’s Hal again, oozing into my brain, making everything black.” 

3. Try an exercise: as your pen is guided by one hand, look at the other hand, and write about how it looks to you. Set a timer and challenge yourself to write past the moment when you think you’re done. Ask, what does my hand look like? How do I use it? What does my hand want from me? What makes it happy? 

4. Journal about three people or things you love. Write about what makes you love them. 

5. Make a list of causes: any helping project that interests you. Come up with at least five charitable acts or programs. They can be big or small. They could range from volunteering at the hospital to calling your mother more often. They just need to focus on helping another person.

In a way, self-loathing represents our most profound thinking. Realizing just exactly how lowly we are is devastating, but it also leads us to new awareness, one that’s fundamental to enlightenment. So we shouldn’t just dismiss feelings of self-disgust. They’re actually building blocks. 

Sure is ironic: you’ve lost faith in yourself, so how can you find the get-up-and-go to lift yourself out of this darkness? 

See #5 above. Do something for another. Make someone else happy, ease their pain, focus on them. Hands down, that’s the cure. Like it or not. Force yourself.

The smallest act of kindness towards another will have you feeling better. Can you imagine what regular action of that kind will bring you? 

Journal your plans, and journal the results. Keep track, stay observant. 

Self-hatred commands respect; it’s not just “in your mind.” It’s an affliction that comes over most of us now and then. But its control diminishes significantly when Journal Power comes into play.