Addicted to self-rejection

Welcome to my second blog post! Thank you for the support on the first one <3 The sense of achievement and pride I got from it was immense, and it made me realise how important this blog will be for me. To those who found it led them to take action and go to doctors, that is amazing!!! I hope this piece will also inspire action, but maybe in the form of self-reflection.

I was planning on writing a piece on my favourite film “Threads”, but recently I have felt a strong sense of urgency to write about some realisations I’ve had within the last week, mainly to process them for myself, and hopefully to shed this light on a profoundly human, universal experience.

I have always struggled with my self-worth. From a very young age, I didn’t accept myself on an unconditional level. 

I was a very sensitive child, you know one of those who cried when the teacher shouted (even when it wasn’t directed at them!), and this was my first ever battle against who I truly was.

Teachers used to roll their eyes when I began to get upset, which admittedly wasn’t even that often, they’d state my sensitivity as an area that needs improvement within my school reports, and when my classmates would comfort me, they would tell them to stop. I was around 6 years old when I started getting fed these messages. I was just a child. It was my first ‘reality check’ that being attuned to myself was not good enough, that I had to change who I was in order to receive praise and approval. 

Other than that, I was a very high achiever in school, and I believed I used this as a redeeming quality to cover up this ‘flaw’ that my teachers saw in me. It was a form of making myself more loveable and palatable to others, it was a performance, an image I curated for myself.

This idea of performance has stuck with me my whole life. It has evolved into many different images, but all of them stem from this deep feeling of not being good enough as I am. From the image of the perfect daughter, to the perfect student, to the perfect girlfriend. Since adolescence, I have dealt with a fundamental feeling of being unlovable, which has been inherent within every romantic interaction. This resulted in an impossible quest towards being perfect, reflecting my earlier beliefs that I was ‘too sensitive’ or ‘too much’ as myself.

This awareness however led to an endless pursuit of ‘fixing myself’, buying self-help books about anxiety to make me easier to love, listening to podcasts to heal my unrelenting anxiety surrounding relationships, yet none of it worked. Not one thing penetrated this fundamental dissatisfaction with myself that was the core of it all.

Until, I realised that they were just further adding to it. All of these attempts were of a flawed motivation, I didn’t do it out of love or respect for myself, I did it out of hate. I did it to make others like me more.

I felt completely lost. I had no idea that all of these years pining for the answer to all of this suffering had just been contributing to it, until a few days ago.

One book gave me the answer that there is no answer. 

“Addicted to Love” by Jan Geurtz is a book I read on a whim, on a final desperate attempt to maybe find something that would just sort me out and end this cycle of suffering. I ended up reading it within a day, and found myself with my jaw on the floor at some of the remarks due to how much they resonated.

I thought it would just be any other self-help book: read some positive affirmations! Name your inner critic! Understand your attachment style! Do the box method of breathing! Pretty much just surface level, CAMHS-level advice. None of it worked, it basically acted like putting a small plaster on a stab wound, yeah it helped a little, but it never got to the root cause.

This was different. I’m currently in the process of reading it again, immediately after finishing the first read.

Guertz’s main premise of the book is how our search for love and approval comes from a fundamental self-rejection. He shines a light on the four layers of our identity: 

1 - The fundamental negative belief: a feeling of not being good enough as you are e.g. “I’m too much” “I’m too sensitive” “I am a burden”

2 - Rules and conditions we must fulfil to believe we are good enough: these usually come in the form of either unattainable, or mutually contradictory life rules we hold. We believe it keeps us safe from our negative beliefs, our self-rejection, or other’s rejection. E.g. “You mustn't show negative emotions” “You mustn't ask for too much” “You must withhold your needs”

3 - Patterns in behaviour - these are the behaviours which manifest as a result of the rules e.g. perfectionism, minimising one’s needs, never crying.

4 - The image - this is the final layer, and it seeks to conceal every one of the previous ones. It is how we want others to see us. It is the performance of seeming ‘stable’ or ‘secure’ or ‘put together’ e.g. the image of being low maintenance, the image of being unbothered, the image of being emotionally regulated

This resonated with me like no other advice. I saw these layers of identity throughout my whole life, and everything these layers have in common is self-rejection.

It was a difficult realisation to see that I’d never really accepted myself. It made me scared, thinking my whole life was a lie, but then I realised this very fear was the self-rejection talking: “See! Confronting your real self is scary, you should avoid it and go back to what you’re used to”.

This is when I made the further realisation that all this “anxiety” that I had been feeling surrounding relationships was in fact shame of who I was and how I saw myself. I wasn’t really scared of abandonment or rejection, I was scared that it would prove me right, and how I would spiral into self hatred. I was terrified of my own mind.

I’m writing all this in past tense, but really I still feel all of this very much, even as I’m writing this. In a way I’m doing this to cope, but I also like to think I’m doing it to signal a new reality and a new way of living, and leaving this 18 years of shame in the past. 

The title “Addicted to Love” also highlights the nature of this constant battle. It is an addiction. Yes it might not be to drugs or alcohol or sex, but it is just as damaging and addictive. It is a problem made worse by our ‘solution’ to it - isn’t that the whole premise?

This image we present of ourselves (the fourth layer) is the core of the addiction. The compulsive behaviours we use are reflective of compulsive use of drugs. The high is approval from others and the absence of rejection. The thing we run from is our negative beliefs about ourselves. And it even follows the same tricks of addiction to keep us in it - “you won’t be able to cope without it!”, “you’ll be worse off if you stop!” “it’s impossible to heal”.

What Geurtz said was the solution to this addiction was an acknowledgement of the true, perfect nature of the self. I was skeptical at first too - thinking this was just some New Age, unrealistic spiritual shite. This was until I realised it was true. 

So many problematic behaviours of mine and yours can be explained by a fundamental rejection of our true selves. Pure kindness can be distorted by the belief “I am a bad person” into people-pleasing. Intelligence can be mutilated by the belief “I am stupid” into becoming arrogant. Vulnerability can be infected by the belief “I am weak” into false strength and hiding emotions. Emotional attunement into disconnection and coldness. 

I brought up so many counter-examples to try not to believe this - I imagined a range of people from murderers and dictators, to just shitty people in general, people who are mean, selfish, aggressive, inconsiderate, and I thought, “well surely my self-rejection is protecting me from being like them”. I then realised that all of these behaviours I condemned and wanted to stay away from were also a result of self-rejection. 

People chat shit because they are unhappy with who they are, they are aggressive because they feel as if showing sadness or vulnerability is a flaw, they are selfish because they feel they cannot open up to others. Plus, murderers and dictators don’t seem like the happiest, most secure, emotionally intelligent people ever, to put it lightly.

Self-rejection does not protect you from being a bad person. I always thought this - if I’m not harsh on myself then what’s stopping me from turning into an emotional wreck, a bitch, a bad person? In my case, self-rejection wasn’t something I openly projected onto others, it was instead directed at myself. It made me a bad person to myself. This doesn’t mean that once I let go, I’ll be completely self centered and selfish, instead, I will be able to show my unconditional love and kindness to myself without letting fear get in the way. It’ll open up my capacity for love and clarity even further. 

This is not to say my life has been a lie. This is a trick my self-rejection is implementing to make me scared and run from acknowledging it. I have been able to love deeply and genuinely without fear on many occasions, with pure kindness and sensitivity oozing from every pore, even when I have this shame. What I am looking forward to now is to keep loving like this, but now also offer it to myself. 

I feel as if I cannot offer a solution here just yet, there are many meditations and practices I need to implement into my life in order to not just be aware of this, but realise it. The key is to look inwards into the mind, more specifically the self, and I cannot wait to see this. Perspective is the answer.

Instead of putting endless plasters on the wound, instead I will now be removing the knives from around me.

I hope when I next write about this topic that I will have a success story for you.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes” - Marcel Proust, an excerpt from Addicted to Love.