UNAIR NEWS – The self-hatred phenomenon or the tendency to self-blame often affects students, especially those with pressure. Realizing this, Airlangga Safe Space held an event titled Overcoming Self-Hatred: Why You Hate Yourself and How to Stop Doing So on Saturday, May 28, 2022. The event was meant to recognize and stop self-hatred behavior.

Savira Anjani MPsi Psychologist attended the event as the keynote speaker. She is a child, teenager, and young adult clinical psychologist. According to Savira, self-hatred is the feeling of guilt, inadequacy, incapable, and low self-esteem which happens continuously.

“So if it happened only once, it’s not self-hatred yet. But if it continues, for a long time, it is considered self-hatred,” she explained.

The Co-founder of counseling service @deepsmalltalk also mentioned that traumatic childhood experiences could be one cause of self-hatred behavior. Types of traumatic behavior include bullying, parents’ abandonment, and domestic violence.

“We are used to feel not worthy, undeserving. We are being ignored, we are not heard, and we are criticized again and again. We are used to feeling like that,” Savira further expressed.

Another factor that causes self-hatred is the habit of comparing oneself to others. The result is that people will feel not enough with themselves and find it challenging to appreciate themselves for who they are.

“We could be better than the people we compared ourselves to. Because we often compare ourselves, we cannot appreciate that we are also beautiful, smart, excellent, and many more,” said Savira.

She continued by stating that self-hatred created someone to have bad self conceptualization. Moreover, someone in the self-hatred condition tends to be affected by other psychological disorders, such as stress and depression.

“We often underestimate ourselves,” Savira revealed.

According to Savira, stopping self-hatred habits could be started from a simple thing such as accepting compliments to a more complex thing such as self-compassion. “We hated ourselves because we are too hard on ourselves. Self-compassion is the opposite: we forgive ourselves, we are kinder to ourselves,” Savira explained.

Author: Ghulam Phasa Pambayung Editor: Nuri Hermawan