Speaking to Your Childhood Self
A lot of people carry some amount of self-hatred, and almost nobody wants to say so out loud. The odds are good that friends, family, the people sitting near you right now, feel versions of what you feel. We rarely bring it up with each other. The topic is uncomfortable, so it stays buried. There are plenty of reasons the feeling takes hold in the first place, and there are ways to work on it. One method I keep coming back to is writing a letter to your younger self, especially when you can trace the self-hatred to something that started in childhood.
So try to go back. As far back as your memory stretches.
Did you ever reach a point where you just didn't want to be you? Where you looked up to someone so completely that you wished you could trade places and become them? Maybe you spent hours lost in being Tinkerbell or Superman, and felt a small collapse when you had to come back to the ordinary afternoon. Maybe there were stretches of deep shame about yourself that you couldn't explain.
These are ordinary childhood feelings. There is nothing embarrassing about having had them. Good childhood or bad one, parents who showed up or parents who didn't, most of us hit a moment that felt like this. If none of it rings a bell, you belong to a lucky minority.
For the rest of us, the memory of it is lonely. There's a sense of being set slightly apart from everyone, as though you don't quite qualify to join in. Those early insecurities don't stay in childhood either. They tend to ride along into adult life, and sometimes we hand them, without meaning to, to our own kids.
What follows is a way to interrupt that.
Step one: see it. Picture your childhood self in one of the moments when you felt worst about who you were. Sit inside that memory. Let the image fill in until it stops being a picture and starts feeling like a place you are standing in.
Step two: change it. Now pull back out of that scene. If you're a woman, build in your mind the most wonderful mother you could possibly imagine. If you're a man, do the same with the father you would have wanted as a child. Give them whatever matters most to you: patience, warmth, humor, gentleness, steadiness. When the picture of this person is sharp, step into them. Become them. Carry all of those qualities in your own body for a minute. Spend a little time living as the Ideal Parent and get used to the feeling.
Step three: see it again. Walk back into the scene from step one, but this time as that Ideal Parent. From here you can look at your childhood self from the outside, clearly. What would you do, as this parent, to comfort that child? What words would you reach for to make the hurt smaller? Play the moment out in your imagination and do exactly what the Ideal Parent would do.
Step four: change it again. When the scene is finished, write down what the Ideal Parent said. When I did this myself, I ended up crying for a long while over how gentle the words were. It struck me that no one had ever spoken to me like that. The whole thing healed something, and I go back to what I wrote whenever things get hard. Reading it again fills me with a kind of comfort and steadiness I can't get any other way.
Here is part of the letter my ideal parent wrote to the child I used to be:
'I want you to feel a sense of worth when you hear your name, a sense of pride in your value and essential beauty. I want you to know the reverence and respect I have for you, even though you are only tiny. I love you. I will love you your whole life. I will heal you from the inside out. I want you to know that you are wonderful and special and beautiful and precious and worthy and lovable and there is nothing inherently wrong with you. You do not have to achieve to be worthy, you already are. You do not have to behave a certain way or match up to my expectations, you are lovely and a wonder to behold exactly as you are. You have such a lovely heart, tender and loving and giving, and the ideas you have to help people are amazing. I encourage you to follow your dreams. You have felt disrespected and controlled and unloved and inadequate and I am so sorry you had to feel that way. I hope you will forgive me. Whatever is happening around you, remember that you have the power of God in you. Smile, little darling, and always remember how sweet and lovely and beautiful you truly are.'
- Iman Mohiki