Taught to Hate Myself

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📖 "_He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds._" — Psalm 147:3 (NKJV)

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Six years ago today, I shared something that stopped me in my tracks when I saw it again. I remember the moment — that uncomfortable recognition when you read something and quietly think, yes, that is true of me.

It was an image of a child with tears on her face, and words that landed like a stone:

"When you keep criticizing your kids, they don't stop loving you, they stop loving themselves. Let that sink in."

Alongside it, I shared another quote that cut even deeper:

"Everything I learned about self-hatred I was taught by the hands that loved me."

I posted it. Briefly. Honestly. With a crying face and a few words about generational cycles. I wrote that I'd been working at unlearning it all for almost two years.

Looking back now, I don't think I fully understood the weight of what I was saying. I only knew that something deep within me needed to name it out loud.

Now, six years later, Facebook has brought that post back as an "On This Day" memory.

I don't see it as an algorithm.

I see it as a signpost.

Breaking the generational cycle of emotional neglect and abuse is one of the greatest challenges of our time — and one of the most personal. We can't heal what we refuse to acknowledge. We can't change what we refuse to name.

And I was guilty of more than I first realised.

I judged my parents as cold and distant. It felt like truth at the time — perhaps it even was, in part. But we know that when we judge, we set in motion the laws of sowing and reaping. We become what we judged. We reap it back with increase — in our relationships, in our parenting, in the very patterns we swore we'd never repeat — until those judgements, expectations, inner vows and foundational lies are confessed, repented of, and put to death at the cross of Christ.

That is where the cycle truly breaks.

Not in our resolve. Not in our self-awareness. At the cross.

If we truly desire to change the world for the better, it begins in the hidden places of our own hearts, where we courageously face the baggage that has been handed down so that we don't simply pass it on to the next generation.

That was what I believed then.

It is what I believe even more deeply today.

The hardest part of that quote is its tenderness. It doesn't say, "I was taught by cruel hands," or "I was taught by people who didn't care". It says, "the hands that loved me."

That is the part that still undoes me.

The people who shaped my earliest understanding of my own worth loved me, in the ways they knew how, with what they had. Some wounds were intentional. Others flowed from pain they themselves had never healed. Whatever their source, they landed, and they shaped the way I saw myself.

What we absorb in childhood becomes the lens through which we interpret ourselves, others, and even God.

Yet God, in His incredible mercy, has been patiently dismantling that distorted lens in me.

He doesn't shatter it.

He redeems it.

He gently shows me where the glass was cracked long before I ever held it, then He lovingly replaces the lies with His truth.

I am not who I was taught I was.

I am who God says I am.

The unlearning continues.

It is slower, deeper, and far more layered than I ever imagined when I first began this journey. Two years became six. Six will become however long God knows is necessary.

That isn't failure.

It is simply how roots grow.

Deep healing takes time.

Deep healing takes grace.

Deep healing takes a Saviour who never grows weary of returning to the same tender places, speaking truth over them again and again until His voice becomes louder than every lie.

Today I find myself profoundly grateful for the woman who wrote that Facebook post six years ago.

She was brave enough to say, "This is true of me."

She didn't minimise it.

She didn't spiritualise it away.

She simply told the truth.

That truth became one of the stepping stones God used to lead me towards freedom.

I've come a long way from hating the face looking back at me in the mirror.

I remember Sandra ministering to me in prayer in 2020 — right in the thick of that unlearning season — and telling me to stand in front of the mirror every day and say, "I love you." I haven't been able to say those words to myself yet, but I no longer hate the face looking back at me.

And that — that — is not a small thing.

This is still part of my story.

The difference is that it is no longer the whole story.

Today I no longer read that old post with sadness alone. I read it with gratitude. It reminds me that healing is rarely a single moment — it is a lifelong journey of surrender, truth, and grace.

The woman who wrote those words was taking her first trembling steps towards freedom.

The woman writing today knows the faithfulness of the God who has walked beside her every step of the way.

There is still more healing ahead, yet I no longer fear the journey, for I know the One who is leading me.

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📖 "_For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope._" — Jeremiah 29:11 (NKJV)