Confronting client self-hatred in coaching and facilitation work

Summer flowers by Emma Fordyce MacRae

From Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

"We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional. We become convinced, on some basic level, that these pieces of who we are, are not good enough--that they are, in fact, shameful--and we banish them to the farther shore of our awareness in hopes of never hearing from them again."

"Shame closes the heart to self-compassion. We live with an internal state best characterized as self-hatred. In order to loosen shame's grip on our lives, we need to make three moves. The first is from feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of a budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing. As long as we see our suffering as evidence of worthlessness, we will not move toward our wounds with anything but judgement." ***

Self-hatred is sometimes hard to recognize as it can be unconscious. As coaches and facilitators, we can recognize it most often in its projection onto others. So when clients are intensely angry or disgusted by something they see in someone else, we can help clients create awareness around those feelings and shift them out of self-hatred into self acceptance.

In other situations, self-hatred is more overt. The client laments certain qualities or aspects of the self. Clients can recognize these qualities in the self but don't accept them. Our work as coaches and therapists in the Authentic Wholeness model is to help clients develop greater self-acceptance, self-compassion, and integration of the not-beautiful parts. This work is one of the cornerstones of the Authentic Wholeness coaching model.

Our work is to bring these feelings and beliefs about the self, about good and bad, about worth or lack of worth to the fore in the coaching conversation. We must work with our clients to understand the cultural and familial origins of their feelings of shame or self-hatred. We must help clients differentiate between particular behaviors and aspects of the self that are enduring and require acceptance and integration.

In the Authentic Wholeness Coach Training Certification Program, I teach how to work with clients through self-hatred; how to identify it, how it manifests in relationships of all sorts, how to come to know the aspects of the self that one finds loathsome or inadequate or shameful, and how to integrate that knowledge on the path to wholeness.

The Healing Time by Pesha Gertler

Finally on my way to yes I bump into all the places where I said no to my life all the untended wounds the red and purple scars those hieroglyphs of pain carved into my skin, my bones, those coded messages that send me down the wrong street again and again where I find them the old wounds the old misdirections and I lift them one by one close to my heart and I say holy holy.

—Pesha Joyce Gertler