Blaise Aguirre, MD, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at McLean Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
552: How to Deal With Self-Hatred
Dr. Blaise Aguirre
In this episode, Hunter Clarke-Fields speaks with Dr. Blaise Aguirre about the difference between typical teenage self-doubt and deeper self-hatred, exploring how parenting and environment shape a child’s self-perception. They discuss the role of sensitivity in emotional health and the link between borderline personality disorder and self-hatred. Dr. Aguirre emphasizes that self-hatred is often learned from critical influences and highlights the importance of self-compassion. The conversation covers therapeutic strategies to challenge negative self-beliefs and the use of mindfulness and deep listening to promote healing. Together, they offer insights on nurturing healthier self-esteem and breaking cycles of self-criticism in families.
Ep 552- Aguirre
Read the Transcript 🡮
*This is an auto-generated transcript*
Dr. Blaise Aguirre (00:00)
Every single time you notice a critical thought like you are lazy, you are mean to say, I am bringing in a narrative that was taught to me into the present moment. And it's actually not true.
Hunter (00:19)
You're listening to the Mindful Mama podcast episode number 552. Today we're talking about how to deal with self-hatred with Blaise Aguirre.
Welcome to the Mindful Mama Podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have. And when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clarke-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting Course and Teacher Training, and I'm the author of the international bestseller, “Raising Good Humans”, “Raising Good Humans Every Day”, and the “Raising Good Humans Guided Journal”.
Welcome back to the Mindful Mama podcast. Dear listener, welcome if you're new. This is a super powerful episode for you to listen to. I'm psyched that you're here because you are going to learn so much. I talked to Dr. Blaise Aguirre, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at McLean Hospital and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. And we talk about the difference between typical kid and teenage self doubt and deeper self-hatred and we explore how parenting and environment shape a child's self-preception and maybe can lead to developing some of these things. So if you have young children, this episode is for you. If you have older children, this episode is for you. It's really, really powerful. We talk about the role of sensitivity and emotional health and how we may have learned self-hatred. So you may learn things also about yourself. We talk about therapeutic strategies to challenge it and how to promote healing.
This is an incredible episode. I know you're gonna get so much out of it. So join me at the table as I talk to Dr. Blaise Aguirre.
Welcome to the Mindful Momma podcast. I'm so glad you could be here.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre: Thank you so much for having me on. It's really just a pleasure. Thank you.
Hunter: Well, it's kind of a tough subject. I was, my 18 year old was just like, I was like, you know, I have two minutes to talk to you because I'm talking to the author of this book and I held up, I hate myself. And she's like, okay, well, have fun. Is that something you say to somebody who wrote such a book? But I think it's such an important topic and it's so important to talk about. And you work with a lot of teens. I know that. So you've worked with thousands and thousands of teens struggling with mental health. And so I was wondering if you could just start this off by telling us how do we distinguish between just typical teenage self-doubt and something more serious like self-hatred or self-destructive thinking?
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
Yeah, mean, I have to say, and maybe it's just because I work with teens all the time, but I had four of my own and they were teens and they would have all their friends over, many of them who didn't have any diagnosable mental health issues. And I would say that I think it's probably a rite of passage to have self-doubts, to have self-criticism, have self disappointment, self-blame, and those kinds of things. And I actually think it's probably, in most circumstances, pretty healthy, because I don't know how we improve if we don't recognize the ways in which we haven't sort of lived up to our own expectations or lived up to the expectations of transcending adolescence into early adulthood and so on.
Hunter:
I guess the opposite would be kind narcissism if there's nothing wrong with me and everything I do is amazing, right? Like we don't want that either.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre: Exactly, exactly. And then I don't even know how that child who is so absolutely fabulous would then face a real challenge if they haven't had other challenges where they wished that they hadn't snuck out and had one too many drinks or dated the wrong person or not studied for a test, et cetera. So that kind of thinking is quite common in, I mean, almost any adolescent I've ever spoken to. But what I'm talking about is an experience of such a high level of self-criticism, self-doubt, self-blame, self-judgment, self-disgust, that it becomes embedded into a sense of who the child is and that it happens very, very early on in life so that they cannot distinguish between who they are and what their experience is. In recent times, I've been thinking about like when a fish swims in water, all it knows is water. It doesn't know air because it's never been in air. It just knows water. So if the child is in an environment, where it's experiencing enduring criticism, it's all it knows. It doesn't know that that's not toxic to itself. As an adult, mean, you how many of us as parents have heard, have made mistakes, wished that we said something else to our kids many, many times, but we can say, I wish I hadn't said that. You can go back and you can repair it. You can say, you know, next time this is the thing I'm gonna do.
But when you're a child who's three, four, five, six years old, you can't contextualize life in that way. You can't sort of stand back from it and say, you know, that person said I'm a horrible person, that person teased me, that person belittled me, that person compared me to somebody else, that person called me lazy, and not everybody thinks that way. And also, how does a child even talk about those sorts of things when it doesn't necessarily recognize them as toxic.
Hunter (07:28)
They are just absorbing it. imagine you're so present at those ages. You're just in the moment. You're just absorbing this.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
Exactly, 100%. And that's the thing that I'm talking about. I'm talking about a level of that-ness that is different from standard self-criticism. And the other thing about it is, if you look at your typical teen who's messed up and who's maybe self-critical, they bounce back. They're saying, like, “Okay, I dated this terrible person, I'm gonna go cry in my room for the next three days”, and then, “wow, this other guy is interested in me or this other girl”. And onward. And I've got all these friends and life is fun and I'm gonna get on with my after school activities. Those states are fluctuating, they're sort of, they're intermittent. But I'm talking about an enduring state of dislike of the self. And it's tragic, and it's just devastating to see these wonderful young human beings think so poorly of themselves.
Hunter:
Well, you brought up little kids right away. And this was something I definitely wanted to talk about and get to is this idea of, you know, as parents, considering that our kid might hate themselves at some point in the future is tragic. It's what we would never want, right? So we want to think about one of the things I wanted to, of course, talk to you about today is like, how do we prevent this? kind of what I'm hearing is that you're saying part of where this level of self-hatred comes from is, you know, there may be something, I mean, I was wondering, may there be something genetic, right? Can it be passed down? In your book, you talk about this a little bit, but also like, what is it in the environment that we can, as parents and our parenting, avoid or how can we shape the environment? And I'm hearing this, be careful about the level of criticism and how you're talking. it's so funny because, I just did right before this, the teacher training program, and we were talking about not using barriers to communication like shame, name calling, and et cetera, and then how destructive these are. And you're basically saying exactly how destructive these things are.
So one of the other biological pieces, that I talk about is the highly sensitive child. And those of us who have more than one child, we'll know that, I mean, it's possible that you have two highly sensitive children or three.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre (10:20.982)
Exactly. And by the way, as a therapist, I am one too. I was the eldest of eight children and two of my siblings are just not sensitive at all. mean, anything can happen. It just rolls off their back. And I was much more sensitive.
But if you think about it, and I've often made the comparison to a peanut allergy, I you could have two children, one who's allergic to peanuts and the other one who isn't. And you could have a third child who's sort of intermediate allergic to peanuts. And you give one a peanut and they eat it and they move on. And the other one, you know, give a peanut and they have a massive reaction. For highly sensitive children, criticism is like those peanuts, sort of like an emotional peanut when they're allergic to it. So that when you're critical, those labels stick and cause a very, very big reaction. And so we know that human sensitivity is biological. And being a sensitive person is neither good nor bad. It's just like what you are. It's what becomes problematic is if you don't know how to manage that level of sensitivity. But when you recognize that later on in life, you could say, well, I'm a highly sensitive person. When these things happen, I have big reactions. What am I going to do to manage these reactions when you're four or five years old, it's the only thing that you know. Now, uh, now, you know, then you ask the question, okay, like what can we as parents do? Because we can also not bubble wrap the world, you know, the, or the child and that the child is going to experience, um, uh, the bullying at school. It is going to experience a critical relative- is going to experience comparisons with maybe a more skilled child, a more hardworking child, you know, from the parent's point of view, a more athletically gifted child. So all of these things, you know, can be impactful. And so even, even just the idea, you know, wow, did you see your sister? Like she just ran the mile in six minutes. Isn't she like this incredible human being?
To the not sensitive sibling, they say, “yeah, that was great”. To the sensitive child, they go to, “what you're saying is that if in order for you to love me, in order for you to think of me as important, I have to be able to do the same thing as my sister does”. And so there's these comparisons that parents do all the time, which aren't intended to be hurtful, but to the sensitive child is, it turns out to be much more hurtful. And then what happens is that the child says, you don't think I'm good at sport. Or they say, nobody likes me at school. Or they make statements like that. And as a parent, we immediately go to, that's just not true, honey. You know, I, of course I love you. Of course you have friends at school. And what happens is, is that then has the, the, the impact, unintended impact of telling the child that their experience is not real. You're dismissing, you're invalidating their experience. So when a child says, you know, like, I'm so sad, like, why are you sad? Because I don't have any friends at school. That actually may be factually incorrect. They may actually have quite a few friends at school, but something happened that led them to that conclusion. The feelings are absolutely real. The facts of them may not be real, but something led to those feelings. And the question, you know, our task is to see, yeah, you're dismissed-
Hunter (14:01)
The feelings are real.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre (14:11)
-what were the circumstances that led to that conclusion? And that you do much, much better job listening than contradicting. Because contradicting may be done in love and may be done in compassion, but it actually has the impact of telling the child that their experience is not real. And so, you know, once the child is able to settle because you're listening, then they're going to say things like, well, actually I do have Susie and Johnny as my friends. And they'll get to that conclusion on their own. But simply telling them that, you know, not to, you know, don't criticize yourself, don't judge yourself, don't blame yourself, those kinds of things which are natural for parents to do, don't actually get to tackling self-hatred.
Hunter (15:01)
Stay tuned for more mindful mama podcast right after this break.
Okay, yeah. I mean, this is fascinating because this is what we talked about in this training session is about this idea of like validating these feelings, even if you don't agree with them, right? And you're describing exactly how that can have the impact on a kid because they want to be seen and heard. And you're basically saying “You're wrong and then that your experience wasn't right and I'm not seeing you, I'm not hearing you”. And so that’s cognitive dissonance. And so it can feel weird to say, “oh, wow, that must feel really terrible to feel that way”. As if you're saying that you agree, it can feel to parents like it feels like you're saying like you agree, but basically it's just offering empathy and saying, “I hear you, I see you”. And so this may be a critical skill for parents to kind of be able to do and understand.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
No, you're absolutely right. to really reassure yourself that you're not making a mistake when you're saying, me what's going on that you got there. And by the way, I've got four kids, my two less sensitive kids, if they fell down and they were upset because they got tripped in soccer, I would yell at them and say, “Get up! Go chase the ball!”, and they'd get up and go chase the ball and it would be fine. If that happened, you know, they'd be really upset. And if I said the same thing, that would be really hurtful to them. So it's not to say that you cannot be, you know, be somewhat critical. It's like, “you know what, dude? You didn't study last night and you did fail the test and you know, hitting your sister is not right. And, and, you know”- so I'm not saying that you can't do that. All I'm saying is that you have to know your child. You have to know their level of sensitivity. And just because something works with one kid doesn't mean that it's going to work with the other kid. Gabor Mate, I think, said no two children are raised by the same two parents because each child is different and each of us is different as we get older, as our relationships evolve over time, who we are with as a parent with one child is different than who we are as a parent with two children, who we are as a partner with one kid, with no kids, with two kids. It's going to be different. These are states of evolution all the time and you can't be static.
Hunter:
You're talking about being present, being aware. So this level of the self-hatred though that you talk about in “I Hate Myself”, it may come from like absorbing a lot of criticism, somebody who's highly sensitive maybe, but you also talk about borderline personality disorder. How is that intertwined with this and how it presents in your clinic?
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
So in 2007 at McLean Hospital, which is in Belmont, Massachusetts, it's one of Harvard's biggest psychiatry teaching hospital, I would see a group of young people who were coming in with cuts on their arms, who were very, very suicidal, who said that they wanted to die. And the research was bearing out that at that time, suicide rates in teens and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in teens were increasing. When they came in, was this group of children didn't seem to have depression or anxiety or bipolar disorder. And they had this condition known as borderline personality disorder where the hallmark of this condition is, is people who are exquisitely sensitive and that in, and the sensitivity is so much that it actually causes psychological pain. And the psychological pain is so powerful that at times the only thing that seems to work is cutting themselves to reduce the psychological pain or acting on suicidal thoughts. And the other problem is that with that level of emotional sensitivity and reactivity, relationships are strained because people are emotional all the time. They can tend to be very afraid that loved ones are going to leave them and abandon them because they feel that they're a burden and they're just too much for other people. They can engage in very risky behaviors and often those risky behaviors like driving fast, cars fast, drugs, dangerous sexual encounters, often serve to change how they're feeling in the moment. They can get very, very angry. And these states happen frequently. It's not that the person is depressed for three or four weeks. They can be very sad one moment, happy the next, angry the next. And so the emotions are very, very volatile.
So in 2007, I started a unit using something called dialectical behavior therapy that integrates mindfulness practices with cognitive behavioral therapy in order to reduce the level of suicidality and self-destructiveness in these children. And the reason we use that is because research showed that dialectical behavior therapy was very powerful in reducing those behaviors in adults. And we thought, why does a person need to suffer until they're an adult? They start working on these things earlier on. And so here's a group of young people and we've had about 5,000 people come through our program who presented with a lot of high suicidality. Tragically, and unfortunately, a few of those did end up taking their lives. Parenthetically, I've been very close to the families of some of the ones that did take their lives- started foundations for suicide awareness and borderline personality disorder awareness and dialectical behavior therapy awareness. But the ones that did experienced very high levels of self-hatred.
And when I went to research this a little bit, there was very little literature on self-hatred, but the one research paper that was out there, not necessarily in borderline personality disorder, it was in all mental health conditions, said that people who hate themselves at this level tend to feel that they are a burden to others and that the best thing that they could do would be to remove themselves from the world because that way they wouldn't continue to burden the people that they love. So self-hatred was very tied to suicidal thoughts and behaviors. And I thought, “I've been doing this for such a long time. And why have we never addressed the symptom of self-hatred when it is so tied to suicidal thoughts and behaviors? And why in psychology schools and psychiatry schools and social work schools, why aren't we taught about this? Why aren't we doing a better job assessing a risk factor for suicide?” And so in that context, a couple of years ago I just started writing and you know in February the book came out.
Hunter:
Yeah, I mean, that has to be incredibly hard work to do. mean, I imagine you have to do a lot to take care of yourself to do this kind of work.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre: I mean, I don't know how without- look, I exercise, I try to eat well, try to sleep well. I try not to watch the news, but I don't, know, without the, without a mindfulness practice, I just, know, it, I've had many, many colleagues, you know, work with me who leave after two or three years because they feel so burdened. and I think there's only two of us left who started the program originally who are still doing this work. And for me, mindfulness practice is fundamental to together with exercise and eating well, et cetera, et cetera, but to being able to sit with a child who's suffering with such incredible levels of suicidality to be able to get them to the other side. You're like the person in the raft that the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh used to speak about. In the rafts, the rescue boats, if there was one person when everybody was panicking, one person who could be steady and calm, everybody else could absorb that and they could get safely to land without harm.
Hunter:
I'm so glad that the mindfulness practices is there for you. How do you address symptoms of self-hatred then?
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
Well, it wasn't addressed, but the other part of it is this, is that, I mean, you said you're a mom, right? Yeah, you're a mom.
Hunter:
Yeah. I have a 18 year old and 15 year old daughters.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
Now, how certain are you that you're a mom?
Hunter:
I mean, yes, I'm as certain of anything as I can be.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
Okay. And what if, what if I were to say to “Hunter, you're wrong. You're not a mom”. And now what would that sound like? And, also let's say I was your therapist and then I'm just telling you, you know, “listen, you're wrong about yourself. You're not a mom”. Like, first of all, it's two things. Like what would, what would me insisting that you were wrong about being a mom do? And then what would that do to our relationship? If every single time you came in, I said, you're not a mom.
Hunter:
I mean, I feel like I was being gaslit, like you were trying to gaslight me and that it was incredibly frustrating and that I'd have to get some word that I'm actually heard and understood and not.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
Exactly. So because it is, you are so categorically certain that you're a mom and you've got like evidence that it is true. I mean, there's just no question. don't like, what are you even talking about? That's not why I came to therapy. I came to therapy because am I a good mom? know, should I be doing, you know, I get anxious about these things. That's what I came to do. And you're saying, I one? So what I'm saying is, that for these kids who've only grown up with this construct of being flawed. This idea that they're not deserving of self-hatred is about and that they deserve love and that they deserve to be seen in a different way is as ludicrous to them as me challenging the idea that you're a mom. So when I started to work with these kids originally, these young people, teenage at the time said, no, you're wrong. know, you're, you're, you know, of course you're wonderful. And, and you're this like awesome kid and you're talented and you're, you know, like you're so kind and everything. It's like, stop. Like that's so invalidating. It's like, just like so painful. Stop. Like, you know, I want to talk about other things. I'm not going to talk about this. And it was as ludicrous is me challenging the idea that you're a mom. That is how embedded this constructed. I'm not talking about like, you know, sometimes I think I'm a mom and sometimes I don't. It's sort of like, it's not intermittent. It's sort of like a sense of, of oneself. So, so, so, so, so how, you know, like, you know, so if you were to think about like, how could you convince me I'm a mom? know, like that couldn't happen. So these kids told me that it couldn't happen.
So I had to start off with, you know, to really, really think about how am I going to create a wedge between this very painful and incorrect self-evaluation and the truth. Because I actually experienced a lot of love for these kids, you know, and I found them funny and I found them sarcastic and I found them introspective and I thought like, wow, most people don't ever think about why they live, but people who die, who want to die, think about why they want to live, which is sort of, they're kind of interesting. Like, why aren't they seeing themselves the way that I do? And that's because that early messaging encoded the idea of flawedness. So what, I changed this to this idea that they learned how to hate themselves. In the same way that, you know, that- the reason you speak English as your first language is because you were born to English speaking people. If we had plucked you out of your crib and put you in France, you'd be speaking French right now. So you had to learn how to hate yourself. Yeah. But if you can learn the language of self-hatred, you can learn the language, you can unlearn that language. The second thing is this. If you think about, you you talk about Thich Nhat Hanh, what an incredible human being, you know, he was.
And you sort of aspire to live like that person. And you sort of think, what is the thing that those people do? And you see their lives. But then you say, okay, who were my teachers? The bullies, the critics. Are they the representatives of the kind of people I want to be when I grow up? Do I listen to those narratives? Do I listen to those teachings and say, those are the correct teachings. Because what that's going to do is teach you to be like them, like the hurtful people they were, like the unloving people they were. And so I say, okay, so you've been taught something that wasn't And by the way, I don't think that a parent says, okay, I've got a great child and my second child, I want them to hate themselves. it's not, so I'm not saying like a parent has done this. I'm just saying that there's things-
Hunter (31:18)
The parents got to have so much suffering that is just it's like perpetuated through generations. I mean, it's just that they can't handle it. And maybe they don't know how to validate the child, they don't know how to soothe the child. Yeah, criticism was a language they knew probably and they grew up with.
Dr Blaise Aguirre:
Exactly. And one of the things I tell the kids is like, you can never, ever, ever overcome self-hatred by hating someone else. You can never overcome blaming yourself by blaming someone else. It doesn't matter. You can't do it because hatred cannot heal hatred. So the thing that you have to work on is yourself. At the same time, understand that you learned how to hate yourself by the lessons that you were taught you were taught that two plus two equals five. And then at the end of the year, when you had to take the test, you wrote down two plus two equals five. But it was an incorrect answer because that's the way that you were taught. you didn't, you you weren't old enough to be able to, I mean, we have to look at this through a four-year-old, five-year-old's eyes. You weren't old enough to be able to stand back and evaluate, you know, the lessons that you were learning.
And you came to the conclusion that you were fundamentally flawed, that there was something fundamentally wrong with you, fundamentally unlovable about you. And so what other conclusion could you come if that was the only lesson that you were learning? Now, parents will sometimes say, but my other child doesn't feel this way. And there's a couple of reasons why their other child might not feel that way. And one is that they're not as sensitive. Two is that there may be- one of the reasons, because a lot of the kids who come to my program have had similar kinds of backgrounds. But one of the reasons why not everyone develops self-hatred, even if there's some degree of self-criticism, is because there's always an adult, an important figure in their life, who is able to listen and who's able to validate. My mom was ultra-sensitive, extremely validating. My father was a much more, a less emotionally sensitive person who was, you know, who was very critical. And I would imagine that if I hadn't had a mom who was listening to me, I mean, maybe I would have developed this form of self-hatred.
Hunter (33:50)
Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break.
Wow. I mean, it's so interesting to think about that. then, know, when you also, we talked about Thich Nhat Hanh and it makes me think of in the Plum Village tradition, if you go on a retreat in that tradition, there's a meditation they do where you imagine your father and your mother as a four-year-old child, right? You imagine them as this innocent thing. And that's also something that you do as well, right? With your patients as you invite them to imagine that- before they had learned this, that they had learned the self-hatred. Is that right?
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
Yeah, you know, again, like, that in the days before this thought was very evolved in my head, and, you know, a patient would say, like, I hate my mother, I hate my father, they did these terrible things. You know, my inclination was to not validate the veracity of what they were saying, but just like, wow, that sounds like really painful. And I can imagine why you're so angry at your parents. And so that was a less evolved way of thinking about it. But then as I, as I continue to think about this, then somebody was like examining maybe the way in which they were treated. So I've had, you know, like I was thinking of one particular patient who had a very, very, very punitive mom. And as she was sort of seeing her mom as the person who taught her that she was not that worthy.
I then started to ask, like, what was it like for your mom when she was five? You know, what was her family of origin like? And, and then she said, wow, I never thought about that, but like she was, you know, horrifically punished and, and, lots of consequences and always had to live up to an expectation that she couldn't. And she said, you know, that's probably what my mom learned. You know, like that's how she learned how to parent. What other templates did she have for parenting other than that? And so she could have compassion for her mom while at the same time recognizing that what her mom did was painful and hurtful and critical. And she had a brother who just like said, mom's just being annoying. And it didn't impact the brother so much. But my patient also thought that the mom did in fact treat them differently, but that could also be because my patient was more sensitive. So it's a recognition that simply focusing on blame and simply focusing on cause, the fact that you know why you've got a flat tire doesn't mean that the tire is no longer going to be flat. Understanding cause doesn't change the factness of a situation. You still have to change the tire. It doesn't matter that you know that it was a now.
Hunter:
Yeah, I was wondering, you you've worked with so many patients that are in some deep pain. I was wondering if maybe you could share a moment in your work where you saw somebody break through that self-hatred and begin to heal.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre (39:02)
There was a patient who had wanted to do some work with me, I was being told that she was not very motivated to do the kind of work that we were asking her to do. And she said, look, I don't buy this at all. I don't buy this at all, any of this work. And I don't see how you're ever going to convince me that I'm not a mom, that I'm worthy of love, or that I shouldn't hate myself. But, and she said, but, but I think that, you know, I've heard that you're pretty good at this stuff. So I said, yeah, you know, it's what I do a little bit. So anyway, so she says, well, okay, start talking. I said, no, you know what we're going to do? We're going to go outside and McLean has this big campus in Belmont, Massachusetts. And, and I said, we're going to go and lie on the grass. and she said, this is the weirdest therapy session I've ever had.
I said, well, tell me what you see. And she says, I see grass. So I said, okay, what else? And anyway, I mean, and she kept wanting to go back inside and do therapy or whatever it was. And I said, we're not gonna do that until you tell me everything you see. So by the end of it, we were like little broken pieces of leaves and little, I don't know, like mats flying around and little ants and little sticks and stones and the breeze and the color of the green and that the green was changing and that, you know, there were different greens and all of that sort of stuff. And so then I asked her, how are you doing? And she says, yeah, I'm doing all right. says, can we go and do therapy? I said, what do need therapy for? And I said, you're much more settled now. And I said, you paid attention to something that was. in this present moment and your central nervous system settled. in this present moment, isn't snow on the ground. It's not wet. There's no car sounds around. But if you bring that from the past into the present, that you're adding elements that don't exist in the present moment. They're only existing inside your head. You have carried a narrative that wasn't true into the present moment. And in this present moment, you are loved. And in this present moment, you are talented. And in this present moment, you are kind to your friends. And those things exist in this present moment. The things that you learned don't. I mean, they exist in the present moment in that you learned them, but they were just like false teachings. But if you start to pay attention and look more closely at the way that you interact with your friends, the kindness that you offer them, then you can see that you're not the worst person on the planet. I mean, you're pretty terrible, but you know, not that bad. I have to be a little bit adolescent myself and a little bit sarcastic, but you know, you're not going to say like, you you're the most wonderful human being ever. Like, you're pretty bad, you're pretty bad, but you're not just so terrible, you know? And so it's this idea and there was like, I'm kind of getting it. But it was just, it was, it was a very irreverent kind of intervention that didn't have to do with me sitting in a chair, pondering what was going on. It was like, you know, let's connect with the moment.
Hunter:
Yeah, I mean, I know the power of those tools of becoming more present to just release and ground and have that relief of all those thoughts that may or may not be true that are plaguing you. How did this person come to, how did they continue with their healing? I mean, I need a little more.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre (43:20)
Yeah, okay, so with that, then at least it opened up the idea that creating, that sort of bringing into the present moment something that wasn't of this moment wasn't all that helpful to her. And that, and by doing so, it was going to be impacting her work choices. was going to be impacting her relationship choices. why bring those things in, into this present moment when they're not of this present moment? Even if, you know, if I said, Hey, there is, you know, there, there are only rocks in the garden. And she believes that to be true, but then we go outside and there's grass, you know, to then say, “wait a second, you told me there were rocks. You were not telling me the truth. say, exactly, exactly. I was teaching you something that wasn't true and you believed it to be true, but now you see reality as it is, that you are kind, that you are compassionate, that you are more deserving. And so what I want you to do is I want you to start every single time you notice a critical thought like you are lazy, you are mean to say, am bringing in a narrative that was taught to me into the present moment. And it's actually not true. So you've got to now start to challenge and erode the sort of false truth of teaching. And then you've got to act with more self-compassion so that when you say, I don't deserve getting that job. I don't deserve getting into that college. I don't deserve to date that person is to notice that, to say that that is not of the present moment, that is something I have dragged from the past that was taught to me by hurtful teachers, and I am not going to believe it.
So it's slowly chipping away at the certainty of that truth, or that truth in quotation marks, because it's not true in the same way that you being a mom is true, and that cannot be eroded that you are lazy, that you're not worthy, that you're flawed, that you're broken, that you're stupid are falsehoods that you've carried for such a long time. And then I'd stay at it. I'd stay at it every single week. It's like, okay, we're going to talk about this again. We're going to talk about this again. Because those false truths have then led you to do behaviors that you're not very happy with. Maybe you dated a drug dealer and you're very ashamed of that. But you then concluded that by doing so, it was further evidence that you were this broken person and we're going to stop that.
Hunter:
You're interrupting these patterns and building these new patterns again and again. think what's so beautiful about where you're describing, is that it all really starts with deep listening, with “I see you, I hear you, and I see that must be so painful. That I understand why you think the way that you do. Like it makes perfect sense to me. I mean, you're wrong, but it makes sense”. You see, I can be a little bit more irreverent. Once you feel listened to, it's okay. Then you can do some challenging.
I think that I was gonna ask about parents who may be starting to see their child sort of go down this path that maybe are not at the place where they need to go to McLean Hospital. But I think that we're hearing all the tools here, right? We're hearing like, listen, we're hearing be present, we're hearing challenge maybe that that perception of like, where did you learn this? looking back to when you were loved, all of these beautiful things. But I'm also thinking about there are parents, I work with parents and I know that you cannot give what you do not have, right? And so I know there are so many parents who want to just love their kids, but they may be struggling with that self-hatred themselves.
So if there's a parent maybe who's listening right now who's struggling with this and they don't feel like maybe they deserve help or they feel like change isn't possible, what would you want them to know?
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
That's such an incredibly brilliant question. I haven't been asked that question before and I haven't actually thought about it. So I'm going to have to answer it. Earlier on we said, you know, like, okay, how about I could answer questions that maybe come up. Okay. that is really, really fascinating because, okay, so one of the people I've worked with the longest, met her when she was 17 and now she's a 33 year old mom with three of the most stunning children. She's not my patient anymore and she keeps sending me photos of her kids. This is like really annoying. And I just said like, okay, like I don't care that they're like 15 and graduating now, it's fine. But she stays in touch. and, and, and one of the things that the reason she didn't want to have kids in the first place is because she said, you know, like if I hate myself so much, can I bring a child into a world where I hate myself?
And as she started to work and just like have more self-compassion, then, you know, then, then she was certainly able to give that love to, her kids and her kids. mean, you know, she, she's from the Midwest and she comes with her husband once a year to come and wash the Red Sox and she stops by and the kids just adore her, you know. And it's just so wonderful to see. And I, you know, I would have to think about this parent who has deep self-hatred who has a child and they're doing the very best that they can to love that child. And I really believe that if there is any sprinkling of love in the interaction with that child, that that parent does have love inside of them. You cannot do things that you're not capable of doing. I cannot fly. I don't have wings. I mean, I could want it, but I just don't, I'm not capable of that. Like I cannot do something that I'm not capable of doing. I cannot experience something I'm not capable of experiencing. You know, I cannot experience, you know, ultraviolet light. mean, you know, I'd have to wear goggles or something like that. cannot experience certain sounds. You cannot experience that which is not within you to experience. And if you experience that love, that is a real moment. And that is within you. And if it's within you, it's within you for you too. it's just like, that loving your child is fundamentally an act of self-compassion, even if you don't see it that way. And it's just a tiny kindness towards yourself. And I think that that can grow.
And I just, you know, I'm just sending a big psychic hug of loving, compassion hug to any parent who really doesn't like themselves very much. And I think I also want like any parent that really is self-critical to just to make a distinction between being frustrated with oneself about like, you know what? I didn't really do very well with my child and make some self-critical statement. The single best thing you can do in those moments is to go back to your kid and recognize that you got it wrong. It is so powerful when you say, you know what, I yelled at you and that is not representative of who I am and I was wrong in that moment. Now, I don't like that behavior. It doesn't mean that, you you're getting to drive the car. You still aren't allowed to drive the car, but I, you know, that is not a manifestation of who I am. And you can be self-critical about that. And you can say like, okay, I'm gonna do better. But really to just sort of think about, who taught you as a parent to hate yourself? Who were your teachers? And that you don't have to continue teaching that to your own children. But there's something inside of you, you know, that we weren't born hating ourselves. We had to learn. But love comes much more naturally to the human heart than hatred does. And you're not going to, you know, you can't give love to your child that you don't have.
Hunter:
That's so beautiful. Thank you so much. Blaise Aguirre's book is, “I Hate Myself: Overcome Self-Loathing and Realize Why You're Wrong About You”. And you can get it anywhere books are sold. Do they have an audio book version as well?
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
I just literally heard from a publisher that May 27th, the audio book has been complete and they're just doing the final audio files.
Hunter (52:58)
So it'll be out by the time this is out, because we record way ahead of time. So it's out. There is an audio book version, my friend. That's so cool. Thank you so much. I appreciate that your curiosity in the way you approach this to have this breakthrough in addressing self-hatred and seeing that it's learned and believing these people. think that's really indicative of like a really beautiful, curious mind. And I'm so glad that you're practicing mindfulness to ground you so you can keep doing this amazing work, helping so many people. think that it's having ripple effects throughout the world. So I really appreciate you coming on and I really appreciate everything that you do.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
And thank you for asking important questions, that I hadn't sort of considered. And I think it's part of the problem is because it hasn't been talked about. Like there's lots of things I haven't thought about and, you know, to bring beginner's mind to every situation and just like learn anew is just glorious. I recognize how difficult mindfulness can be, you know, when your house is on fire, when your kid is sick and I am telling you to breathe in and be all sort of calm and you're like, what the heck I'm leaving right now. I'm going to the school to pick up my kid. I'm 911 and, it's, it's, it can feel sometimes a little bit like, you know, okay. All you people who have all your lives sorted out, know, practicing mindfulness. And, and so it doesn't have to be about any kind of particular practice, but you have every single time you sit down with your child. I if you think I'm not going to go to meditate, I'm not going to breathe. I'm not going to sit in the morning. I'm not going to do any of those things, but there's two times like you have to eat, like you can eat mindfully, but you can listen mindfully. And if your practice is listening mindfully to your child. It's probably the most beautiful practice that there is. You don't even have to breathe. You don't even have to pay attention to your breath, but you can pay attention to listening and to be so present. That's the best practice.
Hunter:
I agree, The child is the object of your mindfulness and what an incredible gift. That's what your kid needs more than all the lessons and the trips to Disney that you could ever do is your presence really there and listening.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre:
Exactly. And that's the one that they're going to remember more than anything else. They will not remember all the quote unquote teachings. You they'll remember that you, they, you listened.
Hunter:
Well, Blaise, this has been so wonderful. I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming on.
Wow, what a powerful episode, right? I think that that was such a huge takeaway for me that this is something people learn. It's not innate to us. And do we want to take these teachers on? So powerful. What a message. I think this is so important.
So I hope this episode has helped you. Please share it. You never know who could use an episode like this in their life to help start the healing or continue the healing of what's happening in their lives. So please do share it. Let me know what you think- I would love to know. You can find me on the socials @MindfulMamaMentor. And I'd love to hear what's happening for you with this. And I know it's summer and I hope it's a lovely summer for you. But if it's a challenging summer for you, cause life is always life-ing, isn't it?
I’m wishing you the best. We are getting ready to bring Maggie to college. Oh, my gosh, so crazy. I can't believe it. And it's a big deal and a big change in my life. So if you're going through some big changes too, I'm, I'm right there with you. yeah, I hope this episode has made your life a little bit better and I will talk to you again next week and I'm wishing you hugs and ease and all those good things and focusing on what nourishes you this week. Take care. Namaste.
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