The Presence of Self-Contempt in Your Story

In a previous article on shame and self-contempt, I provided a broad definition of self-contempt and gave a brief description of what it is and how it functions. If you haven’t given that article a read, I’d recommend it as I will be building on some already-established ideas about the reality of self-contempt. The goal is to narrow the focus and move our attention more specifically to self-contempt and how it shows up in the story of your life.

As we explore this topic, I hope that you, the reader, will be more equipped to identify the presence of self-contempt in your own story without judgment. I hope that your curiosity will be stirred as you begin to consider questions such as, “How did I come to feel this way about myself?” “Why do I treat my body or my heart this way?” “What has shaped my beliefs about myself?” or “Is this how God views me?”

In my interactions with clients and through my healing journey, I have found that self-contempt frequently resides in the subconscious realm of our awareness. This realm of our awareness is easily accessible.

More often than not, things that reside in this area come to the surface without us being fully cognizant of them. This is to say that much of our self-contempt and what we believe about ourselves reside in a place that is accessible, just outside of our conscious awareness.

Self-Contempt Defined

In my previous article, I gave a somewhat wordy definition of self-contempt: “Self-contempt is to have contempt (the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn) or loathing for oneself and one’s actions. In other words, it is to have the feeling or belief that you, or a part of you, is worthless, deserving of scorn and loathing.”

For clarity’s sake, let’s clean this up a bit. Self-contempt is the belief that you, or a part of you, is worthless, deserving of scorn or loathing. It is the desire to destroy and is born from a place of hatred toward your own heart.

It is common to experience such beliefs as feelings about yourself or toward yourself. These feelings are different from emotions such as anger, sadness, or joy. Such beliefs may produce an emotional response when expressed, however, these beliefs remain different from our emotions.

You may be wondering how these thoughts even start. Why would I want to hate parts of myself?

Let me begin by saying that I don’t believe any of us has the intention of becoming hateful toward ourselves. The reality is that we find ourselves in a world broken and ravaged by sin. Therefore, when considering topics like self-contempt, we cannot exclude the reality of the spirit.

Because we are living between what is seen and what is unseen, a framework for understanding and uncovering the presence of self-contempt requires us to consider both the physical and spiritual world. In the physical / seen world, there are behavioral or verbal cues that we can observe, which point us to the presence of self-contempt in our lives.

In the spiritual/unseen world, there are agreements and vows made in our hearts and minds that give license for self-contempt to remain. Again, to holistically consider self-contempt, we must have a framework that includes what is seen and what is unseen.

The Operations of Self-Contempt

In his book, The Wounded Heart, Dan Allender says this: “Contempt is best understood in its operation. Consider how you handle the loss of your car keys or cope with forgetting an important date. What are the words that you utter when you realize you’ve done something stupid or silly?”

The unfortunate reality is that we can become self-contemptuous in subtle ways. Perhaps you’re trying on a new pair of pants. You take a look in the mirror and think, “If my legs were more toned, I would fit into these jeans a lot better”. Or maybe you’re driving to work and forgot to grab your lunch that was sitting on the kitchen counter. You say to yourself, “I can’t believe I forgot my lunch. I’m so stupid!”

Or maybe you’re feeling sad and confused because your significant other just broke up with you. As you try to make sense of it, you think, “This happened because I’m not good enough and I didn’t do enough.”

Regardless of the scenario in which you find yourself, self-contempt often presents itself in moments of grief or heartache, especially when our desire or longing goes unmet, is dismissed, or is downright abused. It is often an escape route from our embodied experience of pain or suffering.

A tempting way to take back control in the face of overwhelming or conflicting emotions. To quote Allender again, “Contempt serves us in at least four ways: it diminishes our shame, it deadens our longings, it makes us feel in control, and it distorts the real problem.”

Self-contempt can also be present in more significant ways than our self-talk. While our internal dialogue certainly plays a part in the function of self-contempt, this is merely one tool to make sure we do not stray far from its influence. When contempt is present in our lives, we cannot help but externalize it through words or actions. If our internal dialogue is one tool, then our words and actions toward ourselves are another.

Self-Contempt Exemplified by Pornography

How we treat ourselves is often a reflection of our truest beliefs about who we are and what we believe we’re worthy of. We can use the epidemic of pornography as an example. Keeping in mind Allender’s observation about how contempt serves us, pornography, and our participation in it, is certainly a servant of contempt.

Pornography diminishes our experience of shame by providing a pathway to pleasure through false intimacy. Shame is one of the most unpleasant and discomforting things in our human experience. It is often connected closely with humiliation and creates almost a paralyzing response that we will do anything to get away from.

In the face of such distress and discomfort, our bodies search for something to balance the scale: pleasure. Pornography presents itself as a pathway to pleasure because of the power of sexual arousal. The rush of dopamine and adrenaline through the human body, brought on by the arousal from pornography, is a mighty force. All of this gives us an escape from the humiliation and distress of shame.

Pornography equally deadens our longings by giving us a counterfeit version of what we truly desire. For us to experience longing means our hearts are fully alive, both to the intensity of our desires and the sorrow of such things that go unmet. In this dance, there is a possibility to experience anguish.

As a way to manage this depth of feeling, one may internally commit to destroying or avoiding putting oneself in the position of encountering sorrow, disappointment, and unpredictability. Pornography then enters the scene, offering a way out of sorrow and into something predictable, which inevitably calms us down, and thus the deeper longings are forgotten (or more accurately, buried and ignored).

Pornography provides the illusion of being in control. Allender says, “For many, the raw reality of life in a fallen world is too much to endure; therefore, more acceptable, more controllable explanations must be found. Contempt provides a strange antidote for the struggle of confusion, terror, and helplessness.”

When our lives become too big for us to handle, we are met equally with the experience of helplessness and the need to be rescued. Being out of control reminds us of how small we are and illuminates our neediness. The weight of this on the heart often increases the need to take back control by any means necessary.

Pornography gives us the illusion of being in control by giving us a way to explain away the complexity of our pain. If someone were to be vulnerable about the pain they’re experiencing, it opens the heart and mind to the possibility of being harmed. In other words, out of control. But, if a person can package their pain in the form of, “I’m struggling with porn use,” then it feels much easier to deal with. All the while, the pain in their hearts is avoided.

Finally, pornography distorts the real problem a person is facing. In a fallen and broken world, the central problem for every person is sin, turning away from God to go their own way. Ironically, pornography provides both a sense of pleasure and an example of our depravity.

We are often contemptuous of our sinful state. Yet, it is hard to own the reality of our sinful state to ourselves. Thus, we find ways to ignore it, further distorting the real issue at hand and our neediness for a savior. All of this to say, pornography is an ally to our self-contempt.

Agreements

Circling back to the reality of addressing the spiritual implications of self-contempt, we must talk in the language of agreements and vows.

An agreement is, in short, a partnership. A partnership involves you coming alongside a person, value, or belief and associating yourself with it. In the context of self-contempt, to come into an agreement looks like associating yourself with a statement, more accurately, an accusation, against your being.

Agreeing with accusations of self-contempt is to associate with evil against ourselves. Are you beginning to hear the reality of spiritual warfare? This is the nature of how Satan and the kingdom of darkness operate in our daily lives. This is far more experiential than metaphorical.

When an agreement is made between us and self-contempt, we become partners with evil against our being, which is made in the image of God. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower. In this parable, He describes the heart as soil and the gospel as a seed that is planted in the soil. We can think about self-contempt also like a seed planted in the soil of our hearts. It produces the fruit of accusation, meanness, and being unkind toward ourselves.

Adam Young puts it this way, “The accusations we labor under are sentences or fragments of sentences that carry the energy of self-contempt and violence against my own heart and body.” Again, do you hear the reality of spiritual warfare here?

Vows

Vows, on the other hand, are different from agreements. To use the metaphor of marriage, we can think of vows as a person covenanting themselves to an accusation of self-contempt. Meaning, it becomes a part of their being or personality, and the person believes it is explicitly true.

They cannot separate themselves from it. Moreover, people often make vows as a response to cope with the depth of an emotionally painful or devastating moment. In the wake of such pain, we are motivated to do everything in our power to prevent such events from happening again.

When making a vow, you are committing yourself to that vow with all of your heart and mind. Commitment to a vow made in a place of pain, especially one of self-contempt, is an open door to pride. What eventually gets produced is a sense of entitlement because we begin to believe that we know ourselves better than God, the one who created us. A vow intrinsically informs our identity structure; thus, we believe that they are to be protected even if they are false.

Throughout the Old Testament, God often refers to Israel’s chasing after other gods as “whoredom.” This is the language of vows and agreements. To enter into healing with God, one must enter with the awareness that God is jealous for his people.

For this reason, part of the healing process means being radically honest about the vows and agreements we have made, especially the ones against our own being. To experience self-contempt is to experience the reality of the spiritual war we encounter daily.

Next Steps

If you are looking to engage the agreements, vows, and elements of self-contempt in your own life, I would be honored to walk alongside you. This is courageous work, and I believe that you are worthy of living in freedom. I am currently receiving new clients in Bothell and Green Lake. Feel free to reach out and schedule an initial appointment.