“If you had a person in your life treating you the way you treat yourself, you would have gotten rid of them a long time ago…” states Cheri Huber. Self-hatred is one of the most detrimental emotions one can harbor. It is defined as a great and overwhelming dislike and aversion to oneself. Once one starts to accept those feelings, they are headed down a dark path. One way that they are pushed even further down that path is when it is verbally secured by another person, causing the hating person to feel even worse. This is similarly mixed with the emotion of self-anger, but it is very different. Anger is an emotion defined as a feeling of displeasure. Self-hatred is so much more than that. It affects our brain permanently; while anger is just temporary as well as the fact that it is much more likely to affect the way we treat and look at ourselves as a whole. Not only is it dangerous to one’s health, it is dangerous to the well-being of others. This has everything to do with being self-destructive. Self-image moderates behavior. But why do people do it and how do they cope with this awful emotion of self-hatred?
Studies have shown that one major method of coping with self-hatred is eating disorders. Anorexia Nervosa is one that affects many more people than we are even aware of. A study conducted through the Coordinated Evaluation and Research at Specialized Units for Eating Disorders project that proved “interpersonal factors are increasingly in focus on eating disorders”, showing that 79 out of the 114 patients suffering from anorexia nervosa had a self-hatred issue, or a problem with self-esteem. Since self-image affects body image and moderates behavior, one little alteration of reality in the mind can cause one to start to despise themself. If one was being teased at school for example, called fat or ugly, it is proven that even if those people don’t mean anything to us and are just a passer-by, it alters something in our brains. Some of us are