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You Have Value – My Journey through Self-Hatred

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The truth is you have tremendous value. I have struggled actually believing this. Well, truth be told, I have no trouble believing you have tremendous value. I have trouble believing I have tremendous value. Can you relate?

I’ve been asked by people I trust to share more of my story. So in the hope that it will help others, this post is about my struggle in this area, and how I got freedom. Don’t worry, it’s not a downer, despite the subject matter. It’s a story of hope and God’s faithfulness. I pray it gives you hope and some tools for hanging onto that hope.

A Little Background

I’ve been tremendously gifted. I have a master’s degree in Mathematics from UCLA. I’ve done software engineering for 30+ years. My specialties are reverse engineering computer/network protocols and developing digital signal processing applications. I’ve worked hard to get where I am, but God has tremendously blessed me with an ability to do with computers what not everyone can. Not patting myself on the back here. Just the facts.

I’m also a musician. Keyboards are my primary instrument (I’ve been playing since I was 8), but I also can fake playing bass, drums, and congas. My main keyboard influence is Rick Wakeman from Yes. (Remember that band? I’m totally dating myself here!) Nowadays I play keys in the worship band at church. I play Manheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra on my own for fun. I’ve worked hard to develop it, but God’s gifted me with some talent.

I’m smart and I’m talented. So why do I hate myself?

I grew up loving Jesus from a young age in a solid Christian home. My two older brothers treated me well. My parents loved me and were good, solid, godly parents. I’ve lived a moral life and not experienced any trauma. So where does this self-hatred come from?

Judgments and Inner Vows

Somewhere, deep in my heart, before I had language, maybe even in utero before I was born, for whatever reason, I judged myself as unlovable. We call that a bitter-root judgement.

(Aside: Judgements we make before we have language can be really hard to articulate. But you can discover them by asking the Holy Spirit to help you talk to your heart. I wrote a post on learning this skill, and how I made this discovery here.)

Anyway, I have a sense, deep in my heart, that you won’t love me. No matter what I do, you just won’t. We call that a bitter-root expectation. So in my heart I resolved that with an inner vow to always be good. You won’t love me anyway, but I’m not going to give you a reason. So when you don’t love me, which you certainly won’t, that’s on you. It’s a passive-aggressive way to get back, in advance, at the person (namely, everyone else in the world) who doesn’t love me. I make it your fault, not mine. So there.

It’s a crappy way to live. I’ve paid the consequences in my life. It set me up for a failed first marriage. It set me up with a scarcity mindset, biased against success, believing this lie: “Not everyone in the world will be successful, so it’s not fair for me to be.” I remember thinking this as early as 7 or 8 years old.

I Get It

I get the whole self-harm thing. Although I’m learning and healing, I have a very hard time being in the same room with people who are angry. It causes me a lot of emotional pain. Physical pain hurts less, so it’s tempting to inflict it on myself. It distracts from the emotional pain, and it’s easier to deal with.

I have never struggled with depression, although I’ve flirted with it. I know what it is to want to self-medicate the pain away by not getting out of bed and sleeping all day. I know what it is to go to sleep early as an escape. I know what it is to have gray days that have no color in them.

I know what it is to have suicidal thoughts. As a teen, I lived in a canyon-filled area, actually called Canyon Country, in an upper-desert suburb of Los Angeles. While driving those one-lane, windy roads, I’d think, “One quick, flip of the wheel, crash into the mountain side, or down the gorge, and it’s all over. Finally.” Or even as an adult driving on I-95 at 80 mph here on the east coast, “Undo your seat belt and spin the wheel. Do it.” Fortunately, I didn’t listen to those lying demons. Here’s why.

Psalm 139 – How to Love Yourself in a Healthy Way

Personally, I found healing in Psalm 139, the anti-self-hatred psalm. God himself taught me the stuff I’m about to share with you, when I read nothing but Psalm 139 for a year or so.

The first blow against self-hatred is realizing God wants you to love yourself. Jesus himself quotes Leviticus 19:18 when he says, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31). And Jesus agreed when it was quoted at him in Luke 10:27, before he told the parable of the Good Samaritan. The implicit assumption here is that you love yourself. You can’t love your neighbor as yourself if you don’t love yourself.

Ok, but how? It’s a mindset. Let’s go through Psalm 139. There’s revelation in here I never saw before, that helped me establish a mindset of loving myself. And I repeat it, out loud if I have privacy, but to myself if I don’t, whenever self-hatred comes at me. Here we go.

In reading the Bible, you have to think Hebrew. The word translated “know” in Psalm 139 and elsewhere in the Bible, really means “experience.” (Where do you think the phrase, “he knew her in the Biblical sense,” meaning they had sex, came from? It means he experienced her, fully!) In Hebrew, to know something means to experience it.

So whenever you read “know”, substitute “experience.” I read verses 1-4 and verse 23 like this:

O Lord, you have searched me and you’ve experienced me. You experience when I sit and when I rise; you experience my thoughts from afar. You experience my going out and my lying down; you experience all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you’ve experienced it, O Lord. … Search me, O God, and experience my heart; test me and experience my anxious thoughts. (Psalm 139:1-4,23)

Wow, that’s intimacy with Jesus, right there! That can be really scary. Some people tragically run and never go there. But I encourage you to go there. Going there saved my life. It’s what kept me from driving my car over a cliff. And it continues to defeat self-hatred in my life and keep me alive. His intimacy with me keeps those thoughts from sticking. That’s the deep level of intimacy Jesus wants with you. That’s what he went to the cross to win—relationship with you.

Keep reading. Verse 5 talks about laying his hand on me. That’s not a smack down! He’s stretching out his hand to bless me and commission me. So you could read verse 5 like this, and I read verse 16 along with it:

You hem me in—behind and before; you have laid your hand of anointing and purpose on me. … All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. (Psalm 139:5,16)

And verse 6:

Such experience is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. (Psalm 139:6)

Translation: Mind blow!

Keep going. I personalize verses 7-12 like this:

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to Heaven, you’re there; if I make my bed in Sheol (i.e., Hell in Hebrew), you’re there. [That’s extreme!] If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea (or the interstate), even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:7-12)

If that doesn’t speak to God being with me in the pit of depression and despair, I don’t know what does. In the darkest night, with blackness of soul all around me, I’ve prayed these verses back to him. I’ve prayed, “Lord, it’s dark all around me, and I need you to shine in this darkness right now like you promised.” And in my experience, he always has. I’d press in, warring with this prayer as my weapon, until I either felt his presence or I fell asleep—and woke up victoriously refreshed.

And OMG, the Bible talks about Hell! These verses promise that whatever hell you’re in, there’s no blackness that’s too dark for God. There’s no sin that disqualifies you from his love. No trauma he won’t meet you in the middle of. His love is bigger, stronger, and way more persistent. His love will run you down and find you, even there. No darkness is too dark for him to meet you in and rescue you from.

It’s in this context, God being there in the middle of the blackest blackness, that David writes the most beautiful verses in the whole Bible:

You created my innermost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139:13-14)

This means, God made me, and he likes who I am. This is true for you too. God made you, and he likes you, he loves who he created you to be, even if you’re not acting like it at the moment.

Look at verses 17 and 18, “How precious are your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.” Gee, that “when I awake I’m still with you” is awfully random.

While it’s true that God has a lot of thoughts and they’re important to me, that’s not what this verse means at all! There’s a footnote in my Bible on the word “to” flagging that it could also be translated as “concerning.” So verse 17 becomes, “How precious are your thoughts concerning me, O God!” That puts a whole different spin on these two verses, and it explains the random bit at the end of verse 18.

Since God taught me this, I read now these two verses like this, and they blow me away. They have become one of my favorite passages in scripture:

How precious are your thoughts about me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you, because you’re still here thinking about me. (Psalm 139:17-18)

God thinks about me a lot! And they’re good thoughts! Even while I’m sleeping, he’s thinking about his plans for me, wringing his hands in anticipation. When I wake, he’s there, excited to bring me the next day of my life, one day closer to the destiny and identity he has for me. Take that, self-hatred. In! Your! Face!

The next verses, 19-22, get aggressive and can sound a bit extreme. They start out, “If only you would slay the wicked, O God!…” But to me, in the context of self-hatred, they’re talking about the spiritual forces lying to me and tempting me to hate and harm myself. He’s talking about the demons behind all the negative chatter I hear in my head. I personalize these verses like this:

If only you would slay the wicked, O God! Away from me, you bloodthirsty demons! They speak of you, God, with evil intent; they are your adversaries and they misuse your name. Don’t I hate those liars who hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies, and I will never compromise with them. (Psalm 139:19-22)

I hate the lies that rise up against God’s truth for my life, and I hate the lying spirits who tell them. That’s hatred placed where it belongs. “I count them my enemies” means we don’t go shopping together. Don’t be friends or compromise with the liars in your life.

Your agreement is everything. The freedom, or the bondage, in your life comes down to what, and who, you agree with.

And then David ends Psalm 139 where he began:

Search me, O God, and experience my heart; test me and experience my anxious thoughts. See if there’s any offensive way in me, and lead me in your way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)

I love that David ends the psalm where he began—with intimacy. It’s intimacy with Jesus that ultimately set me free from self-hatred and protected me from its devastation in my life.

No One Heals in a Vacuum

While God taught me a lot one-on-one in Psalm 139, and it’s been a powerful, healing force in my life, I didn’t come to the degree of freedom I have alone or in a vacuum.

I’ve sought out and received inner healing prayer ministry, to expose the lies I’ve believed and replace them with God’s truth. I’ve received deliverance ministry to overtly break the power and presence of self-hatred in my life. God places us in community because we need each other. I’ve needed others in my life to love me back to life. So do you. That’s why Satan’s number one weapon against us is shame–to isolate us out of community.

I haven’t arrived yet. I still struggle sometimes. But God’s winning. And I am growing so much in the process.

But what if you know all this, done all this, and it’s not enough?

That’s great that Psalm 139 worked for you, Dave, but it’s not doing it for me. What if you’re still depressed or still have suicidal thoughts? It’s ok. You’re ok. There’s nothing wrong with you. It just means there’s some deeper level of healing God wants to bring you. Get help.

Should I talk to my pastor, or get counseling? Yes. Do both. There’s nothing “anti-Christian” about getting counseling from a counselor/therapist with a Christian world-view. Most pastors are not trained to deal with depression. It’s not an either/or. If your pastor doesn’t get it and shames you for getting counseling (pastors are human too and allowed to make mistakes), then find a different church where the pastor will work with your therapist on the same team.

The same goes for medication. There’s nothing “anti-Christian” about taking meds if you need them. If your church shames you for taking depression medication, find a different church. Those same Pharisees go home and take their insulin for their diabetes and their heart/blood-pressure medicine. But somehow the chemical imbalance in your body doesn’t count? Horse-pucky! There are good churches out there who get it. I encourage you to keep looking until you find one.

(Yes, I believe in supernatural, miraculous healing. I’ve prayed for it and seen it happen. God heals by miracles, but he also heals by medicine. It’s his call, and it’s a different mix for every person. No one type of healing is more holy than any other. All healing is from God, however he chooses to do it.)

Resources

While it’s true that receiving deliverance and/or inner healing ministry from unhealthy or immature practitioners can be worse than none, these are solid, godly ministries that have blessed my life. Getting ministry may not be the whole deal for you, but it can be a huge piece if that’s what God’s doing.

For inner healing and prayer ministry: Dominion Counseling and Training Center (Richmond, VA)

For deliverance ministry: The Church Unchained (Stafford, VA)

For inner healing resources: Elijah House Videos

If you suffer from suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. You matter.

How about you? Have you suffered, or do you suffer, from self-hatred? Tell us your story in the comments or shoot us an email on the Contact Us page. We’d love to hear from you. And please share this post if it would help others. God really does love you. You have value.

3 Ways to Help Someone with Depression

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This could quite possibly be the most important post I’ve ever written. It could save a life. It’s based on Sarah Robinson’s excellent post here (not an affiliate link). Sarah is a personal friend in our writer’s mentoring group, and a very strong believer. Please read her article, share it, and then come back and read this post.

Before we get to the 3 ways we can help someone with depression, we need to understand a little more about it, and how we as the church often, unfortunately, miss critical opportunities to be Jesus.

Is the gospel “Try Harder!” or is it “God loves you. You matter.”?

Listen to the common responses I’ve heard Christians give to people suffering from depression:

  • “You just need to choose joy!” Translation: “Try harder!”
  • “You just need to believe and live the word!” Translation: “Try harder!”
  • “Take those dark thoughts captive to Christ! Apply 2 Corinthians 10:5 to your life.” Translation: “Try harder!”
  • “You just need to pray, read your Bible, and/or worship more!” Translation: “Try harder!”

Yes, we all have choices to make. Yes, no one is arguing against believing and living the Word. Yes, learning to take our thoughts captive to Christ is a skill we as Christians need to learn. Yes, intimacy with Jesus through prayer, Bible reading, and worship is critical.

But what if someone does all those things and more, and they’re still depressed? What if they do everything you tell them perfectly with all their heart, and yet they still feel the crushing blackness?

I think most of us would tend to say, “Well, you have to fight for it! You have to contend!” And then we’d quote them some verse about God’s faithfulness. Translation: “Try harder!” And the truth is, for most of us, we get very uncomfortable about now, because what we thought should be working isn’t working.

The sticky wicket is, those things are all true. God is faithful, and we do need to contend. But that’s not what they need to hear right now. That’s not how to be Jesus to them right now.

Before we dive into the 3 ways to be Jesus to them, we need to understand WHY all the good, solid, Biblical advice and scriptures we’re quoting at them aren’t working.

The Wrong Answer

The obvious (but incorrect) answer is, they’re not doing it right. We think if they were doing it right, these things would work. So we conclude they must not be doing it right. And we tell them to try harder in all of the Biblically accurate, kind but self-righteous ways we can muster.

At the end of the day, we’re preaching Works Righteousness. We don’t mean to, but we totally are. “If you were doing it right, it would work. Try harder!” We may not say it, but we’re thinking it. That’s works righteousness.

There’s a natural reason why we do this. We need our world to work. We need to at least pretend it’s a safe place. Say our neighbor’s child commits suicide or something really bad happens to them. We search for a reason to believe they were bad parents. Or he’s an alcoholic. Or she’s whatever. Something negative. Because if we find that negative, and we avoid it ourselves, then we can secretly believe that bad thing can’t happen to us. Our world works.

That’s works righteousness, and it’s a false hope. The truth is a lot messier and uncomfortable. The truth is, the world doesn’t work. It’s not a safe place. Bad things do happen to good people.

The Right Answer

Here’s the uber-counter-intuitive secret of why quoting the Bible verses and all the good Christian principles don’t always work. Ready? Here it is. God’s not letting them work. What?!? God’s not letting his own Word work? That makes no sense at all!

Hang with me a minute here. Let me explain. If God allowed quoting the Bible verses to work, if he allowed doing all the things to relieve the pain, we wouldn’t search for deeper healing. There’s something else God wants to do in our lives, some deeper level of healing and anointing he wants to give us.

Maybe there’s wounding so deep it happened before we had language. Often, we come out of the womb with wounding, or someone did something to us very early in life. That’s not our fault. The sin done to a child is never the child’s fault. Our responsibility is the judgments we make afterward, and the lies we believe about ourselves, about God, about others and how they will treat us, as a result of our wounding.

That early wounding can manifest in our lives in a lot of different ways; unfortunately, some of them are less socially acceptable in Christian circles than others. Depression is often not accepted in the church, and that’s an injustice we need to correct.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we ignore or sugar-coat stuff in people’s lives. But I am saying we need to accept the person without judging their pain.

There might be no wounding at all. Maybe God wants to give them a powerful anointing over depression to help others. The good news is we have authority over what we’ve been delivered from. The downside is we have to pass through the darkness to be delivered from it to get that authority.

So what’s Biblical? Inner healing? Counseling? Deliverance? Medication?

They are all just as Biblical. We tend to tell people with depression if they just had more faith they wouldn’t need that medication. But we won’t dare tell a diabetic that, and for good reason. It’s the same thing.

Medicine is not unbiblical. Penicillin was discovered completely by accident. Someone left a petri dish uncovered by an open window. It got moldy overnight, ruining the planned experiment, but there were no bacteria around the mold. That’s how Alexander Fleming, in 1928, discovered the medicine that’s saved millions of lives and changed the world. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin#Discovery) How much do you want to bet an angel opened that petri dish and moved it by the window? The same angel probably opened the window, too! The discovery of medicine and the wisdom to use it is from God.

Yes, God often heals miraculously without medicine. And, personally, in the West, I think we turn to medicine too quickly. It should be our last resort, not our first. But there’s nothing wrong, and everything right, with taking medicine if you need it.

It’s not “either/or.” It’s “and.” Often, a person needs medication first to get leveled out enough to receive inner healing, counseling, and/or deliverance. Sometimes deliverance needs to happen first to remove spiritual blockages that are keeping the medicine from working. Sometimes inner healing goes first. They can go in any order. None are contradictory, and they are not all always needed. It just depends on what God’s doing with that person.

Yes, sometimes with depression there’s something else going on, but sometimes there’s not. Either way, Christian shaming about taking medication is not Christ-like! We need to stop it.

So How Do We Help People in Pain?

How can we be Jesus to our brothers and sisters suffering from depression?

Look at how Job’s three friends handled it, in Job 2:12-13:

When they saw him [Job] from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

Job’s three friends typically get a bad rap, but they actually got it right for a whole week! Then they opened their mouths in Chapter 4, and it was all downhill from there.

So what did they do during that first week?

  • They went to him. They didn’t let him be alone.
  • They shared his pain. They wept with him.
  • They sat with him in the middle of it, in the wreckage of his life.

We need to get comfortable around each other’s pain.

People don’t share their pain with us because we judge it. Too often, we’re quick to whip out Bible verses or some Biblical principle because we’re honestly trying to be helpful. We don’t realize it, but we’re actually trying to fix them, and it’s not helpful. People want to be healed, not fixed.

We have not been taught how to be around hurting or grieving people. We don’t know how to process someone else’s grief. We’ve been taught, falsely, that real Christians don’t hurt or grieve. But Jesus said just the opposite (see Matthew 5:11, John 16:33, et al.)

So we tell them, “This too shall pass. It’s only a season.” And while that’s true, that’s not helpful to them. Because they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s around a corner. All they see is the blackness. Instead of trying to fix them, we need to love them through it. Love, with no expectations, is healing.

3 Ways to be Jesus to Someone with Depression

1) Honor them by letting them be hurting. It’s ok for someone to be hurting. Let them grieve. We don’t have to be afraid of their pain or try to fix them.

2) Tell them they matter. To us. To God. That he loves them. That we love them. That we will walk through the dark with them. They are not alone.

3) Do something kind. Ask the Holy Spirit what you can do to show them they matter, that these aren’t just words. What can you give them? Maybe it’s time—just having coffee, or a phone call. Maybe it’s a gift, something they would enjoy, or just a card. The Holy Spirit knows. Ask him until he tells you.

That’s being Jesus. That’s living the Word. We let people grieve, we let them be hurting. But we don’t let them do it alone. We get in the ashes of the wreckage of their life with them, and just sit there. Yes, there’s a time to speak into someone’s life, but there’s also a time to be silent and earn that privilege (Ecclesiastes 3:7b). By just being there. By just loving them.

How about you?

Have well-meaning Christians been complete idiots? Or who was that special person who made all the difference? Tell us your story in the comments. And if you are suffering from depression or suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. God really does love you. You matter.

Please share on social media if you think this would help someone else.