When You’re Your Own Worst Enemy
What I’m Learning As I Battle Self-Hatred
This content was originally published in our Summer 2026 Newsletter under the heading “On a Personal Note”
Sometimes I wish I was someone other than me. Truthfully, after typing the heading above, that’s the first thing that came to mind! I almost deleted it but remembered that one of the values Chantelle and I have adopted, for both our marriage and our ministry, is honesty. Honesty invites us to live openly before God and one another, without pretense or performance. In that spirit, I’m leaving that admission here, admittedly against my preference. Let me explain, hopefully in a short enough way to fit the space allotted me.
I am often unsure what others think of me, but, for most of my life, I can sincerely say that I haven’t really cared! Yes, I want to be liked and loved, just like anyone. But, for better or worse, meeting the expectations people might have of me hasn’t mattered much. But my own expectations for myself – those matter to me immensely.
Unfortunately, I let myself down a lot. As I’ve accepted the roles of husband, father, and now church-planter, it hasn’t gotten any better! I love my family and my calling, but with them have come newer, more complex, more daunting internal expectations. I find myself regularly counting my failures or considering how many ways I might fail in the future, and it makes everyday life very hard. Some days, I really wrestle with self-hatred. The phrase, “I am my own worst enemy,” popularized by the rock band Lit in the late 90s, is apt for me.
If you think of any common action movie scenario, when you come face-to-face with an enemy or adversary, your choice is to fight or flee. But from my firsthand experience, I can tell you that neither works when you’re dealing with self-hatred. Fighting your failure with more self-sustained effort not to fail often leads to more failure. On the contrary, fleeing from your failure almost always leads you to something distracting or self-medicating – momentarily a relief but eventually simply another failing on a growing list.
So, what’s one to do? I am still piecing this all together, so maybe I’ll have to update you more in the future. But, for now, let me share what I’m learning so far. I once read that self-hate is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fighting or fleeing, you perpetuate the cycle, and even popular self-esteem work falls short. The voice of self-condemnation usually outshouts the voice of self-help, and that back-and-forth is often exhausting!
When you are your own worst enemy, you cannot do anything to save yourself. When you are in the cycle of self-hatred, you need a savior. To reuse the action movie illustration, you don’t need stronger hands to fight or faster feet to flee. You need an extraction! You need forces with more firepower and a person with better perception than you. It of course sounds obvious for a Christian to say, but we have this in Jesus.
The good news of the gospel is that the help Jesus offers transcends the classic action-movie extraction. Jesus doesn’t hover above, shouting for me to make the effort to reach up and out. He comes for me, right down to me, and meets me. He perfectly discerns me when I cannot discern my thoughts for myself (Ps. 139:1-4). That means He knows which of my failings are legitimate sins needing repentance, which are limitations of my humanity I need to learn to accept, and which are simply lies I’ve believed about myself that I need to reject. With that knowledge, He reaches into my self-hatred and does what only He can do; He forgives what is sinful, strengthens me in weakness, and tells me what is true.
The key for me, is to ask. I’ve been learning that means I need to speak, aloud, to God. I don’t need to wax eloquent or impress Him with my speech, just speak honestly and desperately: “Lord, Help. I don’t know my own thoughts right now, and this failure and self-hatred feels all-consuming. Save me from this.” Then, I need to listen to Him speak to my trouble by His Spirit and through His Word. That is where it starts.
None of that means my failures are unimportant, or that I shouldn’t seek to grow in discerning the difference between sin, weakness, and lies. Repentance and growth are part of Christian living. But it does mean that I am not solely responsible for winning the war of self-hatred. I have a Helper, a Rescuer, and a Savior – who can save me from what I cannot save myself from.
Even myself.
There is, of course, much more to say about self-hatred than I can fit here. Within self-hatred, there is often a combination of shame, conscience, identity, repentance, suffering, and the ways our stories and histories shape us to consider. If this is something you wrestle with too, a few resources that have helped me are David Powlison’s short interview, Gospel Hope for Self-Haters, an article titled Self-Hatred and the Loving Voice of God by Todd Stryd, and Ed Welch’s book Shame Interrupted. None offers a quick fix, but each helps turn our attention away from simply trying to feel better about ourselves and toward learning to see ourselves more truthfully in the light of Christ.
One important note: if your experience of self-hatred includes thoughts of harming yourself or suicide, please reach out to a trusted person and a qualified mental health professional. If you are in immediate distress or crisis, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
