A Little Help For Our Friends

Interview with Dr. Blaise Aguirre: Confronting the Shadows of Self-Hatred

• Jacqueline Trumbull and Kibby McMahon • Season 5 • Episode 131

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Do you hate yourself or know someone who does? We delve into the painful reality of people who loathe themselves with Dr. Blaise Aguirre, a distinguished expert in child and adolescent psychiatry at McLean Hospital. We navigate the often-overlooked dimensions of self-loathing, delving into how it manifests in various mental health conditions, particularly borderline personality disorder and suicidality. 

Dr. Aguirre sheds light on the origins of self-hatred, tracing it back to formative childhood experiences, critical family environments, and societal expectations that can shape a person's self-image. Throughout our discussion, he emphasizes the profound impact of high sensitivity on emotional resilience, illustrating how those with heightened sensitivity often internalize negative messages, leading them to struggle with self-worth. 

The episode also provides practical insights into healing from self-hatred. We discuss various therapeutic approaches aimed at reframing harmful narratives and fostering self-compassion. Dr. Aguirre’s compassionate insights encourage listeners to shift their perspectives on self-worth and understand the vital role of emotional connections in cultivating a positive self-image. 

Whether you’re on your own journey toward self-love or seeking to support a loved one grappling with self-hatred, this episode offers both understanding and hope. 

Resources:

Get Dr. Aguirre's new book, "I Hate Myself: Overcoming Self-Loathing and Realize Why You're Wrong About You"

Watch Dr. Aguirre's interview on MSNBC

Support the show

  • If you have a loved one with mental or emotional problems, join KulaMind, our community and support platform. In KulaMind, work one on one with Dr. Kibby on learning how to set healthy boundaries, advocate for yourself, and support your loved one. *We only have a few spots left, so apply here if you're interested.


  • Follow @kulamind on Instagram for science-backed insights on staying sane while loving someone emotionally explosive.



Jacqueline Trumbull:

Hey guys, welcome to A Little Help for Our Friends, the podcast for people with loved ones struggling with mental health. Hey Little Helpers, welcome back. Today we have a really cool topic. It's one I always love doing these episodes where it's a concept that can apply really broadly, but we do see it in certain diagnoses more than others. The concept is self-hatred, self-loathing, something that a lot of people unfortunately struggle with at different parts in our lives. But to help us with this topic is how do you pronounce your last name? Blaise Aguirre.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Like a car gear. Like a car gear, dr Aguirre Blaise. Aguirre Aguirre is French, so Okay, which is also cool.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

Helping us with this topic is Dr Blaise Aguirre. He is a child and adolescent psychiatrist. He's a trainer in and specializes in, dialectical behavior therapy, which should be familiar to many of our listeners, as well as other treatments such as mentalization-based treatment for borderline personality disorder and associated conditions. He is the founding medical director of Three East Continuum of Care, which is an array of programs for teens that uses DBT to target self-endangering behaviors and BPD symptoms. He's been a staff psychiatrist at McLean Hospital at Harvard since 2000 and is nationally and internationally recognized for his extensive work in the treatment of mood and personality disorders. He's the author and co-author of many books, including Borderline Personality Disorders in Adolescence, Mindfulness for Borderline Personality Disorder, Coping with BPD and Fighting Back. Blaze, welcome to our show and thank you so much for offering us your expertise and now this book.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

Subtle, subtle plug.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

For those of you with YouTube, you will have just seen Blaze raise a book called I Hate Myself and we just saw the message I hate myself come completely over the screen, so that is why we're talking.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Let me jump in, but.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

Blaze welcome.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Oh, thank you so much for having me on and I just I really appreciate the willingness of thinking people to have a discussion about this really complicated topic. So thanks tremendously for having me on.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

Awesome and Kibby. I'm going to jump over to you to tell KulaMind about on Awesome and Kibby.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

I'm going to jump over to you to KulaMind us about yeah, just jumping in with all different kinds of plugs for things. But I'm really, really excited for this conversation with Dr Aguirre and we'll definitely link where they can find your book and other resources after this. But I also mentioned that for anyone who wants hands-on help with navigating their emotionally challenging relationships with loved ones, with mental health issues like borderline personality disorder, which we'll talk about, anger issues, narcissism and other things like that, check out KulaMind K-U-L-A-M-I-N-D. com. Or you could check out our show notes and you find a link and you could talk to us. You know you could book a free consultation call to learn a little bit more about how we can help you with with navigating a relationship like that. So, done with all that, let's jump into self-hatred. Tell us a little bit about you.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

No, it's just. It's such an aggressive sounding title, but I think it's something that so many of us have struggled with at different parts of our lives. That was me as a teen. But you, I know, have studied this mostly in the context of BPD. Can you? Tell us how you came to this topic, what interested you about it?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah, but I was struck by your comment about how aggressive it sounded, this whole concept of self-hatred. And I remember that when I was speaking to a lot of my patients who've got borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, severe eating disorders and other conditions, and I said, you know, I'm really, I'm working on this project, what should we call it? And then you know, should we call I loathe myself, or you know like learn to love yourself, or something like that, and they all, to a person, said that they would never buy such a book. I said, why not? Because it doesn't capture the experience. I said, well, what is that? What is the experience? And they said, like you don't understand, I hate myself. And so it wasn't a. You know, they didn't want some sort of euphemistic, watered down version of what the experience was. And so and the reason it came about, was that for people who know conditions like borderline personality disorder, we know that suicidal thinking and suicide attempts is very, very high and unfortunately, in people who are hospitalized with borderline personality disorder, the suicide rate is about 10%, which is a tragic number. Any number, any loss is a tragedy, but certainly 10% is a very high number. And, using dialectical behavior therapy in our adolescent residential treatment center, we brought the suicide rate way, way down.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Nevertheless, we did lose some kids and when I was sort of reviewing what we'd missed in those kids, I realized that throughout their record they would talk about the self-hatred. And when I started to work with patients and I asked them about their self-hatred, they you know many patients said no, I don't hate myself. You know, I don't like some of the things I do. I'm dissatisfied with certain things. I'd like some things to change.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

But a few of them talked about this core self-hatred that they had hated themselves ever since the beginning and that even if depression, anxiety, substance use had improved, that self-hatred persisted. And when I asked them what the problem with that was, you know, they would talk about the way it would impact their relationships with others, their love choices, their friendship choices, their academic choices, their employment choices. They would always put themselves down, believing that they didn't deserve more and fundamentally they felt that they were a burden to themselves and to the people that loved them and to the rest of the world and that the world would be better off without them. And that, independent of all other behavioral improvement, the self-hatred persisted and it was really linked to suicidal thoughts, actions and behaviors and I thought, okay, well, if we understand that this is a vulnerability factor, we have to begin to target it some way. So you know, as a DBT therapist, I tried to use DBT techniques and they just didn't work.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

Can you give us a picture of what self-hatred looks like? How does it show up in people who aren't as familiar with? Oh, I hate myself. Like I don't deserve this. What are the thoughts or behaviors that people tend to do when they hate themselves?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah. So there's certainly a lot of self-criticism, a lot of self-judgment, there's a lot of self-blame, so everything that goes wrong is their fault. Every time something goes badly, it's because there's something flawed with them. Every time they mess up in life that we all do I think I did in my last session person so there's a lot of self-judgment. Anytime things work out well, it was luck.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

There's a lot of people-pleasing behavior. There's a lot of perfectionism. There's creating a standard that is just very, very hard to meet, and you know that when I would talk with my patients, you know they would say things that weren't very kind towards themselves and I would say like, wow, it doesn't sound like you like yourself very much. And they'd say, actually I don't. I said, well, how badly, how bad is it? And they said, to be honest, I hate myself.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

And so those are the behaviors a lot of self-judgment, self-criticism and, by the way, most, almost all of the people that I met with self-hatred were highly sensitive people, and I mean I'm a highly sensitive person and so if you look at my name, b-l-a-i-s-e and my mother was Isabel, i-s-a-b-e-l and same letters and she was my I don't know my angel, you know like she was somebody who could validate a highly sensitive person. So I mean, I'm sure, had I had very toxic and invalidating environments, I probably also would have hated myself for being so sensitive, and I think that highly sensitive people are at greater risk for self-hatred.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

And I think that highly sensitive people are at greater risk for self-hatred. My thesis and dissertation research is on BPD, shame and mentalization, so you're a bit of a goldmine for me. But the kind of shame theorists that I was following were kind of telling the story of, I mean, the biosocial model effectively, but that when a child comes into the world and starts emoting and those are the only tools it has is to cry right and then eventually to smile, and it gets met with totally opposite information, that there's kind of an incapability of forming a solid sense of self because the very tools that they begin life with don't work, and that creates such a sense of confusion and it's really impossible to build on that.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

And then there's the shame proneness that comes in. Is that kind of a formulation of how this happens, or would you add to it.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah, no, I think that that's beautifully, theoretically and real life experience stated. I mean, it's you know. I think that that's all true because you know, I mean, a fish doesn't know what it's like to be out of water. It just like you know, it doesn't understand water is separate from itself. It's sort of like you know, and it's just like that's the environment in which it lives. And you know, it's only when you take it out that it says, OK, maybe I do need to be in water.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

So it's not a perfect analogy, but I'm just saying it's like that's the uh, emotional environment, emotional ocean in which that young child is living. Uh, and and and and. So I haven't felt I haven't met too many adults, although I met one recently who developed self-hatred when not having it in childhood. Um, and that's because I think that when bad things happen to adults, they can contextualize it and there's often people in their environment that they can turn to good friends, maybe relatives and other people. They say, hey, this thing happened and they'll say, wow, that sounds terrible. But a child doesn't have the context and the words to be able to, to, to say something.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

Interesting. It strikes me that you're working with like two populations that would both have self-hatred, but for different reasons, like BPD and also adolescence.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

Like.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

I hated myself in adolescence for a period, and I think it was because I was developing a new identity and I didn't have any skills yet to be successful at it, and so all I was seeing was myself messing up all the time, like me being bad at socializing bad at getting guys to like me bad at having friends, but that that's like not contextualized yet like you're talking about in adulthood, but it also doesn't stem from childhood contextualized yet like you're talking about in adulthood.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

but it also doesn't stem from childhood and it's not based on this kind of undergirding of not being validated or listened to or understood in any way. So it's just, I don't know what my question is here, but it seems like you've got two major forces colliding at the same time no, I, I think you're absolutely right.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

But then, but by you know, just by extrapolation, you would have have been a highly sensitive child, a highly sensitive teen. Because I think that kids who have you know, you insult them. You say you know, you're not pretty, you know whatever the affirmation would be to say a girl or to a guy or whatever. If you know, um, uh, if I say to a guy you're not strong enough, your muscles aren't big enough, and and he just doesn't care, so what? Okay, like let's just move on, but but high sensitivity, it's, it's like the gorilla glue for labels. You know, if you're a highly sensitive person, I say you're not that pretty, you're not tall enough, you know you're not curvy enough, you're not pretty, whatever. It is like that. It is just like that, that that's going to stick to you much, much more as a highly sensitive person than someone who's not highly sensitive do you see common um common styles of parenting or childhood?

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

that leads to the self-hatred. I only ask this because we've learned over and over that, in an invalidating environment, critical parents, not supportive with highly sensitive kids leads to this kind of self-hatred.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

However now that I'm a mom and I have a two and a half year old who has big feelings. You know learning this professionally. Sometimes, when he yells for the 50th time, I'm like, come on, it's not, it's just a sock. Okay, your feelings are not legitimate right now, Just get that sock on. Am I doing it? Or what do you see as the common pathway for someone to learn to hate themselves?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah, so, so, okay, so you have a. So again, you started with the biology, which is that of high sensitivity, okay, and then, um, uh, I'll give you an example. I mean and, by the way, most of the parents that I meet are ultra loving parents, so I have not met a parent who said my goal for my child is to go to Harvard and to hate themselves.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

You know, it's like no one wants to have a person with who struggles in their, in their life. Okay, but but for instance, I had a kid. Parents had gone to a very prominent West Coast University. Both parents the child, the child's two siblings had gone to the same university. You walked in to their house and they had cups from this university, they had, you know, duvet covers they had, they painted the doors in the same color and stuff like that and so. But this kid was not academically gifted at all, but was super artistically talented.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Now the child was learning that in order to be appreciated in this family, she had to go to this school and no one was saying that to her. But there was an, there was, it was explicit, it just in the. You know the way in which either the school was talked about, the signaling in the house was that that's what we value. Wow, I'm not as smart as my siblings, I'm not as kind of athletically talented as my siblings, I'm not going to make it there and started to really devalue. And then, in that context, every time something would go wrong maybe they'd get a B in a test or something like that. It would reinforce this idea that they were flawed in a way and then, in the context of a sexual assault in school, it just pushed her over the edge and then she just said like you know, like I'm never going to be enough, there's this question of not enoughness.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

So, yes, of course, if you're a highly sensitive child, there's sexual, physical, emotional abuse and you don't have somebody who can validate and protect you. It's the only thing that you're going to learn Now, you know, with your child. I mean, you know, it's so funny. I went for a hike with my son the social worker he's now a social worker and I said we went hiking in the desert outside of Vegas and I said, son of mine, tell me all the brilliant things that I told you as a child and all the things that you learned. And he said, honestly, I can't remember a single thing, but I remember how I felt around you. I remembered feeling safe. I remember feeling listened to. So I think that it's not so much that you say you should brush your teeth 20 times one way and 20 times the other way, and that way you know like none of that, that's not the you know, like none of that.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

That's not the thing, you know. The thing is that they feel seen, they feel heard, they feel validated. That you can say, and then also that I can admit my own mistakes. You know, like, yeah, I screwed up, I screwed up and I yelled at you and I was just very frustrated and I, you know I made a mistake and frustrated, and I, you know I made a mistake and you know, or, yeah, maybe you did deserve to be yelled at because you know, I told you not to take the car and you're 14 years old and you know what were you doing driving the car, you know. But but so so I think you know, yes, it's not so much that you're yelling at your kid because they've taken the software the 50th time, but it's it's. It's about. It's about a seeingness, a beingness. It's about not rejecting the child's legitimate statements of dissatisfaction and not enoughness.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

The other thing is that how often, when somebody tells us you know, nobody loves me, I don't have any friends at school, Do we reject that by saying that's just not true. Now, it's probably not true, it probably isn't, but no one has been convinced that they're lovable by being told that they were not true. Now it's probably not true, it probably isn't, but no one has been convinced that they're lovable by being told that they were lovable, you know. And so it's not like okay, I love you, you know. Oh, okay, that's great, Now I love myself.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

It's sort of saying, like how, how did you get to the idea that nobody likes you at school? And often it has to do with, like, maybe the best friend has another group of friends and so this one really essential person doesn't like them anymore. And so what happens is that becomes a catastrophe for the highly sensitive person and it feels as if nobody loves them. Catastrophe for the highly sensitive person and it feels as if nobody loves them. But when you're able to sit there and listen, it actually brings the emotions down and they're able to reflect on the absoluteness of their statement.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

So do you see? Okay. So I mean, are we seeing kids as young as like seven experiencing the self-hatred and then it just keeps going, or is it more something that develops in adolescence? Like what? What is the development of this?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

yeah. So I think that I don't know. You know, when I've asked my patients like, when did you start hating yourself? I mean, most say sometime around kindergarten and but. But but if I said like, if I'd asked you, do you hate yourself, that would not have been a concept, Right. So so it's.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

There's this internal dissatisfaction that is showing up. It's not formulated as self-hatred, it's formulated as being flawed, it's like I cannot, I can no longer charm my parents, I am no longer enough for my parents, I am an embarrassment, I'm a disappointment, I am valueless. And this is whether I mean it's possible that a parent is saying you know, you're not as good as your siblings, but also but more often than not it's not explicitly stated it's just how they're internalizing those experiences, those experiences. And then, as they get older and they begin to formulate a kind of a more complex sense of who they are. You know, in early adolescence they start to make a lot of comparisons and when they make those comparisons they see that they don't have what other people seem to have, and then they feel that they're very, very flawed around in those five to 10, in the ooze of the five to 10 year old brain, the formulation, the determination of self-hatred seems to show up in, you know, early, in the early teenage years.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

Yeah, this is a totally self-serving question because I'm basically asking you the answer of my dissertation. But since you do mentalization work, what I'm interested in is I've seen a lot of the mentalization work with BPD has mixed results, but in all of the questionnaires that I see, or the measures, it asks them to mentalize about two other people and they are not included in the equation. So I basically switched the measures to include them in the equation so that they're mentalizing about themselves and someone else. And the reason I'm doing that is because it seems like if you hate yourself and you see yourself as essentially flawed, then that would affect how you think that others view you.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

So, maybe if somebody slights you in some way, or doesn't even, then you might think that's because they hate me or that's because they see what's essentially worthless in me. Do you find those kinds of errors?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah, 100%. And this is why trying to disprove it through any kind of affectionate statement or statement of compassion just doesn't work. Because if I say to that person who sees themselves in that way, I actually don't see you that way. I you know, I see you with kindness, I see you with compassion, and said you know, well, you have to do. You have to say that because you're my parent, you have to say that because you're my therapist. You know it's like, or you're so deluded that you cannot see the rottenness within, within me, and so they truly cannot conceptualize that they can be seen in that way, because that's not how they experience themselves.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

I mean, this might be taking a peek into what's in your book, but what do you do then? I really resonate with what you you do then, like I, I, I really, um, resonate with what you're saying as a therapist, that when you deal with that, the self-hatred, that really hard core belief of I'm unlovable, I'm, I'm terrible, You're just saying nice things because you're paid to do it. There's my therapist blah, blah blah.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Um then, what do you do Like? How do you what?

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

is the most effective way of helping people through their self-hatred.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

Mm, hmm.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

OK, let me, let me ask you this I mean, and I and again, and if you, if it feels like an impertinent question, just tell me it is. But I mean, would you both identify as women?

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

Yes.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

A hundred percent yes.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

I mean, it depends on how we define gender identity, but yeah, yeah, pretty much Okay.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Now what if I said to you listen, we were hanging out in Iceland and I took a why not? Iceland seems like a cool place, I've been there, great and I took some DNA from the cup that you were drinking from and it turns out that you're both XY. Now how? And I said you know what? You're actually genetically a man. How Could I convince you that you're not a woman by showing you the test results? And not only that, not only that could I convince you that you have to change whatever feminine stereotype you're presenting with and the way that you're acting and do things differently. So you have to, like I don't know, sit around on a Sunday you know, belching beer while you're watching.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

I mean, I'd have to believe there's a really good incentive, Like is my life going to just radically become a lot better if I cut off my boobs and sit around drinking beer?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

But I mean, could you internalize, could you internally identify in that way?

Jacqueline Trumbull:

I think that would be very difficult very difficult.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

and what if I told you and like you were coming into therapy and I said to you okay, listen, we have to speak, we have to talk about why you're avoiding being a man? What would eventually happen to our relationship?

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

Yeah, when he trusts you yeah.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

I mean like listen, we've talked about this. This is nonsense, you know, like I know. I mean you know you have to explain why. I've had a baby who's two and a half and running around with a sock, and you know, and no matter what.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

So the thing about it is that in the early stages, like telling somebody that they're lovable that's how fused it is with their identity. There is no convincing them that they're wrong about themselves. Okay, so now the first thing I have to do is I have, you know, like nothing I did. I said practice loving, compassion, and I'm a mindfulness like person and you know, do all these kinds of, and they just, it was as much, it was as as invalidating as me telling you to start considering yourself as being male. And, by the way, this is just like it.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

It's a simple kind of analogy to like thinking the world in a very binary way. But I'm just, you know, just for the sake of the, of the, of the example, and how can you believe something that no amount of you saying can be like for the next year, I'm going to believe I'm a man is going to get you to really believe that that's true, you know. So it's like um, it's so. So this idea of practicing, loving yourself, practicing uh, any of these things is not going to work unless you're willing to accept that, that that concept is fundamentally wrong, um, and that that concept was learned, um. Do you both speak English as a first language?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah ¿Y alguno de vosotros hablas español o no?

Jacqueline Trumbull:

No.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

No, okay, why not?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Because that's not what you were brought up learning. You're brought up learning English, and so what I say is like you were taught, you're a highly sensitive person, who was taught that you weren't enough, and who were your teachers? Who were the teachers who taught you that? And why is it that you continue to listen to those teachers? And why is it that you don't listen to the teachers who are teaching you something much more fundamentally beautiful, much more fundamentally true about you? So you learned how to hate yourself, but if you learn how to hate yourself, you can learn how to love yourself, because love comes much more naturally to the human heart than hatred does. But it's a learned behavior, and and but it's a learned behavior. And so what I you know, and there's a. There's an interesting thing that happens.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

A lot of my patients have tell me that their parents are always ask them advice on what? On advice on how to be happy, and I say, are your parents happy? And they say no, they're not. So why are you getting advice from unhappy people? They're teaching you how to be unhappy. We get so much advice from unhappy people as if their advice is good advice and it isn't. And um, and if it was good advice. Well then, they'd be happy. But they're not. And I said do you want to end up being like that unhappy person? I said, no, I don't want to be like that. Well then, don't stop taking advice from them. No, they're telling me I should do this, this and this. I say OK, well, you know what the outcome is going to be. So, so what about saying, rather than learning?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

And, by the way, those people that were so hurtful to you, I'm not hating them. You cannot overcome hatred through hatred. I'm not hating them, I'm just saying they are a product of their environment, of their biology, of their circumstances and the behaviors that ensued from who. They were treated you in this really toxic way. The problem is, you began to believe their toxic message, and it was a. It was fake news, it was absolutely fake news. You know and um, and you go to like you know, so we have to start. So you drive that wedge. You say okay every time they bring it up. No, you learned that wedge. You say okay every time they bring it up. No, you learned that. That was learned. And sometimes you don't know, but I'm saying as often, you can see how. Maybe there was school bullying, maybe there was a sexual, physical, emotional abuse. Maybe there was a lot of invalidation, maybe there was a lot of comparison with you know other functioning kids.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

So that's how I first start, yeah, identifying the source of where you learn that and try and evaluate whether that makes sense. Moving on Exactly. Well, speaking of fake news, it's interesting. I'm going to bring up the way the different reactions to your book of I Hate, I hate myself. Um, there's that.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

There's one segment from msnbc and there's one from fox news and the fox news one was surprising or maybe not for people listening that they said they were kind of like well, maybe it makes sense that that person hates himself and maybe maybe self hatred is actually good. I mean, you should hate yourself if you're a person which at first I was like this is so silly, but we do. We do talk about how sometimes self doubt or negative thoughts could be functional, like what? And also sometimes you have patients who say I hate myself and I've done horrible things, and then you listen, you're like that wasn't great.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

And then you have some patients who have no self doubt maybe should have a little bit of a, let's say, self hatred, but a little touch. So can you talk about that? Can you talk about the different perspectives on self-hatred, and maybe even more than people like we're talking about? Okay, yes, you should learn to love yourself, but like yeah, well, let me ask you something.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

I mean how? Many of these shows have you done, would you say 130 or something 130 have you have? Has there ever been one that you were just like really upset with, really dissatisfied with, like just like, wow, that didn't you know. Out of those 130, could you think of like the top five and maybe like one said, oh wow, that didn't go as well. Maybe there were technological issues, technical issues, maybe I don't know.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

No, we've been perfect. That's incredible. Yes, that is fantastic.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

The shoes maybe, I don't know. No, we've been perfect.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

That's just incredible. Yes, that is fantastic. 10 out of 10 every time, and you know what?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

I think you should put your child on right now and let me tell your child what a fabulous mother he has that and that not to complain about the socks anymore.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

So so you know, if you, you, if you, if something were to happen and you were to say okay, like that didn't go the way that we were expecting, it wouldn't be because I am a flawed individual. It's like maybe I didn't prepare enough, Maybe I don't know, the guest you know was just not on, Maybe they, we had the wrong guest, we got the wrong. You know, Brene Brown, we got you know.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

So there was something wrong about, there was something that happened, but it's not because you're flawed, it's because something didn't work out. So that's something that's external to you and that you can fix. So I think that if you use self-criticism, self-judgment as a way of correcting something, then that's OK. I mean, I'm not saying, you know like, have blind and bland love for yourself and you know, we all screw up and we have to correct those mistakes. We all screw up and and we have to correct those mistakes, so, uh. So in that context, a little bit of uh, self-judgment, self-criticism, self-blame is fine, but but when it's, when it's, everything is because I'm so flawed, you know, um, uh, then uh, um, then you're stuck in a state of like, well, then nothing can ever go right, because if things go right it was luck, and if things go wrong, then it was your fault. So I drive this wedge and then I start to kind of examine, moment by moment, when self-hatred is getting stronger, when it goes down. And typically self-hatred gets stronger in the context of people that they're not very happy with and self-hatred goes down when they're in connection with people that they love.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

So if we get back to your original question, which was MSNBC, you know, recognizing the value of examining this topic, and maybe Fox News saying not so much. Maybe you should hate yourself or using it as a prop for attacking people that they have political differences with. My problem with that is, you know, I mean, look, I'm all for a good joke and I'm good for, I'm all for a good joke and I'm good for, I'm all for a good political joke, but when you take a vulnerability factor that a human being experiences that might lead them to take their life, I just think that you've done a disservice to those who suffer from the experience. And you know, I actually emailed the host and said, look, I mean, I think that's one or two of the things that they said were kind of ridiculous, somewhat funny, but at the same time, you know, can we take the other side of it so you don't show a level of ignorance and disdain and disregard for people who are suffering?

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

Agreed.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

I hear that sex is done as a disturbance. What?

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

were you going to say, kadee? I mean, it kind of touches on something that we're seeing across the board in our society, where there's you know, I hate myself, I'm worthless or the other side, which is no, like charge ahead, let's be strong, let's dominate right. There's like this conservative movement of don't doubt yourself, in fact, storm in with full confidence, and that's that's the, that's the approach to strength, and it, you know, there's going to be people who still feel that way inside and and learn oh, I'll just have to project the opposite. So you're right, it's very dangerous to make fun of. You know that, struggle inside.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Well, and I think I mean you know, it's not as if self-hatred goes to the voting booth and says are you a Democrat or a Republican, are you conservative, are you liberal? And if you're one or the other, then I'm going to latch on to you. I mean that's true of any condition diabetes, asthma, arthritis, cardiac illness and stuff like that. It's not as if, you know, any of these conditions is picking one person or another. And at a time when deaths of despair are an all time high, when suicide rates are an all time high, and we're talking about closing the borders because of fentanyl coming into the country or increasing tariffs by 25% because of fentanyl coming into the country, why? Because the tragedy of these deaths of despair is so heartbreaking. Then, if we think about, what are the vulnerability factors, what are the conditions when people die, maybe through overdose or by suicide? That is so trivialized. I think that that was the sadness of the of that fox segment um I'm trying to think.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

I'm like I don't know that I want to go in this direction, but I am trying to think if I see traits along the, the political lines that would lend themselves to healing from Um, I can kind of see an argument for both.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

But um, so you start by there. Whenever I have a patient with a lot of self-loathing, I always have this somewhat absurd well, it's logical, but emotionally absurd reaction which is like this is so pointless, like none of this isn't doing you any favors. This is just serving to prevent you from having any kind of like reparative action in your life to you know, to show that you could be happy and could be lovable. But then when I think about my own like body image issues, since literally up until I got liposuction, you couldn't talk me out of it. You know it was just this thing, like I just don't like my body, so how am I supposed to start liking it? And there also felt like there was this point to hating it, like if I keep hating it, then I'll get better, which is kind of what you're talking about, you know criticism so I know that while it may be pointless, it doesn't just a lot.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

You can't just logic it away. So you're saying that first you kind of go in and create a wedge between their trust of the self-hatred, like, oh wait, this was taught to me by figures that maybe I shouldn't trust in the same way. What do you do next?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Okay, by the way, you know, it's interesting how you. I really appreciate your vulnerability. So let me just say, you know that, in terms of talking about your own experiences and I think it's refreshingly honest to have somebody say, hey, you know, I didn't like my body had liposuction here we are, you know, but here's the other thing is is that, you know, when I was young, I'd get like Time magazine or National Geographic once a month and that would be it. Now we're bombarded with marketing for self-hatred. We market to self-hatred. You're not tall enough, you're not skinny enough, you don't have six pack enough, you're not strong enough, you're not athletic enough, you're not smart enough.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

But, by the way, if you buy my product, you'll be fabulous, people are going to love you because you'll be so fabulous. And if you buy my book, um, which is, um, this one, people, you know you're going to, uh, it'll make your life so, so much better. You know, but, but I think that that's it. It's it's like we market to your self-dissatisfaction, and it doesn't even have to be very big. It's just like wow, you know, like I don't know, my wrinkles could be just a tiny bit less, or you know something like that. And if you do that, like everything in your life is going to change in terms of how you see it and, by the way, I'm not saying that some of those things aren't true, like some of those things could be true but it's just that you can never reach that pinnacle because that's something outside of you. It's not something inside of you. You can only ever get to self-acceptance through something that's inside of you.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Okay, so you get back to this point. So I drive this wedge between okay, this was taught. Okay. Then I want to be very specific about what the lessons were. The lessons were my dad calling me stupid, calling me lazy, telling me I was never going to succeed, and that message being repeated over and, over and over again. Okay, so that was one of your teachers, the bullies at school, who called me fat or who called me, you know, I don't know whatever that label was that stuck so strongly?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

whatever that label was that stuck so strongly? The teacher who told me that I should leave piano because I was just never going to be good at piano. Any teacher negation of a person's effort or a person's capacity, comparison with somebody who is more talented, without any mitigation, without any recognition of the value of that human being as a human being. You know, I want them to actually write it down and I'm saying, wow, look at all of this. These are your teachers telling you these things. And then it's often there's such powerful voices that you cannot hear the voices of the kind people. And then, you know, to an earlier point, you just stop believing them because you say the toxic people must be right and the kind people obviously cannot see what the toxic people see in me, you know. So I say okay, like now.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

And then I do a very interesting thing and this is something that I worked out with a patient is I got them to bring photographs of I think she was 19, of every birthday from one to 19. And I put them down and you see the change every year, year two, they have a sock in their mouth because they stole it from Kibi and I say tell me when you start hating her, tell me when you start hating that little girl. And they can't. They want to reach back in time and grab her in their arms and just tell that little girl how much they love her. And then they see the education that that child received. That told her she was so worthless.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

What does healing look like At that point when they start to soften and change around and around those, those thoughts and beliefs? What, what, what do you see healing look like at that point?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

I had a patient who, um, uh, who was uh who said to me that, um, she'd always dated these toxic men by toxic men. It's just like men who would not, they didn't feel valued by, but they felt that they deserved because they were so flawed. And one day she told me, you know, as she broke through, as she began to see how that toxic messaging had led her to make toxic relationship choices, I was teaching the interpersonal effectiveness skills of DBT and he said, well, what's that? And he said well, what's that? He says, you know, like, by doing this, I'll be she misused the word, but she says I'll be a better person. And then he said, well, good, because you need to be a better person. And she stops and she thinks about this and she says you know what, if I'm a better person, I'll get a better boyfriend. That was brilliant, that was so fantastic, you know. And it was sort of like yes, you're seeing that you deserve more than what you've learned to believe is the best that you can get.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

And again, I did not want her to hate this guy. I mean I say I'll do all the hating for you because I didn't like how he was treating her, but nevertheless, who knows? I don't know how he's been maltreated, how he's been abused and everything like that. It's just that that is not her destiny, it's not what she deserves. So you start to see healthier choices, living up to their potential in terms of academics, in terms of of employment, learning how to say no.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Stop people pleasing. Less perfectionism, I mean. People pleasing is such a red flag for self-hatred. Um, you know it's, uh, it's, I will do whatever it takes to get you to like me. You know, to the point of devaluing yourself, and you know the person then gets whatever they want and moves on and you're left resentful because you get nothing back. Doing the right thing for you is never doing the wrong thing for someone else, and the corollary is like doing the wrong thing for you is never doing the right thing for someone else, and the corollary is like doing the wrong thing for you is never doing the right thing for somebody else.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

I'm rifling through patients in my head right now of like when I could have used these interventions. Is there a difference? Do you think about that? Wedge trust, wedge of like do we really? Trust these people who have given you these messages and I guess I'm like okay, so what if you know? You ask, like I had a patient who was bullied in middle school and so those are the people, presumably, who gave me that.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

But we don't know if they're happy now. We don't, because at the time she she probably saw them as cool, pretty pretty like well, what happens then?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah, but I mean it doesn't actually matter Because I just want to know. Those were the teachers at that time. It doesn't matter how they've turned out and we don't actually know what their lives are like and that shouldn't be our focus. In any case, they may turn out fabulous, posting pictures of themselves in bikinis on yachts in the Mediterranean, you know, or I don't know, sitting in the toilet with dysentery after a trip to down the Okabanga swamps. I mean, who knows, you know, who knows who knows what? But it doesn't matter because you may, it's not about, it's not about this, it's just that those were the teachers. Who knows how they turned out? And it doesn't actually matter how they turned out and even if they seem outwardly happy, we don't know the lives of others. So it's like saying, okay, those were the lessons. It doesn't matter where they are now and what they're doing now. It matters how you're doing now. It matters that you've carried the weight of uh, of those lessons, the, and that weight has been such a burden.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

I do this exercise with uh, with some of my patients. I I get them to hold out a two pound weight and can be you. How heavy is your kid?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

very heavy, more, okay, more than two pounds 40 pounds, there we go and you can hold him. But if you think about, okay, so you could hold out a two pound weight, you know, given that you can do 40. But if you hold it out like that, you're holding it out, holding it out, eventually you're saying, wow, this is getting really heavy, and I say, okay, well, let's put it down and weigh it, and it would still be two pounds. But the longer you hold on to something, the heavier it feels. The longer you hold on to those messages of toxicity, the heavier they feel, the more they weigh on you, especially if you're an emotionally sensitive person although to Jacqueline's point, what's interesting about sometimes, when, when patient, when people re-evaluate who taught them to hate themselves?

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

like these messages of being successful, being beautiful, being like your brother is?

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

the way for me to love you. I see sometimes that they can get to the point where they recognize who the teachers are. I then having to doubt that or question that could dismantle a lot of their lives, right? Oh, if my, if my dad, my dad's messages of what's right and wrong, um, and to hate myself or love myself are incorrect, well then he, he's wrong, and then I, and then this might threaten my whole, then maybe he's a bad person, and then maybe this ruptures my whole relationship with it. Right, there's kind of like a holding on of these beliefs sometimes when you trust that he's taught you versus.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah, that's fair, but this is where wise mind comes in. I mean, like that, here's the thing is like when you feel shut down, when your body contracts, it's a bad lesson, you know. When your body shut down, you get. When you're sick, your body shuts down and you contract. What happens when you like experience love and experience joy? It's like expansion, you know so. So your body is actually telling you whether something's toxic or not, and I think you know, from a DBT point of view, with dialectics, it's. It's, you know, not every message is a toxic message and not every positive message is useful. You know, telling me that I can dunk a basketball. You know, I'm old and decrepit and you know, I mean I can barely, you know, put my arms around the rim of the, I mean touch the bottom of the net. So I mean, some things are just true, you know, but it's really examining, okay. So you say okay, like that was the student.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Now, by the way, often what we find is that a parent uses the same technique with all of their children. You know, I said I, you know I. I yelled at the oldest, he turned out okay. I yelled at the middle one and she turned out okay. But this one, you know, I tell her get up and, you know, do whatever it is starts crying. That's because they're highly sensitive people, and so the well-intentioned techniques that a parent uses with one child and with two children, you know, if your child's allergic to peanuts and your other one isn't, one's going to have a reaction that the other one isn't going to have. And so now it may not be intentional that they're getting these messages, that the parent is delivering those messages. It just might mean that, look, okay, we're not going to sit here and say that because your dad taught you these messages, that he's a fundamentally terrible human being. I don't want to get into that. And in any case, hating somebody to stop hating yourself just doesn't work. Hatred does not cure hatred. So it's sort of saying, ok, I learned these lessons, but maybe they were just, like they were, teachers who'd been taught that way themselves.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

I learned that the word concha is a Spanish word for a shell. I used that word in Ecuador when I was teaching and it is the word for intimate female anatomy, and I was there, you know, lecturing away, talking about like this wonderful shell that I had found on the beach, and it was nice and smooth on the inside and I could put it to my ear, hear the ocean and it smelled a little bit like fish. And you know, it was like, and I could see the students like mortified, because I had been taught so the word is correctly. That in Spanish is how I understood the word, but I was, you know, like in the different context did not come out so well, you know. So the point is OK, that was a mistake.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Now people could go home and say, oh, my God, like this American professor came and gave us the most disgusting teaching ever about female vaginas, teaching ever about female vaginas, and, um, and and. But there was somebody could say, oh, you know what, like, okay, he, he mislearned, like that was it? What was the context? And then say, okay, like that was bad teaching, let's correct that. Can you go back to a parent and say you know what? Those were actually hurtful, and I know that may not have been intentional, but but nevertheless it had a certain impact. There was some attempts to, you know, like, going on to going down to New York and and doing some some of the morning shows, but you know they haven't panned out yet because there's a lot of political news in the in the news cycle, and so you know that this hasn't taken um you know on, but um, yeah, so we'll, we'll see but yeah, no, I'd love to.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Uh, you know, uh hang out and uh, you know, happy to. I just love teaching and um, uh, yeah.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

Well is it. Can you tell us where? Um where? We'll definitely put the link to your book in the show notes, but is any other resources or where that people can find you or talk to you or anything else that you want to give to the listeners?

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Yeah, I mean, I think I think our website but I mean our website is a treatment program, you know so, it's the continuum, whether it's outpatient, residential or a partial hospital. But people send me, you know so, that I, because I think that the flood of emotions as they come are are so powerful that that, by stopping and getting the person to do some reflection, you know so, I think, in the book that there's all these exercises, but I think that we're at the beginning of a journey of of really examining this concept of self, you know, this concept of who we are as human beings, and I think that in this day and age, the self-absorption leads us to a level of self-hatred that is kind of unprecedented, and I think that we're going to see more and more of it. And I think, you know, I mean I wrote this, it took, I've written 20 books.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

And and run 57 marathons.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

So I mean you know, like I live a very extreme life. I mean I mean I very like I live on the intense age of life and but but this one I can. You know, I can really churn out a book quickly, but this one took two years because it was so important. It's my, I think to me it's my most important book, because I, because I, because it is so antithetical to my experience to see somebody who I so deeply love to hate themselves. You know, I just, and now the problem is is that all my patients who not love themselves they won't leave me alone. I mean they're so frigging, annoying. They send me pictures of their ultrasounds and of their marriages and of their babies.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

And.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

I'm not your therapist anymore.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

I said never stop loving yourself.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Exactly, leave me alone. But you know it's just wonderful to stay connected. I mean they often will travel once a year to come to Boston, to come and say hi and bring their families or go and grab a coffee. It's lovely.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

I'm literally putting this in my Amazon cart after we hang up, because I have a patient who struggles with this and it can make you feel so incredibly helpless.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

I think the only thing is thank you so much, just in terms of recommendation, because of the Fox piece there was a little bit of negativity, negativity if, if, uh, if you, if you review it and you think that it's worth anything.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre:

Um, you know, like one thing that can help is sort of like supporting it on amazon by saying you know five stars or whatever it is you know just just in terms of like, because I I think, um, there's a, there's a sense of like it being that, there's a self-indulgence, and I think that people are mistaking kind of superficial self-dissatisfaction with the self-hatred that is going to take someone's life. You know, guys, you are beautiful and wonderful and, kibi, if I come down, I'm definitely bringing socks for the little guy to drive you nuts.

Dr. Kibby McMahon:

Well, we're in New York, so we would love to also come and visit, if there's any kind of mentalization-based training.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

Well, little Helpers. Now I'm about to beg for five stars. So after you're done reading Blaze's book, give him five stars. Then come on here and give us five stars and we'll all be so happy and we'll love ourselves. For now, see you later and you'll hear from us next week.

Jacqueline Trumbull:

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