Addicted to Self-Cruelty

“He doesn’t belong either in your head or in your bed. He just serves your addiction to pain... I think you’re the one who’s committed to hurting you. He’s just a screen on which you project your cruelty to yourself.”

Maria Bello, Whatever… Love is Love

Most every codependent I’ve ever known has been unknowingly addicted to pain. So many of us were taught to be cruel to ourselves. As small children, when adults hurled nasty, shaming words our way, we allowed ourselves to be verbally and emotionally stoned to near-death. We took their harsh criticisms very personally and we learned to endlessly repeat every ugly word we absorbed. We then beat ourselves up with these same shaming criticisms until we developed a need for them.

This is how our addiction to pain began. As we grew into adulthood, we then searched-out new people who could serve our addiction to pain. We often chose friends and lovers who treated us as badly as our parents had. These new people became the screens on which we projected all of our inner self-loathing. And because these people were just as emotionally unavailable as the adults we grew-up with, they constantly reinforced our internalized shame as they validated our core belief: I’ll never be good enough. I’m worthless—a belief we hated but had become comfortable with.

On the surface, we sought these people out because we wanted them to rescue us from our self-cruelty by proving to us that we were indeed lovable and worthwhile. But because we were addicted to our pain and suffering, we purposely chose people who couldn’t possibly love us. Sure, these people looked nice enough on the surface. But underneath they were emotional zombies, who loathed themselves as much as we loathed ourselves, and who had absolutely nothing to give us but misery.

It was a very familiar misery. It involved endless emotional withholding, endless disappointment, and endless verbal assaults that pierced our souls like poison arrows. Once more we were on our emotional knees faced with the failure of being ourselves and with our endless fear of abandonment cutting our insides to shreds.

I remember those days well. And although I have been in recovery for 20 years, I still sometimes struggle with an inner-attraction to people who serve my deepest old desire for self-cruelty. Recovery has taught me to be aware of these ugly patterns of behavior, but it hasn’t fully removed the need for them. I think that need sometimes still exists because there is a lesson I have yet to learn. And so I still need that someone who can be the screen that I project my self-cruelty upon.

The advantage today is that I am more aware of what I am doing and so it doesn’t take as long to learn my lesson. I experience the pain, my denial lifts and, instead of playing the victim, I ask myself “What have I learned from this step backwards?”

Usually there was hidden shame that needed to be brought into the light, exposed, faced and challenged. Then begins the process of taking my power back from that shame. Once I am past the shame, I have eliminated another reason to be cruel to me. And life is always better when we have one less reason to be mean to ourselves. It also means that we have one less reason to be attracted to toxic people. After all, their only real purpose was to act as screens, or mirrors, to reflect our self-loathing back to us. The less we loathe ourselves, the less we need toxic people around us.

If you find that you are attracting people who simply serve to reinforce your own self-cruelty, you need to get to a support group and stick with it. A cruelty free life is worth living!