The invisible prison of self-hatred

How we are often the architects of our own demise

It was almost 8 years ago that I first glimpsed the bars of a prison that had held me captive most of my life. I was meditating alone at home—something I was new to at the time. I had turned to it desperately to find relief for my broken heart. I did not know how sitting on a cushion, focusing on my breath, would ease my sorrow. But people claimed meditation helped. And so, there I found myself, in the middle of the day, trying to calm my mind and count my breaths.

I fidgeted at first—my legs hurt in the uncomfortable and unfamiliar posture. But I was a broken man at the time and didn’t have much fight in me. So, I soon settled into a quiet rhythm—breathe in, breathe out. I don’t know how much time passed like this. Eventually, I found my thoughts drifting to how I needed to lose weight—a battle that had been ongoing for 12 years.

I suddenly heard a sharp rebuke, “Why can’t you just go to the gym, you fat fuck?” I was stunned at the sudden harshness of these words. Not because they were new. No, I had spoken to myself this way for as long as I could remember. But in the silence of the room and the quiet concentration on my breath, the cruelty of those words registered consciously for the first time.

Still tender from my broken heart, I found tears running down my cheeks. I thought sadly, “I know I need to lose weight, but surely there is a gentler way to get myself to do that. Why must I be so harsh?”

In that liminal moment of self-awareness, in that first act of waking up, I wondered— “How did I end up here? How does someone learn to be this vicious to themselves?” The answer, though I couldn’t see it then, was hidden in deep patterns of my subconscious. It lay coiled at the bottom of a story I'd rather not tell—but one that might help you see the bars of your own invisible prison.

A deep pattern of self-destruction

I encountered this self-cruelty following another episode in a series of self-destructive life choices. I had been obsessively pursuing someone who, unknown to me at the time, I was trying to use to fill a void within me. It was an on-again, off-again relationship involving endless cycles of lying, cheating, viciousness, obsession, and genuine love. From the inside, it felt like a grand narrative of love against all odds. From the outside, it probably looked like the self-harming behaviour of an addict.

I won’t go into the specifics out of respect for the privacy of all concerned. But if you need a glimpse of the madness—I checked her WhatsApp profile every few minutes to see if she was online. Why? Because I was nursing a desperate hope that she would come back to me, and seeing her online made me feel a phantom connection. As if sharing the same mundane moment meant something profound. A drowning man clings to the thinnest of straws. Besides, maybe this time, when I refreshed, her status would change from 'Online' to 'Typing'. Maybe this would be the moment my torment ended.

After months of mixed signals, this cycle ended with her finally telling me, “If I wanted to be with you, I would have been with you.” The words landed like a slap across my face and left me feeling used.

I struggled to process what had transpired. The mental image I had of myself at this time was of a man who had been run over by a truck, his body in tatters like a rag doll. I pictured myself struggling to get up, but my body being too mangled to stand. I collapsed again and again as I tried desperately to drag myself somewhere off the road.

First glimpses of the prison

A few days later, I called my brother, as I often did. He sensed something was off and asked me what was going on. I needed to unburden myself, but I was afraid of being reproached and too ashamed to share what had happened. He promised to listen without judgment. After he listened to the story, he told me I would get through it. He said, “You have beaten this thing before, and you can do so again”.

But I found it hard to believe that I would overcome what had happened. I told him, “I don’t know why I am unable to let go. I don’t know why I keep going back when I know she isn’t good for me.”

He was quiet for a moment. And then he said something which I am still unpacking to this day.

“You are punishing yourself, Akhil”.

“Punishing myself? Why would I be punishing myself?”

“Because for some reason, you feel like you deserve it. Because you hate yourself.”

I was confused. If anything, the thing I had been accused of sometimes was being arrogant or having too high an opinion of myself. A little too smug, a little too clever—a man with more answers than questions.

I thought, “Yeah, I criticize myself now and then, sometimes even harshly. But isn’t that just reflective of high standards? Surely nobody wants to be mediocre. And sure, I have often made excuses on her behalf for the cheating and viciousness. But I cheated on someone else in the past, too. So who am I to judge or feel hurt over the cheating?”.

I did not know what to make of what my brother said. It was only later that I would realize that arrogance was just another manifestation of insecurity and self-hatred. Such is the wicked nature of this prison. I was simultaneously the smartest and the dumbest person alive.

Sharing the tale with others brought reflections similar to my brother’s— “You don’t deserve this”, they said. But what then did I deserve? The whole thing seemed so ambiguous. It was only while meditating months later that I realized my brother might have been right.

But these realizations didn’t crystallize into a breakthrough. I found my obsessive thoughts about my ex returning with great force. Her words kept ringing in my ears. I would be out buying groceries or taking a bath, and I would hear them again—”If I wanted to be with you, I would have been with you.”

But this time her words were accompanied by other questions—”Doesn’t loving her mean being okay with her wishes of not wanting to be with me? Wasn’t my continued obsession just selfish desire? Did I then even really love her? What even is love?”.

I spent many days agonizing and pacing my room, crying silently in anguish, shaking the bars of my mental prison in a desperate bid to get out. I made precious little progress at first, but this anguish yielded one gift—empathy.

Trying to make sense of why this had happened, my mind could find only one answer—Karma. I saw then how my own actions had hurt others.

Not just how I had cheated on someone else. I felt the sting of each callous remark, each heartbreak, each cruelty. The moment I had left a girl who liked me mid-way through a movie because someone had gotten last-minute tickets to a play I wanted to see. The time I had described a girl as fat right in front of her and a group of friends. There wasn’t any malice in any of this. The others’ feelings just weren’t a consideration. As Hannah Arendt said on the banality of evil, the greatest harms often come from thoughtlessness and the failure to see others as real.

A hunger for self-worth

Empathy helped me become a better person, but it did not provide relief for my anguish. After months of struggling, I desperately scoured self-help books in hopes of a way out. Something clicked while reading Brene Brown’s “Daring Greatly”. There is a section in the book that explores male sexuality, shame, and worthiness. A therapist tells her:

“From the time boys are eight to ten years old, they learn that initiating sex is their responsibility and sexual rejection soon becomes the hallmark of masculine shame.”

He goes on to share this about pornography and addiction.

“For five bucks and five minutes, you think you’re getting what you need, and you don’t have to risk rejection. I guess the secret is that sex is terrifying for most men. That’s why you see everything from porn to the violent, desperate attempts to exercise power and control. Rejection is deeply painful.”

I closed the book and stared at the wall. The therapist had given words to things I didn’t want to admit, not even to myself. I understood then why I was so obsessed.

The endless cheating had left me feeling utterly rejected and inadequate. I couldn’t stop imagining her with someone else—visions that arrived uninvited and unrelenting. I wasn’t just picturing an act; I was reliving a complete rejection of my being.

I wanted her back, not just out of love, but because having her again felt like the only way to undo the humiliation, to erase the sense that I wasn’t enough. Being with her had become my way of reclaiming self-worth.

That realization—that I wanted her to undo my rejection—was painful, but it wasn’t the full picture. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized how much my desire to be with her, even in the beginning, was driven by my low self-worth. I distinctly remember when I first fell for her. She had been talking to a friend, and something he said made her laugh. She had this unrestrained, full-bodied laugh that lit up her whole face, and I thought she looked beautiful. I found myself wishing I could make her laugh like that. The significance of this thought dawned on me when I read a tweet many years later:

“The reason you want to be with a 10/10 is not because she is a 10/10 but because you think being with her makes you a 10/10.”

I did not then know that part of what I was doing was not loving her, but treating her like a trophy. A prize that I would get if I was amazing, and then could show to the whole world as proof of said amazingness. She was strong, beautiful, defiant, and free— everything I admired, and everything I lacked. I didn’t just want her. I wanted to be her. Possessing her became a perverse substitute for my cultivating those qualities myself.

It’s hard to admit this. Harder still to know how much of what I once thought was love was actually a search for self-worth. I wasn’t pretending. I cared about her deeply. But mixed into that care was something hollow and hungry—a need to prove something to myself through someone else. For the first time, it became clear to me how I was the architect of my own prison.

The addiction of dysfunction

But this still did not completely explain why being with her felt so good. One of the things that kept me hooked was the sheer intensity of our physical connection. How could this not be meant to be when it felt so right?

Years later, neurobiology offered clues into the mechanics of the subconscious. I didn’t use the language of addiction above by accident. The constant chasing for scraps of love that came my way at unpredictable times wired my brain the same way a slot machine wires a gambler’s brain. It made me feel alive in a way few other things can. My body caught in constant fight/flight mode, found relief only through moments of reconnection. My nervous system was the driver of the truck that had run me over.

I can connect these dots only in hindsight. Back then, these feelings only presented as desires and obsessions. At that time, these clues from my brother, Brene Brown, and the tweet brought into hazy view the bars of a prison I didn’t even know existed, let alone one I needed to escape. It was the invisible prison of self-hatred.

The non-linear path of healing

I wish I could say that things changed radically after these realizations. They did not. None of this fixed me. I didn’t suddenly become wiser or kinder to myself. Having spent most of my life in an unconscious stupor, I didn’t have any inkling of the extent to which subconscious scripts of inadequacy were driving my behaviour or how deep they ran. I had no idea what to do with these clues. They came like small lights in fog—brief moments of clarity that flickered and disappeared. And I did what I had always done— go on with life.

I’ve often wondered why. Why didn’t I try harder to change when I had these clues? Why didn’t I pull myself out? Why was my path to healing so messy and non-linear? The mental image I have of these moments is that of a child stuck at the bottom of a well and crying in despair, wanting to be rescued. Except when a light appears at the bottom and illuminates a rope that can be used to climb out, the child turns away from the light and continues to cry. Eventually, the light and the rope are all but forgotten, and the child keeps lamenting that there is no escape from his cruel fate.

Psychology offers many clues— but if I had to pick, I would probably choose blindness coupled with a lack of faith and imagination. If you spend enough time at the bottom of the well, you don’t really register the rope and light when they appear. They are so far removed from your worldview and your lived reality that your mind doesn’t even comprehend that it is witnessing the possibility of something different. The walls of the psyche and a nervous system addicted to chaos don’t let such things penetrate. So it was when my brother first told me I hated myself. I took my arrogance to be proof that what he said couldn’t be true.

If by chance one manages to register the rope and the light, they seem like a lie. They can’t be trusted. You don’t believe anything better is possible because the only thing you know, the only thing you remember, is the well. Besides, even if the rope and the light are not a lie—you doubt they would work for you. One thinks one’s brand of wretchedness is particularly unique after all. That never before has the world seen such a reprobate, a being so far beyond redemption.

All this, too, I can only surmise in hindsight. The version of me back then had many more years of stumbling around in the darkness left before he could truly understand the nature of the prison he was trapped in. He would need to repeat this cycle many times, hit rock bottom, and excavate childhood wounds that created this prison before he would stop punishing himself. He would go on to learn that love doesn't obsess or try to coerce; love is that which enables choice.¹

I will share the stories of those years in the coming months. For now, I hope my experience helps you see if you, too, are trapped in such a prison. Its exact shape might differ. Perfectionism, self-doubt, anger, attaching self-worth to titles, income, or others’ approval, thinking too much about others and too little about yourself- a form of self-abandonment. All manifestations of alienation from ourselves.

It is worth trying to understand the unconscious scripts driving you. Why? For one, a freer, lighter life awaits on the other side. Second— our wounds, hidden behind layers of armor, bleed out into the world. Hurt people hurt people. The violence, greed, and despair poisoning our world? They begin here, inside a tortured psyche. That's why healing ourselves can be the most powerful force for change in the world.

It won’t be easy. Looking at the mess never is. It will be tempting to look away. And you might not know what to do. In those moments, all you can do is sit — with the mess, the ache, the silence. But that can often be the most powerful thing we can do to escape the prison of self-hatred. Because in that silence, you might just hear the first cracks in your prison walls.

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1. Thanks to Evan Davison Kotler for this framing