The most dangerous form of hatred isn’t always directed at other people.

Sometimes it’s directed at ourselves.

The trouble is that self-hatred never leaves us where it began. It always has consequences. It either turns inward and slowly destroys us, or it is projected outward and harms others. Sometimes it does both.

For much of my life, I knew only the first path.

My self-hatred didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was learned.

When self-hatred is turned inward

I grew up in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s when homosexuality was illegal, ridiculed, and regarded as something shameful. Gay people were the butt of jokes, portrayed as predators, deviants, and criminals. Long before I understood my own sexuality, I had absorbed the message that if I turned out to be one of “those people”; it was a curse.

At 18, I became a “born-again” Christian, believing I’d find freedom and change.

Instead of finding freedom from that shame, it supercharged it. What society had labelled “abnormal”, I was now taught was sinful, evil, an abomination my King James Bible said. Unless I changed, I feared I was destined for eternity in hell.

I threw myself into trying to change. I prayed endlessly, fasted, underwent deliverances, conversion “therapy” and immersed myself in the Bible and Christian service. I genuinely believed that if I had enough faith, enough commitment, or enough obedience, God would change me.

Nothing changed.

The only conclusion I could reach was that the problem was me. Not enough faith, not enough commitment, or as the pastor in the conversion “therapy” residential program told me, “you love your sin more than you love God”. Was I that evil? It was because I loved God that I was in so much inner conflict. I was reminded of the scripture that said, “The heart is desperately wicked, who can know it.” Jeremiah 17:9.

In my early Christian experience, like so many of us at that time, the famous Pentecostal preacher and author of the bestseller, The Cross and the Switchblade was a hero of mine. It didn’t help that his advice to young gay men like me was,

“You must learn to hate, despise, crucify and mortify your flesh. You must learn to look into a mirror and honestly say, “My body, my flesh, is worthless, worm-eaten, and full of decay and death!” Cultivate a shame for your nakedness.” 

All of that pain was directed inward, and I fought a secret battle with myself.

What began as shame became self-hatred.

Looking back, I can see what self-hatred cost me. The constant inner conflict fuelled a depression I kept hidden from everyone. I had several emotional breakdowns. Sometimes the sense of hopelessness became so overwhelming I wondered whether life was worth living.

After more than ten years of marriage, out of the blue one day my wife confronted me. “I  feel like I don’t know you,” she said.

I protested, of course, but she was never more right. How could she know me when I was presenting a façade and spending every day hiding who I really was?

Coming out doesn’t automatically remove the years of harm or deep psychological scars of living with self-hatred. It is often the underlying cause of self-sabotage and self-destructive behaviours. For some, it ends up in self-harm.

In 2018, I was sitting in a Broadway theatre watching a 50-year anniversary revival of Mart Crowley’s 1968 play The Boys in the Band for the first time. Jim Parsons was playing the lead role, Michael, a gay man, Catholic, and a recovering alcoholic. The play took us behind the closed doors of a New York apartment, where a group of gay friends gathered for a birthday party. As the evening unfolded, the witty banter gave way to painful truths. Beneath the humour lay a world of secrecy, fear, shame, and internalised self-hatred formed from decades of being ridiculed and rejected. We lived in closets or ghettos.

I saw myself many times in the play and had met all the characters more than once since coming out on the scene.

As all the drama and bitchiness eventually subsided, the play finished with Jim Parsons saying,

“If we could just not hate ourselves so much. That’s it, you know. If we could just learn not to hate ourselves… quite so very much.”

I honestly sat there stunned as I realised in those few words, he had captured the defining struggle of the first forty years of my life.

Self-hatred develops like this.

External condemnation from society, family, or our religion becomes an internal sense of shame. Every failed attempt to change becomes further evidence against us. Every unanswered prayer confirms that we are the problem. The shame becomes internalised and rooted as self-hatred. We take it on as part of our identity. Eventually self-hatred becomes self-loathing.

Condemnation → shame → self-hatred → self-loathing.

Self-hatred is pervasive and insidious. It exists independently of behaviour. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of people who had never once acted on their same-sex attraction. Yet many were still overwhelmed by shame and self-hatred. They spent years fighting feelings they had never chosen, convinced they were unacceptable to God and unworthy of love. That is the tragedy of self-hatred. It doesn’t wait for your actions. It convinces you that your very existence is the problem. That is why I am so against the celibacy messages of people like Kim Zember and Sam Allberry.

The Man I Couldn’t Pray Away © Anthony Venn-Brown 2025

Finding Freedom from Self-Hatred

It took some years to get to the place I’m at now. There are a number of things I discovered along the way that helped me change that inner identity and heal the harm.

  1. Educate yourself

Knowledge really is power. If we’ve lived with self-hatred, it’s because we’ve believed damaging messages about ourselves. Before the truth can set us free, we first need to recognise the lies that kept us enslaved.

If our struggles relate to our sexual orientation or gender identity, we need to take time to learn what the scientific evidence says. These areas have been extensively researched. The overwhelming consensus of major medical, psychological, and mental health organisations is that same-sex attraction and gender non-conformity are simply natural variations of the human experience.

If you come from a Christian background, educate yourself about the Bible passages that have traditionally been used to condemn homosexuality and same-sex  relationships. For centuries, these texts have been misinterpreted without critical attention to their historical setting, cultural context, or the original Hebrew and Greek. Many respected biblical scholars now understand these passages address specific behaviours, such as rape, exploitative relationships, prostitution, pederasty, and some idolatrous practices, rather than loving, committed same-sex relationships as we understand them today. READ OR LISTEN HERE.

  1. Use Positive Affirmations

Positive affirmations are short, intentional statements that reinforce healthy and life-giving beliefs about yourself. Their purpose is to replace the false messages that have fuelled self-hatred with truths that affirm your worth and dignity.

Affirmations are most effective when they are realistic and repeated consistently. At first, they may feel uncomfortable because they challenge beliefs you’ve held for years. But over time, they can help establish new patterns of thinking and strengthen a healthier sense of identity; you’re no longer saying statements; you actually believe them.

Some simple affirmations include:

  • I am worthy of love and respect.
  • I deserve kindness, including from myself.
  • My worth is not determined by the opinions of others.

Affirmations alone won’t erase years of shame or self-hatred, but when practised consistently they can become a valuable part of the healing process.

  1. Analyse and change your self-talk

The way we speak to ourselves shapes the way we see ourselves. If we’ve lived with self-hatred, our inner voice constantly repeats messages of shame, failure, and unworthiness. Learning to recognise these destructive thought patterns and deliberately replacing them with truthful, compassionate ones is a vital step towards healing. We can’t always control the thoughts that enter our minds, but we can choose which ones we believe and allow to define us. Remember this simple formula: thoughts → feelings → behaviours.

  1. Practice self-compassion

Self-hatred thrives on harsh self-judgement, but healing begins when we learn to treat ourselves with compassion. Self-compassion means extending to ourselves the same kindness, understanding, and grace we would naturally offer a close friend who was struggling. It doesn’t ignore our imperfections or mistakes; it simply recognises that they don’t determine our worth. Learning to be compassionate towards ourselves is one of the most powerful ways to weaken the grip of self-hatred and build a healthier sense of self.

  1. Therapy

Healing doesn’t have to be a journey you take alone. Many people find that working with a skilled counsellor or therapist provides the support, perspective, and tools they need to heal. The first openly gay psychologist, Donald Clark, authored a seminal book, Loving Someone Gay. Published in 1977, his book helped thousands of gay people and their families replace fear and misinformation with understanding and acceptance. Clark believed that, where possible, gay people were usually better served by a gay therapist because of the greater likelihood of empathy and shared lived experience.

Awareness → self-acceptance → self-worth → self-love  → authenticity.

Be aware that traces of self-hatred can remain buried in the deep inner recesses of our subconscious and occasionally resurface. When they do, don’t be discouraged. Recognise them for what they are: only echoes of the past, not the truth about who you are.

When self-hatred is projected outward

Not everyone responds the way I did. Some people project their self-hatred outward.

When people cover their secret shame, they find it easier to condemn others. Unresolved shame becomes an unhealthy obsession, attacking LGBTQ people or the community. Inner turmoil can masquerade as moral certainty. Anger becomes a crusade of supposed “righteousness”.

I’ve lost count of the number of prominent anti-gay politicians, preachers, pastors, and religious leaders who have later been exposed as living secret sexual lives. Sometimes the revelation is that they were engaging in the very same relationships they publicly condemned. In other cases, the stories are far darker, involving sexual abuse or the exploitation of vulnerable people, including children.

These regularly recurring stories point towards unresolved shame, self-rejection, and repression playing a role. When people despise an essential part of themselves, that self-hatred has to find an outlet somewhere.

History suggests that an unhealthy anti-LGBTQ obsession is often rooted in unresolved inner conflict. Some are eventually exposed for the hypocrisy of living lives that contradict everything they publicly espoused about family values, morality, righteousness, and holiness.  Others may succeed in keeping their private lives hidden, but beneath the façade they remain trapped by the very shame and hatred they project onto others.

Of course, hidden sexuality never excuses abuse. Abuse is always the responsibility of the abuser. Years of shame and self-loathing can distort people’s lives in tragic ways.

Conclusion

Emotionally healthy people rarely spend their lives trying to control, condemn, or humiliate others. They have little need to. They’ve made peace with themselves.

That’s why self-acceptance and self-love are so important. People who genuinely accept themselves often become more accepting of others. When we stop fighting a war within ourselves, we stop looking for battles everywhere else.

One of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves and the people around us is to find healing through self-acceptance, genuine love of self, and to practice self-care. One of the greatest myths I believed was that if I hated myself enough, I could change. I couldn’t. All self-hatred ever produced was more self-hatred. Healing only began when I learned to accept myself with compassion instead of condemnation. Ironically, the very thing I had been taught to reject, self-acceptance, became the pathway to emotional health.

Joseph Campbell put it so beautifully when he said.

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”

For those who have known internal self-hatred and found healing, there is freedom and integrity. But for those who project that inner conflict onto others, hypocrisy and deception are the personal costs they carry every day and will become their legacy.

Disclaimer: I am not a trained mental health professional. Everything I have shared here is from my own lived experience.

For more details of  the journey, read A Life of Unlearning.