My outer critic is my inner critic

[ah]

I've been noticing more and more that my anger isn't related to other people at all, even when I feel angry at someone I'm actually full of self hatred.
My self hatred overflows and then I can't tolerate anyone else. I'm not seeing them at all. I'm just feeling I'm too evil to exist, so I can't stand others because all I want is to disappear. To be gone from the world. I wish I weren't there, and then in their movements and their speech and behavior they leave me so triggered, any interaction hurts so much.

I don't know if I really have an outer critic. Right now it seems to me my outer critic is a type of inner critic.

When I notice my self hatred my anger toward the other person evaporates. Not my self hatred though, OH NO  it buries me under but oh well. 99999999999999999999999 down, one to go? Or is it the other way round?

I do hate one thing: I hate being warped like this. I hate being taught hatred. I hate that my heart, if I weren't hated and neglected and abused from day 1 to now including today, wouldn't have known this emotion. It could have been big and I could have done a lot of good. Never do bad. Instead I turned into nothing. There's nothing. Waste of a life. I'm not just told I waste oxygen, I do waste oxygen. It sounds harsh but that doesn't mean it can't be true too. All my potential has turned into a scorched desert and the people who did it enjoy stomping on it and reminding me of it any way they can. 

But I don't hate a single living being, I don't hate my most sadistic abusers. It's not that I like them (YRGH!) - I feel... well, I think that's the saddest tribute to how atrocious emotional abuse can be.

When I was 2 years old I used to chat to adults who seemed sad, sit next to them and give them loving nicknames, interview them about their lives, ask if they had kids I could meet.
I used to stand up to my F and try to save my siblings every single time, even though I always lost the battle and my siblings never, ever did the same for me despite being twice or three times my size. They watched me being hurt with blank, empty eyes.

Taking a baby born with that sort of character and breaking her and grinding her into dust is...

[artemis23]

Ah,

I can relate to the self hatred and feeling like a waste of oxygen. The truth is you are not, but the truth is also that you 'feel' like you are. Any oxygen I've seen you use here is so so valuable to all you come in contact with. I actually see compassionate caring 2 year old still IS you.

I think beyond internalizing and believing the self hatred we've been conditioned with, we also turn our hatred of our abusers in on ourselves. It doesn't have any 'safe' place to go, it can't be expressed to the people it belongs to, so we put in on ourselves. It has to go somewhere and it's very real! I have been struggling with this lately and sometimes it just gets the best of me. We have been scapegoated. I think we get really freaking confused about anger. Because out abuser's anger was evil, malicious, and controlling, not to mention they were in control of it and used it to hurt us/others. And any anger we have can make us feel 'bad' because we naturally don't want to be like them. Projecting onto a child that they are the one who is bad is highly effective. It lasts...

Something I've realized about anger is that it's the energy of change. I often direct it at myself, and it will destroy and debilitate me. But sometimes now, I'm finding, I can redirect it's powerful energy into action, change, healing. Sometimes the only thing that gets me through the self hatred is the stubbornness in the feeling that if I keep it up for them these jerks win.

I like how you explained it with your outer critic is really your inner critic. Makes perfect sense to me.

I just want to say you have a right to be angry. You may be trained to direct it all at yourself. I see you do have a pretty big heart and you are doing a lot of good here! I know what it's like to feel like potential is gone, but the other morning I woke up from a dream to see that it had only been buried for it's own self preservation and distorted by the malicious people who were pathologically envious of it. I wrote a beautiful piece about it and maybe I will post it some time. It's about how we have to lose our identity, or gifts, our potential, to survive. But it's never really lost, it just needs to feel safe to be accessed again and that's a process.

Sometimes when I am feeling like this I write a hate letter, even to myself. Just like, stream of consciousness get it out on paper and purge. Its ok to hate yourself, has anyone told you that? Even if you are not really truly hate-able your feelings are real. Maybe they will tell you something. I let it flow out and if I start to feel the hate towards someone or something else just let that flow out on the page too.

I was the protector of my sibling too and she only resents me. I hate her sometimes now, I didn't think I was allowed to before. She's mean. Not my problem. But I didn't aways allow myself to feel that.

I'm proud of you for acknowledging your anger, it ain't easy. 

[DecimalRocket]

I agree that compassionate 2 year old you is still left there. When I was around kindergarten age, I was a lot more blunt and argumentive.  I admire those people who kindness came easier and earlier. How natural it is to them, compared to how much I needed to work hard for it.

Ah, you're not evil. You're kind. You don't know how much you've done for me, much less on what others have benefited from you. I relate to that feeling of thinking I could have done more. But it's not the big shot famous successes that do most of the good in the world. It's the combination of what everyday good people do. The best kindness isn't just done once in a while. It's done everyday.

But I swear. You deserve kindness whether you're doing good or not.

Anger is not always evil. There's anger that seeks to change for good. People like human rights activists who seek to turn their rage into activism, thoughtful discussion, kindness to others and a listening ear to them. This could apply to you to yourself too. It's the need to stand up for yourself or others. How it's expressed is something else.

It's alright. Be angry. Be angry at your abusers. Be angry at the world. *, be free to be angry at us for not being enough for you if it feels like it. I know I had trouble feeling that kind of anger even though I could control what to do with it.

It's okay, Ah. We'll still be here. 

[Slackjaw99]

I think self-hatred should be part of the definition of cPTSD if it isn't already. Self-hatred is how I defined myself for decades. My only emotion was anger. Although like DR states, anger is sometimes "righteous". Righteous anger comes from seeing someone mistreated. In our case it can come from seeing how we've been mistreated, and that's actually good. It's good because this type of anger combined with being so sick and tired of this condition provides the requisite motivation to do the one thing different that will allow us to recover. 

That one thing that's so difficult to do is to is to "self-parent" your angry inner two year old with *unconditional love*. You have to give your angry two year old permission to feel- to yell and scream and, most importantly, to grieve for the lifetime of injustice and loss. This is the "psychodynamic" way of saying you need to turn towards and embrace your emotions as part of you. Grieving and angering are the only way that we humans can release the traumatic energy from our brains and live a normal life. The paradox for us is that we've been taught to fear and stuff our emotions as a matter of survival making this task near impossible. The stuffing of our emotions is how self-hatred breeds.

Having recently had my own cathartic release of a lifetime of grief, I can say that my inner critic is gone as is my hair trigger anger- replaced by self-love. My irony is that I still seem to have a healthy but orphaned outer critic due to a lifetime of habitual thinking that I'm confident can be overcome through mindfulness and willpower.