#138🌳 What Purpose Does Your Self-Loathing Serve?

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I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.

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Part 16 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life.

Belief: My self-loathing is something inherent in me — it comes from inside, and inside only.

Reality: It didn’t all come from inside me — it grew from roots outside me too: my biology, my culture, my history.

Action: Stop trying to fix the feeling — ask what purpose it served, then practice living without the weight.

Three weeks ago, I sat down with my ADHD coach (shoutout to Brett) to take on one of the hardest things I carry: self-loathing — the quiet belief that I’m not good enough and I’m an inherently flawed human. It has been a core struggle of my ADHD. Or well, it was.

I expected to be presented with coping strategies. Instead, I got a question I didn’t see coming: what purpose does the belief serve?

Not why do you hate yourself, and not you should stop. Just — what function does this serve, and is that function still relevant to your life today? It was the first time anyone had treated my self-loathing as something with a history rather than a defect to be ashamed of. And that single question did more for me in a week than years of trying to wish the feeling away.

For a long time, I believed my self-loathing stemmed from inside me, and inside only. Some flaw I was born with, a bad wiring I’d have to either fix or hide. If I were stronger or more disciplined, I told myself, I’d be free of it already.

So every time the feeling showed up, it doubled as evidence. Not only was I not good enough — the badness was me, the core of me, and I couldn’t even fix the part of me that believed it. The best I could do was find ways to live with my flaw. “Fixing” it was not an option.

That’s the trap of treating self-loathing as something purely internal: it makes you the whole problem. If it all comes from inside you, then there’s no one and nothing else to look at — only you, failing to be different.

What I missed was that it didn’t all come from inside me. My coach’s question forced me to step outside my own head and look at the world around me — to become, in his words, an observer of my own life rather than only its harshest critic.

And from that vantage point, I could see the roots ran outward, into things that happened to me and around me long before I had any say. They’re hard to pull apart, but I can name them.

• There’s the neurobiology of ADHD and the way I emotionally regulate — things I was born with.

• There’s my culture, growing up Thai Chinese, where you do what you’re told, and you put the family first.

• There’s the childhood weight of a parent trying to fulfill her own dreams through me, which gave me the gift of love, being conditional on achievement.

All of these converged into one feeling, and for years, I read that feeling as a verdict on my character.

Seeing those outer roots instead of only blaming the soil inside me changed how I saw myself. It wasn’t that the self-loathing wasn’t mine — it was, grown right through my life and my body. It was that it didn’t start with me, and it wasn’t only me. It was complex and intersectional, made of parts I could finally name. And naming each root is what gave me somewhere to begin, because you can’t tend ground you refuse to dig into.

The relief wasn’t in deciding the feeling wasn’t real. The relief was in understanding it was made of something — and that I once needed it. My self-loathing taught me how to hustle and achieve. I’ll grant it that gift. But I don’t need to keep carrying the weight to keep the lesson.

You don’t fix self-loathing the way you’d fix a software bug — it’s not a one-time, forever fix. The feeling will come back, and when it does, you’ll want to be prepared to process and learn from it, not fight it. To do that, you’ll need to understand where those feelings come from, so you can hear what they’re trying to tell you. They’re coming up for a reason — and that reason is NOT that you’re broken.

Ask what purpose the belief serves.

• Instead of asking why I feel this way, ask what function the feeling has had — and whether it’s still relevant.

• A belief that once protected you or pushed you can long outlive its usefulness. You can keep the skill it gave you and set down the burden that came with it.

Use the word “and.”

• Self-loathing runs on a binary: you either succeed or fail, and your worth rides on which side you land.

• “And” breaks it. You can carry imposter syndrome and be good at your job — both are true at once.

• When you feel your world shrinking around a fearful decision, reach for it: you can take the thing on and you might succeed, you can do hard work and still ask for help.

Stay curious instead of right.

• Trade the right-or-wrong scoreboard for curiosity, where a mistake is information rather than a referendum on you.

• When I mess up now, I can notice it and move forward — which spares me the spiral of shame I used to pour into every missed test and every roadmap I got wrong.

Practice — don’t expect a cure.

• Some of this will never fully go away, and expecting it to is its own trap.

• The first time a “permanent fix” cracks, the whole thing collapses — the same way an elaborate new productivity system falls apart the day you miss a step.

• Practice means doing the thing without needing a perfect outcome, and showing up again because you will mess up again. That’s allowed.

Self-loathing has been such a load-bearing part of my identity that letting it go feels strange, even a little frightening, because I don’t yet know who I am without it. I’m excited and unsure in the same breath.

But I’m going to practice my way into this version of me — the one who’s more confident, less scared, and more connected to himself and to others.

That’s what I wish I’d known sooner — the self-loathing didn’t all come from inside me. Its roots ran through my biology, my culture, and my history, and the work wasn’t to hate myself for carrying it. The work was to understand where it grew, thank it for what it once gave me, and set it down.

If you want one model for how feelings are formed, Brené Brown describes our emotions as layers of biology, biography, behavior, and backstory in Atlas of the Heart. It’s a useful map for naming your own roots. And if you want to dig into the childhood roots specifically, this video is a helpful starting point on your inner child and childhood trauma.

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