Gemma Speck

Research has consistently found that higher self-criticism and self-hatred

As an adult, if you have more of those things as an adult, it's greatly associated with early memories of parental rejection or conditional affection from parents, but also from favoritism, favoritism from teachers, from childhood bullying.

basically just harmful experiences that occurred right as we were forming our evaluative self.

For example, there was a 2006 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, and it looked at the impact of childhood verbal abuse on how adults view themselves.

they analyzed the data of like 6,000 people and they found that heavy or high levels of criticism and discipline and like non-purposeful discipline, experiencing that as a child has a really significant impact on the development of things like adult depression and adult anxiety.

Researchers described

the role of self-criticism in these studies as basically a full mediator.

So this basically means that the verbal abuse didn't directly cause the depression, but it causes a child to develop a self-critical brain because of course they're going to believe what an adult says about them.

They're the role model.

They're the adult.

And that self-critical brain is what drives some parts or a lot of parts of

Adult depression.

A similar story is definitely seen in terms of peer experiences as well.

When we're kids, when we are teenagers, this weird social like pecking order can emerge as people kind of like fight to promote their evaluative skills.

selves and to feel good about themselves.

Like the main way that we feel good about ourselves as children and teenagers is in reference to other people.

And so to feel better, we often have to result to criticizing others, bullying, making remarks, jokes, feeling a sense of superiority, that sort of thing.

Of course, that's not always the case, but it's very, very prevalent.

And that definitely reinforces the self-hatred of the person being targeted and

for sure, it also reinforces the self-hatred of the person doing the targeting.