Loving yourself like a hostage negotiator

An unorthodox strategy for approaching self-loathing

If any feeling captures the zeitgeist, it’s the feeling of being trapped.

Of all the annoying platitudes about feeling trapped, I’ve noticed one stands out for its unique combination of wisdom and conversation-killing potential:

“You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else.”

For complicated reasons, I’ve been saying this quite a lot to the amazingly warm and talented people I’ve been meeting lately. Most of them disagreed immediately and viscerally with an intellectual or emotional intensity that demanded either retreat or moving forward with crisis-like attentiveness.

In other words, I keep finding myself in a hostage negotiator’s position, pitting a willful lack of tact against the self-loathing of a relative stranger. In most cases, I backed down simply to avoid offending. In one case, at a party whose late night revelry was gradually replaced with an dawn-watch Spanish dubbing of The Negotiator, I somewhat unknowingly stumbled into a strategy I had studied during my MBA.

Step Zero: “You have to care…they have to know that you care.”

I seem to have good luck in finding warm, caring and compassionate souls who are great friends and fun to be around. Sadly, many of these awesome people are also self-loathing in a way that they’ve had years of practice hiding, a way I know extremely well, because I was also that person.

Then I found myself studying for the last section of the CPA exam in a back brace while tapering off of pain pills when it dawned on me that I felt different — even through this pain, I didn’t hate myself. While it may be unrelated, I’m chalking it up as a benefit of the head injury that practically went unnoticed.

That feeling of self-loathing, for me, was never something that made itself known in every waking moment. It just managed to get into position quickly after people paid me unexpected compliments, started talking about anything on a “love yourself” theme or began extolling the virtues of self-esteem. It had a lot of practice at jumping into action, honing its skills against what it saw as inexplicably happy people talking down to a very deep psychic pain.

To gain some kind of success at negotiating with self-loathing, to release the “hostage” whether it’s you or someone else, you have to really, really care. Encouraging others to let go of self-loathing is hard, getting ready to encourage yourself to do it is even more challenging. Not only do you have to care, self-loathing has to know you care.

Step One: Active Listening

The Behavioral Change Stairway Model is not just the hallmark of hostage and crisis negotiation, it’s used in business, counseling and many other environments to break through an obnoxiously resistant pattern of behavior. It’s a simple model but one that requires incredible skill and training to effectively put into practice.

Active Listening is both the first and hardest step. We tend to listen not so much to understand, but to wait for weaknesses in an argument or to have the opportunity to further our own point. How often do you use or hear, “You’re not listening to me!” in the course of a conversation?

Too much of our dialogue focuses around pointed questions designed to elicit the responses we want. We think being “straightforward and honest” is the best approach. We try to get people to say “yes” and in this and many other ways struggle to maintain control of the conversation.

Stop doing that. All of that. Speak to self-loathing in others or yourself by really listening to the pain, even if you have to apply a stethoscope to it. Try to hear all the pain, the trauma, everything valid, invalid, uncomfortable or inconvenient. Take a moment to breathe, remain present and keep your thoughts to yourself. Keep the conversation going in ways that rephrase the statements or thoughts you hear, always pursuing mutual understanding and avoiding injecting anything new. Ask indirect, non-threatening questions without easy answers in mind. If you do ask a direct question, make sure it can be answered with a self-protecting “no”.

Step Two: Empathy

If you’re asking the right questions and doing the right kind of listening, you’ll notice a slide away from a harsh defensive position and into a more pensive one. This is a good sign that you’re heading towards genuine empathy.

It’s easy to mistake empathy as a simple understanding of what another is feeling and where they’re coming from. Genuine empathy means understanding and accepting the other’s emotional matrix in this moment. To know a feeling and a place in an academic way is psychology. To achieve genuine empathy, you have to know, feel and achieve a validating understanding all at once.

To add another wrinkle, being empathetic with oneself is an especially difficult concept to understand, let alone do. We humans are awful at assessing that which could kill us, let alone the wordless feelings within ourselves or others we’re trying to connect with. By comparison, introspection is frequently rhetorically lauded, but often and paradoxically best described as a means of product invention. Conditioning oneself for real introspection may take a lot of bashing away at the psyche as therapists often do when they repeatedly interject with: “How do you feel?”

Some Buddhist contemplation suggests the capacity to take care, protect and nourish is basically what love is. Isn’t empathy both the beginning and the result of that definition of love? The Buddhists go on describe that if one can’t generate the “energy” of empathy towards themselves, it will be rather difficult to do in a truly honest way towards another.

Herein lies one of the curiously twisted benefits of the socially self-loathing that is difficult to grasp: They are really good at being likeable by virtue of this curious tendency to place everyone else ahead of themselves. You might have seen this tendency described as people pleasing, which often cascades out of a lack of self-worth and into a practically functional kind of dysfunction. Like any other coping mechanism, this can range from the barely detectable to the obviously compulsive and depending on time and relative closeness, be anywhere on that spectrum to those in one’s life.

Once you can see the source of the dysfunction and feel it — but not write it off — you’re closer to:

Step Three: Rapport

“Empathy is what you feel. Rapport is when they feel it back.”

You’ll know you’re in rapport in that moment when there’s a clear mutual understanding of the feeling you achieved in empathy. This happens very infrequently between people, let alone within oneself. The rapport you’re looking for is what people would describe as a breakthrough in therapy.

If you’re feeling this with yourself, if you’re truly at the point where you’re starting to dig into things long buried and coming up with more than rocks and dirt, the answers may start flooding out all at once. Sometimes this rapport exists through some other event or trigger, the soil has been thoroughly tilled and it takes you a while to realize that you’re actually closer to yourself than you’ve ever been.

Step Four: Influence

Influence may be the wrong word for what happens in this step, in this particular scenario. You might be disarming one kind of self-loathing and empowering another waiting in the wings. There may be nothing you can really do, depending on a person’s experiences and circumstances, but you may already know that as a course of your exploration in the past few steps.

Guidance might be the best way to describe influence. Perhaps you’ve freed the hostage but they don’t want to go anywhere. They don’t really know any other way to be. You have to walk together back into something that is not as toxic as self-loathing, avoiding mechanisms that may look like a repellent narcissism. Like any victim, granting agency and control is essential to not only restoring well-being but to maintaining a positive influence.

Step Five: Freedom

Yes, in the model this step is called “behavioral change”. In this case, I’ll call it freedom. This kind of freedom is ultimately the goal of many kinds of therapy, the relief one feels when freed from the bonds of chronic dysfunction. Then again, being so freed does not guarantee wellness or happiness, nor will this process end in a few hours like a hostage situation does. True freedom is an ongoing process like recovering from a more obvious dysfunction such as addiction. Relapse into familiar dysfunction is sometimes part of the process of ultimately escaping it.

These thoughts may make absolutely no sense to you. In a way, that’s a perfect outcome because it likely means that the dysfunction I’m describing doesn’t apply to you.

Then again, these thoughts may trigger something else in you. Bear in mind, that unless you already possess this skill automatically, loving yourself is actually really hard. Imagine if you had to learn how to walk as an adult. Picture not knowing how to read facial expressions. These are very difficult things to relearn once they’re no longer automatic. Figuring out how not to hate yourself is something that many people wrestle with their whole lives, keeping themselves in the emotional equivalent of a wheelchair nobody can see and sticking mostly to barrier-free emotional spaces.

Perhaps using the language and context of hostage negotiation was not the best approach, but if nothing else I believe the analogy vivid enough to illustrate the severity of the problem and the lack of agency of the victim. In any case, let me know what you agree — and especially what you disagree with. As always, I look forward to hearing from you.

Much love and thanks to @artmouse for being an intellectual sparring partner and amazing editor on this work. Look forward to more!