You Can’t Hate Yourself into Changing

Self-compassion works better than beating yourself up

My client Sarah had been sober for three weeks when she relapsed. She sat in my office the next day cataloguing everything she’d done wrong and everything she should have seen coming, every way she’d failed herself and her family.

“God, I hate myself. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? I need to try harder, I guess,” she said.

But I’d watched this…