#The Self-Loathing Thing Is Going To Take A While To Resolve...And It'll Be Largely Through Small Consistent Acts Of Love From Others

[xaykwolf]

"Hope that wasn't it" anon for the third & final time, I swear: the way Yang frames her formative experiences as "losses and failures"? Even if its forms of expression aren't *totally* equivalent, detrimental self-loathing is seriously striking me as yet another shared Bee issue.

lol You're fine, anon!

I feel like there's an amount of "approaching the same destination from different directions" we get from the Bees in several different areas. The big one is, of course, trusting close connections to others. Yang has abandonment issues, and Blake has abandoning tendencies, but through their shared experience they're learning to overcome that and heal from the worst example of it (the Fall and Adam cutting off Yang's arm). Blake promises she's done running from Yang and demonstrates it, and Yang begins to believe her and let go of the fear of potential pain of abandonment.

In the same way, they both have similar backgrounds in that they engendered a diminished sense of personal integrity (as in wholeness, not morality/ethics).

Yang learned early on that her purpose was to take care of others, and her very semblance reflects that (though I'm hoping we see a transformation of that, considering Ren got one that means it's possible). She focuses so much on others that she neglects herself, and she considers it a personal failing if she either doesn't succeed in helping someone ("You weren't supposed to be here") or if she ever feels someone else has to help her (The Barn Scene™). There's a very real potential that this self-sacrificial attitude comes from the self-loathing of having needs in the first place. She's going to have to see that not only is it okay (and natural!!!) to have needs, but that also the people in her life are going to WANT to help take care of them.

Blake, for her part, had her development interrupted by Adam, who abused and manipulated her into believing that she was never good enough, a coward who always runs from her problems. He constantly questioned her belief in him and in their cause, and he broke her down into his tool and stepping stone toward becoming the leader of the WF. He taught her that her own instincts and feelings were incorrect (see: the true meaning of "gaslighting"), and he taught her that speaking up would only cause pain. She gradually learned to hate her very self, and even after she left him, she carried that around until she had no choice to confront the "coward" label and see that it was false and imposed on her by someone else.