self-torture
Americannoun
verb (used without object)
Other Word Forms
Example Sentences
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Yearning, possessiveness, jealousy, deception, self-torture, the impossibility of truly knowing another person — these turn out to be the unhappy and recurrent elements of Proustian love.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 3, 2022
These interests set him apart at school, and he would later define this period of his life as a “desperate quest, filled with effort, judgment, self-torture and constant striving”.
From The Guardian ● Jan. 9, 2020
Is doing a one-woman show actually a form of self-torture?
From Los Angeles Times ● May 4, 2018
He did not appear to be one of those actors given to second-guessing or self-torture after a night onstage.
From New York Times ● Jan. 5, 2016
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
Twelve years ago, Theo felt more like an abstract idea; a man I romanticized in all of his sensitive, self-tortured, manic-pixie-dream-guy ways.
From Slate ● Apr. 11, 2025
Aloy, instead of the self-tortured clone of Elizabet Sobeck, becomes a traveling vagabond — learning the songs of the pastoral Utaru people or the creation myths of the warlike Tenakth.
From The Verge ● Feb. 14, 2022
The characters in this franchise are perhaps the most self-tortured, or perhaps just more convincing at it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 6, 2021
He wrote to a friend: “It’s far & away the best thing I’ve done, simpler, more honest, and, for the first time, out of myself — that is, not self-tortured or -absorbed or -eviscerated.”
From New York Times ● Mar. 13, 2018
Even his eager sympathy could not reach the depths of her self-tortured heart.
From Out of the Ashes by Mumford, Ethel Watts
It was the voice of the self-torturing '20s, filled with a sort of sobjectivity that one critic described as "the authentic note of heartbreak," and it went over big.
From Time Magazine Archive
For the man on whom the archbishop smiled was Don Miguel Archibeque, longtime head of the self-torturing sect called Penitentes, which was officially banned by the church for almost 100 years.
From Time Magazine Archive
"He's incredibly insecure and very self-torturing," says Merrill Markoe, his former girlfriend, who helped create Late Night, devised such popular bits as Stupid Pet Tricks and wrote for the show until 1986.
From Time Magazine Archive
But sadness and a large amount of self-torturing pain were mingled with the satisfaction that her son had now come to her.
From The Son of His Mother by Viebig, Clara
What was it? he asked in the self-torturing way which besets the analyst of his own nature.
From Despair's Last Journey by Murray, David Christie
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
