HATE: THE MOST TABOO FEELING
I know it’s weird to be in the middle of a religious holiday season and receiving a newsletter on hate. Hell, it’s practically heresy. Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Solstice. Hate=Bad; Holidays=Good.
But, is that really true?
Can you have the Jesus birth story without hate? I mean, King Herod, fearing the birth of a King of the Jews ordered the slaughter of all male babies born in Bethlehem. I think that qualifies as hate.
Surely those suppressing the Israelites felt hate, and potentially those involved in the Maccabean Revolt felt it right back, birthing the Hanukkah celebration.
Would there be a Kwanzaa celebration if there had been no hatred and racism against African-Americans for centuries?
Lastly, having grown up in the harshest of winters in Minnesota, I can tell you that my celebrations of Solstice definitely included a whole lot of winter-hatred, which is looped into hatred of going to work/school in the dark and coming home in the dark.
Hate is as much part of life as love, disappointment, exuberance, and every other feeling.
So, rather than go after the traditional “struggles with family (or loneliness) over the Holidays”, I went a different route.
I hope it sheds some light on what is universally considered the darkest of human emotions.
Peace and laughter,
Sven
HATE: THE MOST TABOO FEELING
There are few words in the English language more loaded, more despised, more untouchable than ‘hate.’
- I’m not a hater
- That’s a big word
- I don’t use that word
- Don’t ever use that word, kids
- I don’t hate anyone
- Hate is a bad word
Yet, for all of the hatred for this emotionally loaded word, I’ve discovered that few things have greater power to unlock healing, relief, peace, lightness, release, and a sense of ‘Aha!’ like hate (when it is channeled properly). In an odd way, while there seems to be a glut of hate in the world, there is a silencing of the actual usage of the word, itself. ‘Hate’ has become more taboo than the normal four-letter swear words, such as the f-word and the like. How odd is that? Yet, it is an extraordinarily powerful healing word, because of the power we give it. Few things relieve soul constipation like use of the strongest language in the counseling setting, which includes words like hate and ‘f*ck you.’
Because it is such a sacrosanct word for so many people, because its usage so scarce, because it is a word that is only whispered or used in closed circles, because culturally we have made it this taboo thing, it is for most people imbued with this immense amount of power. That power only multiplies when pointed in the most the sacred of directions – toward ones mother and father, who are always the last bastion of untouchable in a person’s life.
Yet, it is precisely because of that sacred nature of the word that it can be surprisingly unlocking in the healing process.
(NB. It is important to remind you here that I don’t need you to ever confront your living, breathing parent(s) in order to heal you. Thus, using words like ‘hate’ and ‘f you’ can be done in a counseling setting in mythical conversations that are shockingly profound and releasing without any actual humans being harmed in the making of this counseling session.)
Trains Coming into the Station
Feelings are normal, everyday responses to life circumstances.
Feelings are like trains coming into a station. The train comes into the station. It lets people off. It lets people on. It closes the doors. Powers up. Chugga chugga, leaves the station. Out of the station. Eventually it’s a dot on the horizon. Then – poof! – it’s gone. That is the natural trajectory of feelings. That’s it. Feelings are not a permanent state.
Granted, some feelings stay in the station longer than others, because they have more cars and, thus, more people to unload and reload. But, trains were not made to stay in the station permanently.
The purpose of feelings is to release the natural energy of the body and mind as they respond to stimuli from life. That’s it. Feelings are your natural responses, both physical and emotional, large and small, to things happening in your life. Even the most painful of happenings in your life elicit bodily and emotional responses in the body and mind as a way to release the energy response.
And, there is a natural beginning, crescendo, peak, decrescendo, waning, and end to the feeling. All feelings. Think about your favorite team, say the Minnesota Vikings NFL team. It’s the 4th Quarter and they’re down 14 points to the Green Bay Packers (not likely, but whatever, it makes for a good story). But as the final quarter goes on, the Vikings pick up some momentum and chip away at that lead, and the Pack picks up a few points. Vikes fans feel a slow swelling of hope. With four minutes left the purple and gold are within one score of a win. Within two minutes they’re 80 yards from a win. With 30 seconds to go, they’re 40 yards away and hit a lightning strike to their receiver on a post route into the end zone to go ahead. The Vikings fans go nuts!!! But there are still 20 seconds on the clock. So the Packers get the ball with time to take a long shot. Vikings fans and team have contained excitement and hope waiting to explode. Then the defense comes up with a glorious interception and the Minnesota crowd goes bonkers!!! The pandemonium and euphoria are so glorious that your heart bursts with love for all of humanity.
An hour later that feeling of euphoria is still strong, but it has come slightly off its peak when the Vikings ended the bad guys’ hopes and pathetic, miserable dreams. And, now you’re having sex with your partner. So, mix the euphoria with the high of sex and it’s a good day, all around.
The next morning, you wake up for work feeling good. But, your euphoria has come down, quite a bit. You talk some football with your work buddies, but then it’s back to the grind. By the end of the day, the euphoria is a warm glow, a dot on the horizon that lasts until Thursday or so, when the anxiety of next Sunday’s game starts to set in. Poof! The euphoria from the Packers game is now gone.
There’s a natural crescendo, peak, decrescendo, waning, and departure…but only if the feelings are allowed to come and go. And, THAT is the most critical piece, the piece that gums up the whole equation in the lives of most people, especially as children and, thus, later as adults. They’re seldom allowed to let the trains into the station, unless those feelings are happy feelings. Though, strangely, some children are not even allowed to be happy. (Yes, you read that right.)
What has happened in your life is that you weren’t allowed to let the trains into the station. So you’ve got all of these trains backed up outside the village on all of these backup tracks. They’ve been leaking diesel fuel for decades and packed with cranky passengers. And, we’ve gotta get those trains moving. Trains ain’t meant to be stopped. They’re meant to be moving.
But, this is the hard part of life, these feelings. So many people don’t want to experience the feelings. It’s just too much. They were never allowed or never normalized in childhood. So, feelings can be scary. So, perhaps it’s easier to just stay up in their head as a thinker, because feelings are too unpredictable (even though feelings are quite predictable and manageable, once you begin to truly understand them and learn how to move the trains). Or, perhaps ‘feelings’ to you are just all the ‘bad’ feelings, and you only want the good feelings. Or, maybe you only allow two feelings – ‘fine’ and ‘angry.’
As I explained in Love Cup, on the surface of life are behaviors/actions. But trying to change behaviors never changes behaviors, long term. Down below behaviors are principles and values. And people think that changing principles and values will change behaviors. That’s a fallacy, because down below it all are your core beliefs and fears. Beliefs and fears drive everything. You have to drill down to the core beliefs driving behaviors, or you will never change behaviors.
In fact, principles and values are just backfill. They are nothing more than intellectual contrivances we tell ourselves and especially others to create seemingly reasonable justifications for our actions. But really our actions are driven by our beliefs and those deep fears. Name those fears in yourself and in others and you’ll see inside their soul what they often cannot see.
Everything in life is driven by feelings or aversion to feelings, whether people admit it or not, whether people know it or not. Everything.
Hammered Thumbs and Bloody Murder
If I’m out on my property fixing fences and happen to catch my thumb with the hammer, my neighbors a half mile up the road are going to hear me screaming bloody murder as my body releases the pain from doing so. In that moment, I’ll be feeling anger at myself for doing so, frustration for having done that for the third time this month (yes, I’m an idiot), and a tear running down my cheek because it really hurt this time. Three feelings at one time.
It is a perfectly normal human experience to feel multiple feelings in any given moment. We’ve all had a lover or friend for whom we felt love, anger, frustration, sadness, and five other feelings, all at once.
There’s no way to be a parent without feeling 17 feelings at once, as well. Or, in a friendship or a work setting there are always mixed feelings going on. It’s very natural in the human experience to feel what seem like opposing emotions, all at the same time. Back to your favorite sports team, there’s simply no way on earth to be a sports fan without both loving and hating your favorite team, without feeling glee when they pick up that great player; exuberance over this week’s win but fear over the upcoming big game. Mixed feelings are part of the game.
Go to your favorite movie or listen to your favorite piece of music; sit in front of your favorite piece of art or watch excellent performance art and you will be taken through a range of powerful emotions. Mixed feelings are what make life rich and difficult.
Not only is it possible to experience more than one feeling at one time, it is perfectly normal. Or, to be more precise, it is perfectly normal to feel seemingly opposing feelings in spaces of time so compressed together that they seem to be right on top of each other, occurring seemingly simultaneously.
Feelings are Morally Neutral
Contrary to very popular misconception, especially when you think about the word ‘hate,’ feelings are morally neutral. There are no bad feelings. When considered as simply the body’s attempt to purge energy, there is nothing bad about anger or sadness, rage or melancholy, euphoria or peace. Each is simply different in terms of the body/mind’s response to stimuli.
The feeling only takes on a moral imperative when coupled with an action that might cause harm. If after hitting my thumb with that hammer, I throw that hammer as hard as I can and it breaks the window of my neighbor Andy’s shed, there’s now a moral value attached. It’s bad. I gotta go apologize and shell out some dough to pay for a window for my stupidity.
But, absent an action, the feeling is morally neutral. So, hatred, anger, sadness, contempt, sorrow, depression, excitement, anxiousness, seething, peace, power, pride and any other feeling is neither bad nor good. If you feel it, you feel it. It is a train with a natural trajectory. You can either allow it to come into the station, allow its passengers on and off, allow it depart, or not.
However, if you don’t, those trains, those feelings, get backed up. And, there ain’t nothing that will cloud judgment and screw up life like a lifetime of backed up, bottled up, stuffed down feelings. Nothing.
You’ve been packing your feelings into that vault deep inside of you for decades and that’s the crappy feeling you feel deep inside you that eats at you. That and the core beliefs you were taught about yourself are what cause no amount of success to bring you happiness. That stuff is eating at you from the inside. So, until you have the courage to go inside and empty that vault, it will keep undermining you from the inside.
What this vault means in terms of the hate discussed earlier is that when you say, “I’m not a hater,” as the reason for not getting any and all potential hate out of you, you’re actually already a hater. Do you see that? See, if feelings are the body’s natural mechanism for getting energy out of the body, but you’ve stuffed it down deep in your body, in the vault, you’re carrying it around with you. You’re not a hater when you express it, or purge it. You’re a hater by simply carrying it around with you.
If someone punches you in the face, it is only normal that you might feel hatred, in that moment, as well as pain, sadness, rage, betrayal and breach of trust, depending on who did it, shock, and any number of other feelings. Right? Every one of those would be 100% normal. That doesn’t mean you act on any of them or go hurt someone else. But those feelings are perfectly understandable.
If your beloved dog of 13 years gets hit by a car in a parking lot, quite by accident, and dies, your feelings might run the full gamut from rage to sorrow, shock to bitterness, deflated to emptiness, relief (because now you won’t have to pay for her cancer treatments you just found out about) to guilt (for feeling relief), anger (at yourself for feeling relief) to misery (at now being alone), confusion (about whether to get a new dog). Hatred at God for taking your only true friend, and on and on, and always the sadness. Right?
To some people it may sound crazy to have to even say this, while to others it may be a revelation, but it needs to be said, feelings are as normal to life as going to the bathroom, literally. And, they basically serve the exact same function – the purging of energy.
The sucky part, and thus the part where a lot of people get stuck, is that feelings when they sorta come into the body – i.e. when the stimulus happens – and when the feelings go out of the body don’t always feel good. In fact, they often bite ass. I mean, seriously! So, in a life of pain avoidance, people try to stuff those feelings down. They bottle ‘em up. They don’t allow the trains into the station. But the expressing of those feelings is the body/mind’s natural attempt to get the negative energy, in this case, out of the body. Block that process and a sort of spiritual sepsis begins – a toxicity from the inside begins to eat at the soul. That is why the slow seep of misery can begin to take over a life in your forties, or start as early as three or four (yes, I’ve seen it that early, tragically!).
One More Question on Hate
I’m going to ask you a few questions. I want you to take out a piece of paper and pen, so that you can write your answers down.
These questions are really going to require you to dig deep into yourself. This is where it gets very, very easy to fudge. This is one of the areas where it is much easier to lose something between the in-person counseling experience and the self-help experience. Why? Because, in person, I would hold your feet to the fire. I would come at you from several angles on the subsequent questions, as well as pretty much everything else in the book; but especially this sector of questions. So, again, if you’re going to get the most from this experience and really push yourself, you have to quiet your quick answers and sit with the questions.
One, let’s start with this one: As you scan the full breadth of your past, from where you are now back to your 20s, down into your high school years, then those often uncomfortable middle school years, and way back into elementary school years, as you think about all of your years and phases of life, have you ever hated yourself? Write that question onto the piece of paper in front of you: “Have I ever hated myself?”
Now, just sit with that question. Do NOT rush on to the next paragraph, just yet. Sit with it. Maybe even close your eyes and breathe on that question as you sort of meditate on it. Have you ever hated yourself?
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When you are ready, write down your answer on the piece of paper. What did you write?
Any answer is fine. There is no right or wrong answer. It’s your life and your feelings. The only answer you need to truly question is the one in which you know or sense you are either lying to yourself or shying away from the real truth. So, is your answer the total honest to God truth, or did you hedge your bet a little bit? What is the real truth? Find and write the answer that is the real, deepest truth.
Now, if you wrote ‘No,’ I want to ask you a follow-up question, just to dig around a little bit down there. If I were to allow you to affix a percentage to your answer, if I were to tell you that it didn’t have to be a straight yes or no, but could be a percentage answer, what would you answer? So, now the question becomes: If you have ever hated yourself in your life, what percentage have you hated yourself, even just a little bit? 20% 50% Now, what’s your answer? Is it “Yes, 35%.” Write it down, whatever it is. If it is still no, that’s fine. Leave it as no.
What age were you when you hated yourself that amount? Or, what age range? Write it down. Was it 12-15 in those middle school years? Or, perhaps it was 21-25, while you were still trying to figure out your path in life. Or, maybe 31-36, when you found out your spouse was cheating on you and they blamed you, and you believed it, for a while. Write it down.
Now, write out the main reasons you hated yourself then. What was at the root of your hatred, then?
Next, go deeper. Was it really the things going on around you, how you were being treated by people? I mean, yes, I’m sure there were those outside influences and factors, no doubt. But, what were those external circumstances triggering inside of you? And, why, was it those particular things that were triggering you? What was it that already existed inside of you that was being touched or pricked by that experience, in particular?
· Triggers: What are they? Why do they suck? Why are they good?
Emotionally Charged Memories: When you were driving to your favorite hamburger joint, last Thursday, and the stoplight turned green after you had been waiting for, like, thirty seconds, then the car in front of you took off, you accelerated. Then, if you remember correctly, you drove up another ¾-mile and turned right into the parking lot in front of that sweet, candy apple-red Corvette. You pulled forward and parked. Corvette guy went to the drive thru. You then walked in and ordered your favorite burger and fries.
What’s fascinating about that drive to the burger place is that there’s literally nothing fascinating about it, nothing that jumps out at you, nothing that makes it memorable. No one honked at you at the stoplight or cut you off in traffic. The guy in the Corvette didn’t flip you off for taking too long to find a parking spot. You didn’t trip and fall stepping up on the curb walking into the restaurant. Nothing. It’s just this totally random, quite unforgettable memory that you wouldn’t have remembered, if I hadn’t called it up from the recesses of your mind.
The reason it’s pretty much a forgotten, nothing memory is because there’s no emotional charge attached to it. It’s just this thing that happened in which there was no event, large or small, that elicited a feeling response of anger, sadness, happiness, frustration, excitement, confidence, satisfaction, or really anything else. It’s an emotionally neutral memory. We have millions and millions of those, every week. All sorts of things happen to us, every day, that are quite non-memorable that are very much part of life, but we don’t remember, very often, because there is no emotion attached to the experience. If someone asked you to recall the story of your drive to the hamburger restaurant, last week, you may not even remember it.
In stark contrast, if someone had cut you off while taking off from that stoplight and maybe partially clipped your bumper, you might’ve felt startled and angry, or afraid. Or, if Corvette man had actually been cranky Corvette guy because he had laid on his horn, shouting at you to hurry the hell up and park, you might’ve felt angry and flustered in that parking lot. Or, if you had caught that curb while stepping up, and thus stumbled forward and fallen into the bush next to the door, you might’ve skinned your knee, gotten cuts on your hand from the bush, and banged your elbow when you hit the ground, thus all causing you to feel momentarily bewildered, afraid for just a moment that you might not be okay or afraid that someone saw you, perhaps also embarrassed that someone did see you and is now running to assist you. Perhaps you feel angry at yourself for dirtying your new pants.
Or, perhaps the story was that the car that clipped you at the stoplight actually pulled off part of your bumper and your car is going to cost $650 to fix, out of pocket.
Now, you have an emotionally charged memory. It is no longer an emotionally neutral event that happened in your past. Now, it’s loaded, either with a small, medium, or large charge. It’s like an atom that now has negatively charged electrons spinning around it. The more loaded those events were, the more powerful those emotional charges.
And with that, you now have an emotionally charged memory. You now have a trigger. If you’re at a wine party a week later and your friends notice you’re limping slightly, and ask about it. You then launch into the story none of them knew, because you’ve kept it quiet, because you’ve not wanted sympathy or attention about it. So, you start telling the story and get quite animated about it, even feeling some of those feelings again, as well as the feelings from the rest of the event of stopping the blood from your scrapes on your hands, having to throw out those pants, and going to the doctor to have your ankle looked at. By the end of the story, you’re feeling very upset for so many reasons.
Or, maybe you’re angry because you realize you won’t be able to make your rent next month, because of the repair costs.
You had been calm and enjoying the evening, and now you’re all cranked up. The story, the memory is now something that can be triggered. The mere remembering of it, let alone telling it, triggered a whole host of feelings behind it that came gushing out. You could barely keep some of them in. That’s how loaded the memory is. Perhaps you can’t even enjoy the rest of the party or sleep that evening, because you’ve got so much anxiety in you from it.
The simple fact of the matter, now, is that if that memory is not fully decharged of all the emotion, it will remain lodged in your memory banks as a memory with an emotional charge attached. So, now, when you go to that restaurant, you’ll remember that and have some sort of excitation of feelings inside you. Or, perhaps, you will not even go back to your favorite burger joint, precisely because it makes you feel those feelings again. Or, maybe you’re more hot emotionally when you’re driving, because of that guy who took off your bumper and drove away. Perhaps, just seeing someone limping stirs anxiety in you, or you’re now lifting your foot higher when stepping up curbs, since then.
It's as if you’re now walking around with a stick of dynamite with a fuse inside of you. You’re on the lookout now for anything that might appear to be match or lighter, anything that might set you off emotionally. In fact, depending on the magnitude of that emotionally charged event, or depending on how many emotionally charged memories get clustered together around a topic or person(s), geography, career, relationship, or what have you, some people spend the rest of their lives avoiding or even hyper-vigilantly running from anything that seems like it might even possibly, potentially be a match. And, that’s completely understandable! When you’ve had a massive amount of emotionally charged memories, or even just a few highly charged events that you never decharged or were not allowed to decharge, or perhaps were not ever taught how to decharge, you have a whole lot of dynamite inside you that could be triggered, at any given moment. It’s a helluva scary way to live. But the dynamite inside you is not the trigger; it’s what’s potentially being triggered. As a result, you’re a ticking time bomb, of sorts. It’s only a matter of time before something sets you off and you lose your shit, inside you at least.
With time and experience, you get good at identifying those things or people or places that set you off emotionally, that get those electrons spinning hard, that get you all jacked up. You learn to know your triggers. In all likelihood, you avoid them assiduously, because you loathe how they make you feel. But, for clarity’s sake, the triggers don’t actually make you feel those stirred up feelings inside. What is making you feel those emotional charges is that memory that is emotionally charged and has not been decharged. What you’re experiencing is the emotionally charged memory, not the trigger. The trigger is just the lighter that lit the fuse. The re-exploding dynamite is the emotional charge from that memory.
And, the simple fact of the matter is that you will forever be susceptible to every last damn lighter and match, or if the charges are very strong, it’s possible even things that have the same silhouette or smell as a match or lighter will have the power to set off dynamite inside you – whether in the form of anxiety, fear, shame, rage, depression, dread, hubris (to cover shame), need to control, or any number of feelings.
Where that dynamite gets super sucky – really, really sucky! – is when that dynamite from that one big charge, or one charge triggers the other sticks of dynamite, and those explosions start spilling out or even firing out onto those people around you. And, of course, it’s never the guy from your bowling league who lives a few miles away. Nah, it’s the people who live closest to you geographically, even under the same roof, and perhaps you love the most or are sworn to protect. That’s the power of internal dynamite, of emotionally charged memories.
And, you think you can stuff those emotional charges down. Maybe you even can, for a while, when you’re younger. But as life wears on, and we bottle up more and more of those charges, we find ourselves using more and more, or bigger and bigger means to quiet those emotional charges inside us: booze, pills, gambling, pot, over-working, escapism, busyness, pot, cleaning, food, cheating, over-parenting, on and on goes the list. If we’re really honest, we know that deep down we’re running from all of those emotionally charged memories that we don’t want to feel.
Eventually, we’re engaged in all sorts of neurotic stuff and/or our relationships have gone to pot. Maybe business or money is in shambles. And, in our times of honesty, we know it’s all a reaction to those sticks of dynamite inside, those emotionally charged memories.
Or, maybe you can’t make that connection, you can’t see it. It’s precisely for these reasons that triggers are actually, in the end, quite good. When it comes to the whole messy, wonderful world of healing and growth, there are few greater blessings than triggers. Why? Triggers are the proverbial ‘X’ on the pirate map, marking the exact spot where you need to start digging to find the buried treasure of your greatest relief, lightness, healing, and freedom.
So, if you really want to do yourself a solid, make a list right now, of every last thing in your life that triggers you – i.e., that elicits some sort of feeling inside of you. Write ‘em down, right now, on your pad of paper. If you’re being really honest, and taking the time to be deliberate, and assuming you have even the mildest ability to feel your feelings and name them, that list is going to start out by being pages and pages long.
Spend special emphasis writing out the triggers that elicit feelings of hatred or anything in the anger family – seething, contempt, rage, annoyance, pissed off, hostility, venomous, bitter, etc. – because that’s what we’re focusing on in this section. But, use this tool in all of your journaling work. Using triggers, or those matches/lighters as the indicators of the ol’ “X marks the spot” is a very helpful and easy trick for identifying where your own dynamite is, where you have emotionally charged memories that need to be defused and extracted. Because, the simple fact of the matter is, if you do not decharge those memories and make them emotionally neutral, you’re a ticking time bomb, a walking cluster of dynamite. What that means is that you cannot blame someone else when you lose yourself and let your dynamite, let your unhealed feelings spill out onto them. At this point now of knowing that you have the power to heal them, to decharge them, the responsibility falls squarely on you, not the thing or person that triggered you. It may be easy to blame the other, particularly if you have power over that person, such as in a relationship, at work, or if you’re the parent, but if it’s your own unhealed emotionally charged memories, the problem is you. So, start finding your triggers and use them as grand and glorious, if temporarily painful, opportunities to finally heal your crap, stop hurting people, stop running from life, and actually begin to live lighter, freer, and happier.
Two, if you have hated yourself in your lifetime, do you hate yourself now? Even a little bit? If any percent, at all, what percent do you hate yourself, presently? What’s behind that self-hate? What are the origins? Why now? Has that number dived or increased? Journal about the hate now. For, truth be told, you’ve got some serious stuff inside you that has not yet been dislodged. It would be no grand stretch of the imagination to say that serious stuff might be inflected with some hate, even self-hate. So, tinker around with it in your journaling work.
Three, what’s the most you’ve ever hated yourself in your lifetime? What’s the highest percentage of self-hate you’ve ever felt? Was it 40%? 80%? Maybe it was flat-out 100%? You wouldn’t be alone. I’ve had plenty of clients, over the years, who’ve felt every percentage on the chart. What’s your peak? Write it down. With it, write down the age or age range when you felt that heightened level. Why that age? What was it that was going on in your life, at that age, that was causing such strong self-loathing?
If it was a high number, was self-harm ever an action, or perhaps a thought? Write about all of the feelings and thoughts that were swirling in you during that period of strong self-hate.
Four, what’s the very earliest time in your life that you ever felt any self-hate, whatsoever, like even a small amount? What age, approximately? What percentage was it?
I’ve heard every answer in the book on this one, from “I’ve hated myself since I was in junior high” to “since I was eight and my parents divorced,” and from “I remember being four and wanting to be invisible or die, because I hated myself so much” to “My entire life, I’ve never known a time of not hating myself.”
Write down the age and spitball the percentage of self-hate you felt at that age? Let’s just say that you wrote down 7 years old and 40%. Again, now, follow it up with the whys. Journal about what was going on in your life to elicit such strong feelings at that tender age. Particularly, dive into and flush out the emotional charges that are coming up as you think about this. Perhaps none are, but that would be a bit odd, because to have such strong of a feeling back then but then have no feeling now would either mean you had decharged it (in which case, why are you reading self-help books?) or the charge is there but somehow there’s an override switch to keep you from feeling it. Allow all of the feelings to come up. Welcome them. Give them words. Put those words on paper. Do not stop. If you do have to stop, however, come back to it later, again and again. This is what it means to decharge emotionally charged memories.
But now, let’s dig a little deeper. If at 7 you felt 40% self-hate. Well, if that be true, then to the best of your recollection, was there one giant event that happened when you were 7? Maybe there was; maybe not. But why would a giant event cause a child to hate themselves? It would be understandable if a giant event caused a child to feel massive fear, such as the family house caught on fire and burned to the ground. It would make total sense if a youngster’s parents divorced at 7, the child never saw one of their parents again, the child was never allowed to feel their feelings, and they had been feeling a deep sorrow in their soul ever since. But, it would take an extraordinarily odd set of circumstances misinterpreted by a child, or badly interpreted to the child, to create feelings of the child turning on him- or herself, at all, let alone to such a degree.
Thus, it is highly unlikely that the 40% was caused by a one-off that happened at 7. Isn’t it far more likely it had been a building up of feelings? If that child was feeling so much contempt for self at age 7, isn’t it reasonable that it didn’t happen overnight and that at age 6 or 5, he or she was feeling perhaps 20% self-hatred? Tinkering around a bit more, if it’s 20% at 5, then that seems to imply that it had started at 4 or 3, perhaps.
Now, maybe it didn’t. There is that very real possibility. And, when diving into such long ago memories, it’s never rock-solid business. But there is a certain amount of reasonable conjecture. So, if this tinkering around feels reasonable and resonates as accurate or even semi-plausible, then allow yourself to run with it.
Why? Because, you’ve spent your entire life believing things, assuming things, not looking at things, not even considering certain things. The cracking open of the healing process happens when we allow ourselves, even encourage ourselves, to think new thoughts and in new ways. It is to step up to buffet and taste new things, rather than simply continuing to chew and swallow the same stories and same interpretations you’ve dined on for decades. There must be that openness.
So, again, is it possible that the self-hate started as early as 3 or 4, or possibly even earlier? Would that be a possible and reasonable inference based on what you do know and what you do know that you felt? If that be true, then what does that say? If you’re feeling self-hate by 4 or even 7, where the hell is that coming from? No child comes out of the womb saying, “I suck!” Further, a child getting life-affirming, loving messages of worth from his or her parents is not going to randomly start believing they don’t have worth, let alone start hating him- or herself, let alone to such a degree as 40%, to the point where it is remembered and felt 30 or 50 years later? No way. Such strong feelings of self-hatred at such a young age require that the child had been receiving negative messaging, either explicitly or implicitly, and significantly so, from a shockingly young age. Repetitively. Messages got pounded into the wet cement of that little child’s soul. Those messages, as described in Love Cup, then hardened, concretized, and became the virus infecting the operating system of who you are for the rest of your life, quite unbeknownst to you, to the point where you have believed that those voices and messages actually are you!
But they never were. And, how do we know that? Because, it is literally impossible for a child to be justified in believing that they suck or that they are innately unlovable. There is simply no such thing as an unlovable or innately bad child. It doesn’t exist and never has. That means that child was taught a lie, a very strong one, which implanted very deeply and powerfully.
What does it say that a 7 year-old was taught to hate themselves? What is the commentary that renders upon parents that either programmed a child to believe that crap or allowed such a thing to grow? I mean, isn’t it reasonable that a 7 year-old would be so affected by such strong feelings of self-hate that they would be quite unable to mask it? I mean, at 7! If you felt 40% self-hatred, today, at whatever age you are now, would you be able to hide it? How much energy and bluffing would it require to do so?
Okay, This is the last question on hate
In your own belief system that, perhaps, you’ve never thought about, does the feeling of hate imply action? That is to say, do you disallow yourself to feel hate because you fear that then you have to or you simply will act on it, as if it’s such an intrinsically volatile feeling that merely touching it could cause you to go off and do wild and crazy things, like kill people or stab them, yell at them, or cut them out of your life?
I have, since I was a child, had a fear of high heights. I’ve not feared flying, jumping out of planes, or even climbing tall trees. But, take me to the Grand Canyon or near the edge of a building, or put up a video on my social feed of someone walking to the ledge of a Norwegian fjord and my stomach goes kooky crazy, dumb as that may sound to some. I love going to national parks on long road trips and visiting the tops of mountains with majestic vistas. But, at the top, I’ll always stay way back from the edge, if there is no tall rail. Or, if there is a railing, I’ll grip it as tightly as I can and/or I’ll not lean too much on the strong railing.
I’ve tried to figure out this behavior. Now, having gone to an engineering university, I know damn well that railing is constructed to hold back forces far more than my 260lb body weight. So, my leaning against it is a miniscule force of no consequence. Yet, I don’t do it. And, why grip the railing if no wind is going to whip up and throw that same large me over said railing? Further, if the only person around is my 125lb girlfriend who could never hoist my fat butt over that railing, where’s the logic in gripping the railing? It doesn’t compute logically.
As I’ve tinkered with it, over the years, I’ve come to realize there’s no external power source that could heave me over that railing, falling into that giant abyss below to my certain bone-crushing, head-smashing death. That means, logically, there’s only one possible thing that could send me over that edge, only one possible thing as I’m gripping that railing tightly in defense against – my own mind. Without even realizing it, what I really fear is something short-circuiting in my own brain, causing my body to heave itself overboard, much as a body might involuntarily spasm in the middle of the night from, say a dream or muscle cramps, just on a larger scale. Presumably and laughably, in this scenario, my gripping hands wouldn’t get the memo to jump and would save me. All highly irrational, but my fear, nonetheless. And, as I broke it down, I’ve grown slightly less fearful of edges, or at least ones with high railings…that my girlfriend can’t push me over. :D
And so, maybe that’s how you view hate? Is it possible that you view hate as such an extraordinarily intense emotion that it will, inevitably, drive you to unwanted action and outcomes you will regret? Is it possible that somehow you fear it being too large to control or manage, so you avoid it altogether, and as a result you pack it down?
What if feeling a feeling, even hatred, doesn’t necessarily mean action? What if it’s just a train passing through town. It stops; lets people out; let’s people on; then goes chugga-chugga out of the station, and is gone? What if it’s not going to hurt you if you allow it in and through, but will hurt you, long term, if you block it or bottle it up?
My Girlfriend and Friday Night Dance Parties
Every few months, my girlfriend and I will have a Friday night dance party in our kitchen, just us. We’ll crank up the 70s rock, pour the G&Ts, and laugh a lot. Granted, she’ll do most of the dancing, while I sit at the breakfast bar watching and enjoying, especially when the disco comes on, because by age 15 and 16, she was getting into Studio 54 in its late-70s heyday in Manhattan. So, this sexy, old broad goes right back, and the two of us have a gay, old time.
Many years ago, as she was grooving to Seger or the BeeGees, I noticed she began to cry. Now, she’s a very successful, but very sensitive woman. So, her crying is not unusual. But in this loud, fun setting it was. So, I asked. She answered. A freight train had plowed through our kitchen.
What she had revealed with the music turned down is that her beloved, beloved mother, whose sewing machine my girlfriend had grown up playing paper dolls under in her Italian mother’s bridal shop in the Bronx, who was the most loving person she had ever known, who as a struggling young woman in her late-teens was encouraged by that same mom to come back to the house and “go shopping in the pantry” (for free) for whatever food supplies she might need after she had moved in with her boyfriend, and who had been deceased for nearly two decades she now hated. And, it broke her in half.
Preaching “family is everything” to her daughters their entire lives, her mother had also placed on my girlfriend the expectation, at a young age, that she and her middle sister would let her oldest sister, nine years her senior, go with to Studio 54 (see the link to that Friday night dance party?) and other nights out. See, big sister had her first child as a teen, then two more in quick succession. Wanting her eldest to have some fun, mom wove ‘take your big sister’ into the ‘family is everything’ narrative, and off they went. Truth is, way back the three of them were thick as thieves, but also quite normal fighting sisters. When my girlfriend started her first company in her mid-20s in Manhattan, then the next, always came the mantra from mom, “Take your sister,” even when the financial backer didn’t want or believe in that particular sister. The middle and youngest (my girlfriend) were exceptionally good at what they did, but others disagreed. Didn’t matter. ‘El Presidente’ as the family called my girlfriend, back in those days, long before I would ever know her, was an Italian; and family is family. She always took her sister. Always made exception for the sister. When their parents died, the two young sisters gave the parents’ house to the eldest sister as a gift, which she decades later sold and kept the proceeds from. When eldest sister retired, she sued the very sisters who had been carrying her for the years she was a no-show/no-work during Covid.
Eldest sister always was a good gift-buyer, but what happened that night in the kitchen was that, beyond the gifts, that eldest had taken far more than she had ever given. And, my girlfriend hated her sister for it. But, that wasn’t the real issue. For her, the real issue was that she hated her mother for saddling her with her sister, knowing that her sister either couldn’t do life on her own, or knowing that my girlfriend was the strong one and would look after her, or just feeling fear for her eldest. So, mom’s fears became my girlfriend’s 30-year burden that her sister took advantage of. Mom’s feelings mattered more than her youngest daughter’s feelings and own right to be free, happy, and alive. Mom fundamentally conveyed the messaged, eldest daughter mattered more than youngest. Boom!
Hatred was a very normal response to being told that, even if that hate wasn’t allowed to come up until several decades later. Also, coming up were feelings of betrayal (both by her mother, by her father for allowing her mother to do so, and by herself for even considering such things), disappointment, sorrow, loss, and so much more, not the least of which was profound guilt(which was completely understandable). To her credit, my girlfriend allowed the feelings to come. Hell, to her credit, she gave herself permission to even utter the words, let alone feel the feelings.
She kept allowing them. Months. She took it at her own pace. She would journal about it some, now and then. Talk about it some. But she goes her own speed and is private about some things, especially something this elemental to her very being. I forgot about it, quite honestly. Thus, it came as a total surprise to me, about three years later when we were driving up the Merritt Parkway through Connecticut on a ridiculously beautiful New England late-autumn Sunday afternoon on our way up to New Haven for some Frank Pepe’s (the only pizzeria to win more than once for best pizza in the US) with Bob Dylan on the radio and, without turning to me but still gazing out at the long stretch of golds, yellows, and reds in the trees stretching in front of us, and knowingly, calmly said,
“I think I’m done hating my mother now.”
It was ten more miles before she spoke again. She went on, “I don’t move as quickly as you, Sven. Even after that night in the kitchen, I resisted it longer than I needed to. But I did the flushing work of allowing it all out and giving it words in my journaling and writing mom and my sister a ton of letters, as well as my young self. I think I can go back to loving mom now. It was never gone, but now the hate isn’t mixed in with it. It’s a nice place.”
The train had left the station and cleared the horizon, as trains always do…when we allow them to do what trains are supposed to do.
She would go on, later, to realize she couldn’t and didn’t hate her sister, still alive, anymore. But, she also couldn’t have a relationship with her sister, until her sister atoned for things she had done within my girlfriend’s family, very recently. That was the proper boundary my girlfriend needed to honor her own self, while still leaving the door open for the future.
But all of this started by my girlfriend, somewhere in her, giving herself permission to deconstruct the family myth system that family is everything always, and she, implicitly, must always give, give, give to family. It was a painfully difficult permission and deconstruction, but it began to give birth to a new sense of self as valuable.
The pain ends. The hate ends. The deconstruction ends. The overwhelmed ends. But ending only happens when we have the courage to go in, allow, feel, flush using words verbally or on paper, allow, feel, and flush some more, until it’s gone. No allowing and flushing, no train departure. For, until the pain is out of you, it’s still in you.
The Fear it will never go away
One of the more insidious fears that keeps the hate locked down tight inside a whole heckuva lot of people is “If I let it out, it’ll never go away. And, I’ll be locked in this state of anger, bitterness, and nasty forever.” I hear it all the time.
It is a genuine fear. We have such a universal aversion to and lack of understanding of hatred as a mere feeling that the fear in which it sits is profound. That fear is so great that it has the effect of causing people to keep that hate locked down tight. It’s the fear that makes mama’s tell children “We don’t use that word in this house” and makes grown men proclaim, “I’m not a hater.” We hate hate. So, we fear hate.
Yet, I’ve seldom seen something with more redemptive power, with greater capacity to bring release, lightness, empowerment to the soul, and relief to the spirit than the speaking in a controlled counseling session or journaling/letter-writing endeavor of intense hatred and the natural “F**k yous!” that come with it! Never. It’s unbelievable, but so regular and predictable as to be common.
MIND YOU, it is not simply the feeling of the hate, but the putting of it into written words or speaking the words to imaginary Mom/Dad, spouse, or whomever it is felt for.
You can take it for a spin, right now. But, I’m tellin’ you, it takes courage! It takes courage.
Healing Hate
The truth is, hate is no different from any other feeling, apart from the stigma it carries. People hate hate. And, for that reason, so many never heal from it or get anywhere near healing from the anger inside them, let alone the pain/hurt that is always driving anger.
To fully heal from it, you must have the courage to go inside of it, allow it to come up, welcome it, then begin the process of putting it into written words (journaling). But how do you find it if you've never touched it or don't believe it even exists in you or for that person(s)?
Start with where your triggers are. What makes you sad or angry? What sets you off? What annoys you? What hurts you? What do you not even want to think about, discuss, or touch with a ten-foot pole?
Right there. X marks the spot on the buried treasure pirate map. Start digging right there. Wherever you have pain, sadness, anger or really any other feeling, it is reasonable that you might have hate there. And, the greater intensity of what you do feel there, be it sad or anger (or some derivative of these), the greater the likelihood for hate and rage. Just pick up your pickaxe and start chipping away at your encrusted belief that there's nothing to see here.
You have to push yourself to go deeper. If you have been stuck, in a depression, done healing work and can't seem to fully get over it all, or just know there's something deeper, more than likely it's hate or it's something that will be uncovered when you go into hate.
But, yet again, this is an act of great courage, not just because it requires going into seriously yucky feelings, but because it requires a rewiring of your belief system ("geez, maybe feeling hate isn't the end of the world, as long as I don't go punch someone in the face"), and, worst of all, the implications of realizing how strong your antipathy is for this person and how bad they really were and perhaps still are towards you. It's that last one that is the real bugger, because it now often means that all hope for a relationship with them and them confirming your worth is gone, in part because you realize they're not going to give it and you no longer want it. Or, that's how it rolls in some cases.
Anyway, I'd bet dollars to donuts that you've got unflushed hate in you that will bring profound relief and lightness to you, as well as grand movement to your healing and growth journey when you finally get it out!
You got this shit!
Journaling Exercises
1. Where’s the buried treasure in your life? What triggers you? Why? What is it about that thing, person, sequence of events that sets you off? If you were to dig deep, what’s the memory/-ies it digs up, and what are the emotional charges attached to that memory? Write out that memory entirely and also all of the feelings attached to it. Write about the person(s) causing that charge in the memory. How did you feel then? Why? What was driving it? What are you feeling now? Why?
2. How can you reframe and better understand your Holiday season within this understanding of hate?
3. More importantly, where are the loads of hate inside you that you need to get out? What are the trains that you need to get moving into and out of the station? Can you write down your previous views on hate and your now new belief about hate? Are you beginning to understand the value of getting it all out, and how it doesn’t mean you’re bad if you do?
4. Who and what do you still hate? Why? Can you allow yourself to name it all, welcome the feeling, write it all down and keep writing until its gone, even if it takes a lot of letters you don’t send and a lot of journaling?
Please feel free to check out my free online moderated community, Badass Counseling Group, on Facebook. But, if you long for a closer community that’s more committed to next-level growth, direct access to me — Sven, and more excellent resources for transformation to greater ALIVENESS, go to www.badasscounseling.com and click on CMTY-PLUS! It’s what you’ve been waiting for!
Thanks for reading.
HAVE A KICKASS DAY!
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.Com
