Why we hate? — And how to overcome.
Hating is not bad; it is a language of life hinting to oneself and people around that something needs to be changed. We struggle to understand because we are quirky with our emotional reasoning system.
Hating often comes after indecisiveness, which is caused by a desire to retain some values (a.k.a attachment) that defy the “current”, or the reality that challenges us. What comes after hating is blaming, a quirky solution to avoid the reality of losing the defying values.
Let’s understand this through an example. The story begins when we try our best to show people (including ourselves) that we are good enough to be in this society. We therefore express that we are an embodiment of some socially preferred values such as unselfishness, adorableness, compassion, and so on. We then live happily and feel safe in society, until the current changes.
A situation arises that challenges our unselfishness with a risk of losing our precious position in society. For example, we may keep getting demands for something from people around to the point that we are factually no longer able to provide. The situation squeezes us to choose between giving up our endearing unselfishness or being crushed into dust along the wind of demands.
Then our attachment comes into play. Since we rely so much on our unselfishness to make our safe space in this society, we cannot imagine how we could live if we lose it; we have the fear of social exclusion. In our emotional reasoning, the value of unselfishness is equally important to our life, as well as the fact that we can give no more, and therefore we are stuck with indecisiveness.
We freeze ourselves, but the current never freezes. The inherent heat develops in our mind and becomes the so-called hatred. It is the energy that tries to unfreeze us.
Then we are forced to come back to our two choices: giving up our values or changing the current. It is valid to try “blaming”, which is our experiment to try changing the current. We are stubborn because we need the ultimate proof that the current cannot be defied before we can surrender our precious values that define our “self”.
So it may look like we are stuck in the loop of hating and blaming, but actually we are in the process of resolving in order to break the wall of stubbornness to gain the wisdom and go with the current with the utmost acceptance.
The Resolved Acceptance
At the end of the journey of hate and blaming, we learn the literacy of resolved acceptance, a.k.a “respect”.
Respect is the opposite of “pleasing”. We please people because we need them as a stair rail to stand amidst the dynamic current of society, and that is because our own legs are not strong enough to stand by ourselves. But as we become adults, chances are we already have the strongest pair of legs, only the sole fear holds our hands tight to the rail.
On one side, self-respecting is to stand on our own legs. It means we dare to release our attachment to some socially preferred values, in order to protect our well-being or something that is more important to us without seeking understanding, approval, or validation from anyone.
On the other side, we respect other people for any choices they make for themselves. That choice may be good for us, hurt us, or not please us; it is totally fine.
In other words, respecting is the literacy of choosing (for ourselves) and giving choices and chances (to others). We hate and blame because we don’t choose and don’t allow others to have choices or chances to make mistakes. It is when we embrace the responsibility to the quirkiness in our own emotional reasoning and use it for our own choosing while avoid invalidating the choices of others’.
Choosing is an act of forming a boundary. It is not a sweet process. It often hurts because it means cutting some parts of our perfect self off. It can also mean risking our short-term well-being. It means communicating what we can and cannot, are and are not. When a boundary is formed by a resolved acceptance, we will protect it without hatred and blaming, because we utmostly understand that everyone needs to be stubborn enough before resolving their acceptance with their environment. We respect other people and give them time to learn to respect us.
In conclusion, it is not the people, current, environment, or the “reality” that hurts us; it is the attachment to the “cuteness” or “rightfulness” of ourselves. The fear of losing it makes us indecisive to protect our boundary and try to invalidate others’ chances and choices.
