As an antidote to all the love around here lately, I thought I’d offer up a little bit of good old-fashioned hate.
I grew up in a very low key household where strong feelings didn’t really have a place. My typical toddler tantrums were legendary because they were so anomalous. Perhaps it was my German/English/’stiff upper lip’ heritage, but I took pride in being mild-mannered, stoic and a ‘non-drama queen’.
As part of this persona, I used to be very averse to the term ‘hate.’ I would try to soften it for my kids if they used it… suggesting substitutions like “I don’t like that very much” or more substantive or descriptive options like “the texture of cooked onions is unappetizing to me.” Hate didn’t used to have a place. Now, somehow, I’ve moved on to somewhere where HATE, like most expletives, can be really descriptive and useful when used sparingly.
For example,
-I HATE it when clean laundry and dirty laundry get mixed up
-I HATE it that I can’t tell if the cat drank out of my bedside water glass
-I really hate going to eat something that smells good and getting a mouthful of onions. Because I hate onions.
I wonder what role HATE has in any of your lives. My examples above are tame and fluffy…. there are much more hate-worthy things in this world; kids going hungry or in pain, patriarchy, racism. Allowing myself to have strong feelings about the small things has helped me feel more ‘righteous anger’ about the larger injustices, I think.
Peeling through the layers of the onion has served a purpose to me; I’ve found that the process of examining the ‘hate’ itself, or its object, has rendered it less powerful; I’m not afraid of hating it anymore. Has dwelling on negative feelings become unhealthy for you, or has recognizing the feeling made you able to move on or take action, when you can? Has your religious heritage informed your freedom to feel or express a range of emotions?
‘Hate’ was a taboo word in our house when I was young, too. They say that there’s a thin line between love and hate, and I do believe that in a way… if we’re unable to express negative emotion properly, we won’t be able to express positive emotion. On a related note, I think I’ve become a lot more ‘okay’ with the times when I get mad, or have a heated argument. I know that the pay-off of these moments is that I’ve also been able to feel my joy a lot more fully in the last few years.
So: I HATE when people lay guilt trips on each other, for things that they themselves believe should be done.
I HATE being stuck indoors for a whole day, when that happens – more often in wet winters!
I HATE feeling ill and not being able to go and run.
You know even as I say these things, I’m aware that I don’t have many things that I really feel that badly about. If I can’t go for a run, I watch a movie. I do really hate that first one, though. :)
I don’t know. Dwelling on the negative makes it so I can’t see the positive sometimes. It’s a balance I struggle with, especially online. Sometimes admitting that I hate the way something is helps me to move on and just realize that I can’t change it, but then I run the risk of getting caught up in the vortex of how much something truly sucks. And if I can’t change it, it only becomes more of a hindrance. So I think there is a place for acknowledging hate and hatred and addressing it and being aware of it’s power. Pretending it doesn’t have a place is probably dangerous, but then, so is giving in to expressing it.
As a funny coincidence, my husband has recently been expounding upon the “haters gonna hate” variations of the meme. Quite funny. Apparently he thinks I’m a hater.
One Buddhist articulation of enlightenment is “to live with a mind free of the three fetters,” which are variously translated as attachment, aversion and delusion or as clinging, avoidance, and mistake. But the most frequent rendering of the three fetters into English is: greed, hatred, and delusion.
For a long time, I didn’t care for the “greed, hatred, delusion” rendering because I didn’t think that the versions of those mind states that I experienced could be usefully described in such extreme language: “Yes, I feel some degree of attachment to my daily routine, but I would never say that I *cling* to it.” “Yes, I sometimes discover that what I’ve understood/imagined about reality turned out to be somewhat mistaken, but I wouldn’t say I was *deluded* about it.” and “Yes, sometimes I feel somewhat aversive toward so-and-so, but I don’t *hate* him.”
But the longer I’ve sat with my own thoughts and feelings, the more I’ve come to admire the traditional renderings. Attachment *is* greed. Aversion *is* hatred. Mistaken understanding *is* delusion. And I was up to my neck in all three of those mind fetters when I wouldn’t admit to myself that I was greedy, hateful, and deluded.
In that regard, my thinking was the mirror image of a quip by a friend from college. She said, “I don’t think of that color as ‘grey’; I think of it as pastel black.” In my upside-down version of the same notion, I couldn’t imagine my attachment as “pastel-greed,” nor my aversion as “pastel-hatred.”
But as I investigate those experiences more and more these days, the more convinced I am that the diluted versions of them that arise moment to moment of each day aren’t really different in kind. They’re just the “pastels,” the less saturated versions, of the same colors.
I love Hayt, the first Duncan ghola.
And the lesson learned is that hate is a psychic poison that turns one into the thing despised. Claire, until you look more like an onion I think you might not really hate them.
I don’t know what to make of this, Claire. I do try to get my kids to say something else besides “hate.” We often say, “I don’t love that.” I’ve honestly not thought too much about it. What’s so bad about saying “hate”? Most often when we say it, it’s just a throw-away thing. We’re not using it in such a strong way.
The origin of “I don’t love it” came from a mother/daughter book club Kennedy and I were in. One of the mom/daughter pairs picked a book that we REALLY didn’t like–and that’s saying something. It was dark and just creepy. So when we were on our way to book club, Kennedy (who was about 9) was fretting over what to say when people inevitably asked, “So, did you like it?” We decided we would say “I didn’t love it” or “It wasn’t one of my favorite books” because we didn’t want to hurt their feelings.
I think that there’s a difference between simply disliking things, or being annoyed by them, and hatred. To me, hatred is a powerful thing: nuclear-strength, and, much like the radiation of a nuclear bomb, it spreads and seeps into things, poisoning and sickening that which it touches. Because of its corrupting nature, then, true hatred cannot really coexist with righteous anger, because righteous anger seeks to forcefully right wrongs, not exacerbate the damage. At the same time, I recognize that there isn’t a word that seems to express one’s strong aversion for a something (say, olives) quite as pithily as hate. And for the record: onions are delicious.
Hate that causes you to do mean things to other people – that is a problem.