Hatred is a feeling we rarely talk about, and yet we see signs of hatred all around us. Anytime we see people divide our world into sides due to politics, race, sexuality, religion, wealth, or even wearing or not wearing a mask, we are seeing hatred at work. The deeper the divide, the deeper the hatred. We may call it by many other names but anytime we reject someone or a side, we are practicing hatred. That is what hatred does: it rejects. But this hatred is not only around us. Hatred can also live within us. Any time we reject a part of our personality or an aspect of our inner experience like certain emotions, thoughts, longings, etc., we are practicing hatred, in this case, self hatred. In this blog, I want to explore what Jesus possibly when he taught that we are to “love our enemies”, including the enemy within us. In the Bible, we read Jesus teaching about loving our enemies. He says, ““You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your God in heaven; for God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt 5: 43-48). What was Jesus getting at in teaching us to love our enemies, the very people or aspects of ourselves that we hate? He was teaching us to practice unconditional love with our experience of hatred. How to Practice Unconditional Love Before we work with the experience of hatred, we have to understand what it means to practice an unconditional love that can hold even hatred. As a psychospiritual therapist, one of my goals is to develop a therapeutic relationship with my client where they experience an unconditional love, a love that allows them to feel safe enough to share of their struggles and pain with me. Self psychology teaches that there are three aspects that clients need to experience to feel unconditionally held by their counsellor, namely mirroring, idealizing, and twinning. Personally, I believe that as we meet each of these needs within our client, our client’s experience of unconditional love from us deepens. Lets look briefly at each need. When we mirror our client’s experience, we reflect back to them what we are seeing and hearing them say. As we fulfill this mirroring need, we reflect back a sense of self-worth and value to our client (//www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/self-psychology, par. 8). This is significant for often other people in our client’s life fail to listen to them and see their suffering. When we mirror well, we begin building a therapeutic relationship with our client, the first stage to creating a setting of unconditional love. Idealizing goes one set further than mirroring. Not only do we mirror back our client’s experience but we also validate it. We meet this idealizing need when we tell our client that their pain or struggle makes total sense to us. (//www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/self-psychology, par. 9). This validation is so important to our client for often their struggles are invalidated through people giving them advice or downplaying their experience (“it is not as bad as you think it is”). Through this validation, our therapeutic relationship with our client deepens further. They become more vulnerable sharing more of their experience for they feel safer with us, more held by our unconditional love for them. Finally, through twinning, this therapeutic relationship deepens even further. Self psychology suggests “that people need to feel a sense of likeness with others” (//www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/self-psychology, par. 10). As we explore our client’s experience of suffering further, we become aware of the counselling field that has formed between the client and ourselves. Within this counselling field, we, as counsellors, feel within ourselves the emotions and pain that our client is experiencing as they share their struggle with us. This is how I understand the twinning experience in the counselling office. As we reflect this suffering "twinning" experience back to our client, our client feels deeply held by this unconditional love that we share together in the counselling field. Consequently, our client is willing to become even more vulnerable allowing insights and new experiences to arise within the counselling field leading to healing and transformation. (for those of us from the Christian tradition, this deep twinning dynamic is what Apostle Paul maybe getting at when he says he has learned to “become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9: 22)) If one understands the development of unconditional love in this way, through the lens of self psychology, what does it means to help our client love the enemy that lives in the world, but also lives within them. What does it mean to hold the experience of hatred within a posture of unconditional love through a self psychology lens? The Importance of Seeing Hatred The first step to working with the experience of hatred is helping people see it. People have no problem seeing hatred in the outside world or in the behaviors of others they judge as bad or evil. But people are often blind to their actions and attitudes that reveal the hatred that dwells within them. They cannot imagine hatred living within them for that would suggest that they are bad or evil somehow, and that is not possible. People are very resistant to having this dynamic of hatred mirrored back to them through their counsellor. And yet, for us to hold this hatred with unconditional love, we first have to help our clients see its existence. This blindness within our client means that teaching is an important first step to helping people see their hatred. To work at this teaching, I have found the Diamond Approach, taught by A. H. Almaas, a useful psychospiritual framework to help my clients understand how hatred works. The Diamond Approaches teaches that there are two causes of hatred. One is related to our relationship with love. Love, at its deepest level is nondual reality. Nothing is rejected. Almaas writes that “love, by its very nature, tends to melt away duality and bring about union and unification.” ( Love Unveiled, pg. 27) This means that everything is included in the experience of unconditional or Agape love. There is no rejection within the reality of unconditional love. However, when this love becomes blocked or resisted, Almaas teaches that the experience of hatred naturally arises. (Diamond Heart Book Four, pg. 198). The deeper the hatred and rejection, the more resistance there is to the love that is trying to arise. That is why often the people we hate the most are often the people who we have, at one time, loved deeply. It is important for clients to see that there is a close and natural relationship between love and hatred. The more deeply we love, the more sensitive we are to the dynamics of rejection to this love, both in the world but also within our own experience. This means that hatred will be a common experience in life, even for those who love greatly, maybe even more so. The second cause of hatred is related to our experience of power. Almaas writes that “hatred arises when you feel powerless, for it is an attempt to eliminate the frustration by annihilating it. You want to annihilate whatever problem you have, whatever is in your way, whether it is an inner or outer frustration. You want to make it disappear“ (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 328). So every time, our sense of inner peace is disturbed or our survival is threatened, we will feel a natural hatred arise toward its cause if we feel powerless to change it. Since many people feel this powerlessness, especially as children, hatred is a very common human experience. To deny or reject this hatred, that is hate hatred, only fuels this hatred and makes it worst. This means that hatred is a common human experience that everyone senses to a greater or lesser experience. For people to love their enemy, they must first be willing to see and acknowledge the hatred they feel toward their enemy, whether that enemy is in the outside world or within the inner experience of their soul. Only then can people move beyond the first step of loving their enemy, that is, seeing their hatred. The Importance of Validating Hatred However, it is important for our clients to not only see their hatred, but to realized that there are many good reasons why we experience the various dynamics of hatred. People need their experiences of hatred validated so they can begin to understand and own their feelings and behaviors of hatred. As we have already seen, hatred is a survival mechanism that naturally arises due to the dynamics of broken love or through the experience of helplessness. However, when hatred arises in our experience, there are certain patterns that typically occur. Attachment theory teaches that there are often two responses we have toward people, especially during times of conflict: either we pursue them or withdraw from them. I have found this theory to be also true regarding intense emotions like hatred. Either we pursue hatred or we withdraw from it. When we pursue hatred, we seek to aggressively destroy or annihilate that which is causing our hatred. We may want to destroy the person who is hurting us or cut out of us (self harm) that part of us that we hate experiencing internally. We want to return to a place of safety and peace where we can settle and rest, whether it be in the external world or within our internal world. This is the positive purpose behind hatred. It is seeking to help us experience peace and rest again. However, as we pursue our hatred in the outside or inside world, our ego will notice a certain power that feels quite good, a power that feels very strong and liberating, a power over that which we hate. This powerful feeling is quite seductive. We can quickly become attached to this power and our hatred toward the enemy associated with it. This is why we see so much hatred expressed in the world, and often why people, including ourselves, feel so justified in destroying our enemy. This hatred makes us feel powerful. But, as we all know, there is a huge downside to expressing hatred. In destroying our external enemies, we now become hated by those who now perceive us as their enemy. Now they seek to destroy us, and so, in acting out our hatred, more hatred becomes directed toward us, which make us more fearful, more powerless, and thus filled with even more hatred. In destroying our internal enemies through self harm, we end up hurting ourselves more causing us to hate ourselves even more. Acts of hatred always begets more hatred. Hatred never produces inner peace. This is why the power associated with hatred is seen as false power within the Diamond Approach. This expression of power never liberates us. For many people, instead of pursing hatred, they withdraw from it. Seeing hatred as wrong, they avoid people they hate or repress all feelings of hatred so they don’t experience this “wrong” feeling. What most people don’t realize is that we, as humans, are quite adept at repressing hatred for hatred was a common experience in our childhood environments. Every time we didn’t feel love from our parents when we needed it or felt helpless as a child to defend ourselves from them, a natural hatred filled us. Now, in most homes, it was never safe to express this hatred for it would have led to severe punishment. Instead, we learned to suppress it. However, as a younger child, due to our cognitive development, we were not able to judge our parents' behavior as bad behanior regardless of how bad it was. Furthermore, since we believed then that our parents must love us, the only conclusion left was that somehow we deserved to be punished, hurt, even abused. So, most of us, as children, and certainly those who experienced trauma in their childhood homes, learned to repress all their hatred quickly that naturally emerged when we were rejected, not loved by our parents, and that hatred turned against us. In rejecting our hatred toward our parents, we often ended up rejecting ourselves, hating ourselves. This is why I often say that we need to get our hatred going in the right direction. When someone threatens our survival, we will naturally feel hatred toward them. This is the natural direction of hatred, the way God created our world. In the Christian tradition, this hatred toward those who do wrong or abuse others is often described as the "wrath" of God, the experience of God's hatred toward that which is bad or evil. (There are almost 200 direct references to wrath in the NRSV Bible, most of them attributed to God). When seen through this lens of attachment theory and the Diamond Approach, we, as counsellors, can validate all the client’s experiences of hatred, and all of their related behaviors. When we validate a client's experience of hatred, we are helping them understand that their behaviors make sense to us, and hopefully to them too. Even if our client’s behavior was hurtful and morally wrong, the experience of hatred behind these bad behaviors is not morally wrong. The feeling of hatred is a fact of life, a dynamic of reality that always arises in us when we feel rejected (not loved) or powerless and our survival is at risk. There is something liberating for the client as they sense their experiences being validated by their counsellor or friend in this way. People often go back and forth between pursuing hatred and withdrawing from hatred. But neither of these options actually transform the hatred people find themselves living with or avoiding. Is there a way to love this hatred more deeply unconditionally? Is there a deeper form of agape love that helps people transform their experience of hatred? The Importance of Holding Hatred (The Twinning Experience) So far, we have seen how people either pursue hatred with the goal of destroying those who they hate or they withdraw from hatred by repressing their feelings of hate. Neither leads people down the path of what their soul is thirsting for, a place of inner and outer peace where it can rest, relax, settle, and just be. However, there is a third option based on attachment theory. Instead of pursuing hatred or withdrawing from hatred, we can help our clients learn how to hold their hatred experience with a deeper level of unconditional love, that is, develop a secure attachment to their experience of hatred. For this type of holding environment to emerge, a client needs a friend or counsellor who can hold their hatred with them from this deeper place of love. When a client feels securely attached to their therapist, they are experiencing a holding environment where they “are able to be fully themselves without apology or shame, where <their> feelings are validated and mirrored back to <them>, and they are able to make sense of their lives in a way that promotes an embodied sense of wholeness. In such an environment, <they> are able to access, articulate, and metabolize inner experience <they> might previously disown or repress or weren’t even aware ,<they> were having” (Licata, p. 39) It is here in this place of holding our client’s hatred that the self psychology’s experience of twinning happens in the counselling room. As the hatred experience begins to arise in our client, we, as therapists, will sense it in the counselling field that exists between the two of us. When this twinning happens, our goal is to welcome this hatred in the field so that our client can welcome their hatred that is arising within them. It is in this place of secure attachment with us and their hatred that our client and us develop an intimate but spacious relationship with their experience of hatred. Developing a secure attachment to our experience of hatred does not happen over night just as a good friendship does not suddenly appear. It is an ongoing process that happens over many months. In many ways, this journey with hatred is a lifelong process. It takes time to soften the conditioned patterns from our past that we have with hatred. However, slowly our relationship with hatred changes from a hatred that I am scared to feel or that I get lost in, to a hatred that I can finally sit with, welcome, and hold without too much rejection. Then, one day you may discover, like that I did, that there are many gifts to spiritually working with hatred. It was during a session I had with my Diamond Approach teacher where I was processing my hatred I carried from my childhood. Many times in doing this work with my Diamond Teacher in the past, I had experienced my wounded little boy, but on this day it was different. Instead of finding myself feeling this hatred as a little boy and his powerlessness, I found myself experiencing this hatred from inside the emotional field of hatred. There was no longer a space between me and my hatred. I had simply become hatred itself, hatred fully embodied. At first, I thought I was in a merged state with my hatred, but this was clearly not the case for I was totally aware and in control. (When we are in a merged state with hatred, we lose all awareness and sense of self and now hatred controls us.) Furthermore, I felt an internal power that I had never experienced in my life. In fact, I felt all powerful, almighty, all the terms we often attribute to God, and yet I knew that I was not God. With this sense of power also came the perception in my mind that I was far bigger size-wise than my normal physical body.
And yet, while I felt all powerful, I also experienced total freedom with this power, that I could chose to act or not act from this place of total power. I realized in that moment that Divine Power is very different than how power is understood in the world which stresses the action-side of power. True power is realized as much through non-action as through action, maybe more so. If we don't have the freedom to not act on our hatred then we have not experienced fully Divine Power yet. Your ego is still attached to the false power found in hatred that only wants to destroy the enemy. (As a Christian, this brings new meaning to how Divine Power manifested in Jesus during his trial and crucifixion experience. Jesus realized that nothing good would be realized by acting out in powerful human ways, just more violence and deaths. Instead, God’s almighty power was manifested in him through his non-action, resisting the powerful impulse to destroy his enemies.) I also learned personally through other powerful sacred experiences like this one that hatred does not mean destroying physically our enemy. Rather, the annihilation happens psychically, within our soul. Holding and experiencing fully our experience of hatred in the present moment gives us the ability to sever the emotional ties between our painful past and our present-day experience. It causes us to emotionally realized due to our increase sense of power found in hatred that we will “never again allow anyone to hurt us” like that again. As these emotional connections are slowly severed from our history stored in our soul, the hatred begins to break for we no longer feel helpless. Instead, we begin to feel powerful, rooted, singular focused, a clarity. Often, with this hatred energy now diminishing, we may notice at times tender loving feelings arising toward those we once hated. In sensing all of this, we notice that our mind, heart, and soul begin to settle into a place of inner quiet, peacefulness, and rest. This is the ultimate gift of fully loving unconditionally our hatred; it will eventually transform into Divine power, inner peace, deep rest, and into forgiveness and the re-emergence of love. So, the next time you experience hate, please don’t dismiss it or reject it. Welcome that hatred and see it as an invitation to learn how to love it unconditionally, for it is the doorway to the path that leads us to discovering true peace, inner rest, and a deeper experience of God's love and Divine power in our lives. Questions to Ponder to help you explore your relationship to hatred:
Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator (CASC)
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