Feeling hateful: What to do to get rid of it
Feeling hateful, hating yourself or hating someone else can be very unpleasant. This is because you are preoccupied with that hatred a lot in your mind, when you actually want to give your attention to something else
But you just feel so much hatred and anger that this is very difficult for you. The hatred is consuming you. Feeling hatred toward someone who has wronged you is a normal emotion when you’re processing trauma. This can include trauma from abuse, accidents, and illnesses.
Hate can also be comforting, because it is self-protective. It makes you feel that the world is simple and helps you believe in a just world.
But what can you do to feel less hateful?
Research shows that realizing that hate is swallowing up your life or not improving the quality of your life is a first step to letting go of hate. People who have done this themselves report that they took a closer look at their thoughts and exercised more control over them. This can be done with mindfulness, for example .
Other people let go of their feelings of hatred through forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean that you approve of what happened. It means that you stop judging yourself and others[1].
All very nice if you can do this independently, but sometimes you need a little extra help. That's why I take a moment to explain some of the techniques I use as a hypnotherapist to help people release hate.
Doing something to the person in mind
One of the exercises I often perform with people who are overcome with anger toward someone is that you do all kinds of things to the person who in your mind has done something to you .
Hate, in fact, aims to eliminate a particular person or group[2]. Fortunately, your brain does not know what is real and fake, so eliminating the person in your mind can go a long way toward releasing hate.
You can torch him/her. Run him/her over. Throw him/her off a flat. Throw him/her out of an airplane. Work him/her with a bat. You can make it as crazy as you want.
This also lightens what that person did to you in a very strange way. In this way, the hate comes off your heart.
You do this until you feel a little sorry for that person. Then you've done enough. You don't stop before then. So if you have to spend ten minutes or an hour fantasizing about what to do to that person, that's totally fine.
Forgiving and Understanding
There are also two steps you can combine, namely:
- Step 1: Forgive
- Step 2: Understanding
Or vice versa. Why can it be the other way around? Sometimes understanding is enough. You see this, for example, when children make a mistake.
You don’t have to forgive a child who accidentally breaks something, because you understand that they’re just a child and that accidents happen. It might still be annoying, but you don’t become resentful toward the child. So sometimes, understanding is enough.
If you understand where someone is coming from and you understand why they do what they do you don't have to forgive them.
For example, if you are cut off on the highway you may get angry, but then when you hear that someone is being rushed to the hospital because of childbirth, you already don't mind.
So understanding really is better than forgiving. Because often forgiving is then no longer necessary.
Forgiveness requires that you are annoyed that someone comes to a certain point in their life that they have done something to you. What must such a person have experienced that such a thing happens? If this is too difficult start with understanding first. Then you can forgive him/her.
Compassion to feel less hateful
The next step is compassion—feeling that the other person’s situation is worse than your own. Because how bad has your life been if you have to hurt someone else? How bad is your life if you have to do something, can do something, or are going to do something?
Imagine you can make that switch that you feel something is worse for the person who attacked you than for you. Then it will never bother you again.
Then you can be almost certain that you’ll likely experience zero problems for the rest of your life. You may still encounter unpleasant situations, but they’ll affect you less.
Don't suppress your hatred
What many people do who feel hatred is say they forgive someone, but under the skin they still feel the hatred. This is very awkward because then it continues to smolder.
You just want to free your heart from those hateful feelings. Acknowledging that you just really hate someone for what that person has done to you can then be a good first step.
It's okay to hate someone who has done something to you. When you find that hate is affecting your daily life, it is important to do something about it.
Also listen to this podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6YSQZVh3vQVoLAEtSWpOQO?si=364ceacae7d7485e
Do you hate yourself or just the other person?
Hate can manifest in many ways. For example, if you yourself are the person being hated, this can cause you to start hating yourself. A particular situation has taught you something about your feelings of hatred, and that is something you must unlearn.
You can start defending yourself from the complicated situation that creates the hateful feelings and start denying the hate[3].
If you hate yourself, it’s very important to practice self-compassion. Of course, you shouldn’t punish yourself in your imagination, because that only leads to guilt, and that doesn’t do you much good (except that you’ll never do what caused the guilt again).
In this case, it is important to forgive yourself or understand yourself why you did something you now feel hateful toward yourself. This also makes it easier to forgive yourself.
After all, sometimes life is just really complicated and you make the decisions you feel are best at the time. That sometimes things turn out differently than you expected couldn't be predicted either.
Why do you hate someone
Sometimes you can feel hateful toward someone or a certain group, when you can't even think of a clear cause or reason for it. It's just a feeling you have toward that person or a certain group.
However, that feeling is triggered by your worldview—your beliefs about how the world works and how you’re supposed to function within it. Those beliefs can make you feel that it’s best for you to hate a certain person or group, even though you don’t even have a clear reason for doing so.
With hypnosis, you can also find out why you hate someone or a group when you have not experienced an obvious traumatic incident with that person or group.
For example, regression can be used to go back to the moment when the conviction to hate certain types of people was formed, because apparently that's the way it's supposed to be.
Often these are events from your childhood, because that is the time in your life when your beliefs emerge. Usually you don't take the time to double-check those and your unconscious just takes them with you, the rest of your life.
But with regression, you go into hypnosis just double-checking that belief to see if it really helps your life move forward.
As you do so, you can immediately change or replace the limiting belief with one that actually helps you move forward.
Depending on the moment, this can be done in multiple ways. Sometimes empathizing with other people who have played a role in the moment is enough. Sometimes you can change the very moment in your mind, by having your adult self talk to your younger self, for example, and bring it into the now.
This can do a lot to feel less hatred toward people or groups, when in fact that hatred does not make sense at all.
In the process, it also helps you to then live on with more positive energy.
Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and techniques for dealing with feelings of hatred? Then join the free online masterclass on hypnosis.
Or sign up right away for one of our training programs.
Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:
Sources:
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00221678960361007
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1754073917751229
[3] https://open.spotify.com/episode/6YSQZVh3vQVoLAEtSWpOQO?si=364ceacae7d7485e