Hello again! I hope everyone is staying warm and well. Since we just passed Valentine’s Day, I thought it would be fun to talk about the relationship between love and hate. I will attempt to give another perspective and explain why they can be more similar than we think.
Let’s first start with hate. Hate may come after the accumulation of lesser forms such as irritation, aggravation, frustration, and anger. It also may come from a past experience like in childhood. A parent may unknowingly impress the mind of the child with hate. The parent from their past experience was taught that their ways of disciplining a child is how it is meant to be. Or the parent might have unintentionally, because of their own problems or frustrations at the time, let out hatred towards a child. Of course, there are times that children need to be directed. This direction should not be with hostility but with kindness and patience. You can see how hate, from past experience, can be prevalent in adults today. Therefore, we can’t ignore and turn away from people or ourselves when we express hate but rather face it and learn from it so that we can start to diminish and erase it in our lives.
Picture a line that shows a relationship between two people. On one end you could put hate. So you could imagine that the opposite side would be love. Have you ever heard of love hate relationships? Sometimes we feel like hate is justified which makes us feel that it is ok to keep expressing it in our lives. I’m not saying to suppress hate, but when we understand it more and where it came from that is when we start to let it go. When we release more hate, it starts to leave more room for love or you could say that we are starting to move towards love on the relationship line. Just like heat and cold being opposites and only differing in degree of temperature, love and hate are opposites but on the same line only differing in degree.
There are plenty of degrees of love. People may love certain foods, items, things we enjoy, our family and friends, or even a love for a higher power. There are also many reasons people feel hatred towards some thing or person. Whatever the reason, we must realize what we do to others we do to ourselves. When we start to make a conscious attempt to view the world based on love instead of hate, we will see it more in our lives. I hope you gained some insight out of this post and like always thanks for reading.
Dr. Chip
