How to Manage the Hate? Monday Morning Check-In Post
How Are You??!!
I’m not talking about theirs right now. I don’t think there is a way to manage someone else’s hatred. I am talking about my own.
Sometimes I feel my hatred rise when I tune into the atrocities that currently abound on this timeline we are on. My hatred then extends to the timeline itself in a “Get me the fuck out of here” kind of hate.
If I were watching this in a movie theatre, I would get out of my chair and leave. If I were at home, I’d turn it off. But there is no turning this timeline off. If I try to bypass it or try some other form of dissociation, it’ll just be here waiting for me as soon as I land back in my body.
Hatred is hard to define; like love, it’s visceral and all encompassing, and I am not even sure it’s hate that I am feeling as I observe those with their fears so distorted they continue to cheer on the violence being perpetrated by 47, the GQP, and their minions.
According to Oxford, hate is defined as: “intense or passionate dislike”.
(This feels insufficient to me)
Merriam-Webster defines it as:
“a: intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury”
“b: extreme dislike or disgust: antipathy, loathing”
I think the Merriam-Webster definition “a” is what I am talking about here. Hate is not a singular feeling but a collection of emotions all rolled into one big mass. It’s a tangle, and we are entangled.
It’s not even the people I hate, the ones who voted for and continue to support this horror, it’s their actions and beliefs that I hate. Their unhealed trauma is being weaponized against them as they have not grown their emotional intelligence by tending to their own inner emotional and mental health. We are mired in the sludge of this timeline by the lowest common denominator of unhealed trauma among us, and there is an unfathomable amount of it running through the collective that’s not yet seen a speck of light.
How can I hate the actions of those who don’t even know they are operating from their wounds?
The ones with the larger audience, who hold more power and sway, well, it’s their mastery at weaponizing other people’s distortions of fear against them, cudgeling society, that I hate. I hate their skill in this, their absolute sociopathy, as the collective becomes simply pawns to be discarded at will in their game of “How Much Shit Can I Amass Before I Die?”
They have the resources for self-examination and healing, yet they eschew them at every turn. This is the action I hate the most: the billionaire class and, in turn, those in office because of their wealth, who could financially tend to their mental/emotional health and won’t, instead trashing the world around them like children wrecking the toys of others—toddlers in grown-up bodies.
It costs money to heal, and money they have, yet facing their hurt is too terrifying for them, so they do what many of us won’t, they bypass at every turn, disconnecting more and more from their humanity, becoming a force of destruction and hate in this world.
Ultimately, I guess it’s the game of this reality I also hate. The cruelty has gotten to me, exacerbated by confronting once again the cruelty from which I come, cruelty that perpetuates to this day - parents who operate from their wounds, who had the resources to get help and again and again chose not to, their addictions and mental illnesses taking center stage in my life. I hate what they’ve done and the wreckage they’ve caused to my sister and me.
As records are public, I know that the home of my mother, who is fading away in a memory care facility, no longer encumbered by the memory of all of the pain she came from and then wrought, was sold to a woman named Norah.
As signs go, I don’t even know how to discern this one. I could make myself crazy trying.
It feels like too much, everything playing out on this timeline and all that has happened in this reality going back eons. The injustice makes this Aquarian's blood boil, this and the lack of humanity magnifying around us.
No justice. No peace.
I am tired.
I don’t think I’ve answered the question I posed in the title.
I guess this rambling is me managing my hate right now as best I can - processing out loud, a technique that always seems to work some measure of healing for me. It’s one of the reasons I started these Monday morning check-in posts on Facebook years ago, in another terrible moment as the pandemic spun out of control, a moment we still have not recovered from.
How are you??!! Please drop me a comment below and let me know.
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You know . . . I feel you. (the young Celia would say - "I feel ya, sister!") For the past . . . I'd say month or so, I have had to take a step back from looking at every action being taken by the administration because it was too much. I found myself highly anxious . . . at some points beside myself with worry without any place to put it. Even with making calls and writing and meeting with representatives - taking direct action to say what I believe in rather than simply accepting what was happening - it was not sustainable for me. My system couldn't take it. I lived in that feeling of hate or maybe trying to flee from it, and that still happens. Shame was another one - ashamed to be American with that person at the helm and disgust that he is. Seeing his face and hearing his voice brings me to hate almost immediately.
The healing piece is interesting. I hadn't thought of it in that way before - - - that the people who seemingly have the most access to it, utterly reject it. I don't even know if it's part of their field of awareness. That's probably too generous to say. But I just had a conversation with my mother in which I suggested therapy and/or anti-anxiety medication and her knee-jerk response was to worry that I thought she needed those things. Her carefully curated view of herself (hmm . . . how am I like this as I sit here with arms crossed between sentences?) doesn't seem to allow for the admission that this kind of help/healing is needed. She doesn't even acknowledge the wounding. It is as you have written above.
I don't have answers, but I was in a gathering this morning, where we attempted to connect with our true selves, and a woman came back with a memory of a time when she was very young and some bullies came at her with a rock. She remembered saying to herself - "you can't make me hate you. I know that this is not truly who you are and you can't make me hate you." She went on to describe some magical stuff happening and said that she wants to get back to that place. I don't know how to put this into actual day to day practice with both family and political figures, but if feels like there's something to it. I wonder what parts of this are feelings/emotions to metabolize and/or transmute vs. not mine to carry. It feels like this is my work right now - finding and trusting myself and my own discernment and guidance. To do that, I need to turn down the noise. That works better with the political/environmental stuff, and less so with those closer to me - mom & kids.
Okay - so with all of that figured out :-/, I will say thank you for the space and for your words and for sharing in this time/space reality and sending lots of love!
I feel you. The barbarity of this moment, the heads-in-the-sand, the cruelty being the point…I so want to jump out of this timeline. Thanks for saying the hard parts out loud.