"How to Hate Properly and Love Too"
How to Hate Properly – And Love Too Robert Doss Wilmington For Women’s Alliance March 3, 1969
There is a theory backed up in reality that it makes a great deal of difference what we think about reality. It’s the old idea of “thinking makes it so.”
Two true examples from Gordon W. Allport:
A man lay at the hospital, gravely ill, in fact near death. The medical staff had told him they could not diagnose his disease, but if they knew the diagnosis, they probably could cure him. They did say a famous diagnostician was on his way soon to visit the hospital and he might be able to spot the trouble.
A few days later, the diagnostician arrived and began his rounds. When he came to this man’s bed, he merely looked at the patient and said softly, “Moribundus,” and went on.
Some years later, that patent called on the diagnostician to express his gratitude saying, “I have been wanting to thank you for your diagnosis. They told me that if you could diagnose me, I’d get well, and so the minute you said, ‘moribundus,’ I knew I’d recover.”
This true story would appear to indicate that life itself may hang upon an attitude or an expectation. Another true story deals with a small boy who was an obsessive thumb sucker.
All of the well-known methods of reward and punishment had been tried on him – tying the thumb, soaking it in bitter-tasting concoctions, slapping, candy giving, candy withholding – the whole bit. All were tried and the thumb sucking grew firmer –By the age of six, the child was a perfect embarrassment and public spectacle. One day – just like that – he stopped sucking completely.
His parents dared to ask him why in their astonishment – why did he suddenly break such a tenacious habit. The child replied, simply: “Big boys don’t suck their thumbs!”
Naturally.
Somehow, this idea got through to him when he was ready for it – when he caught up with the right motivation or it with him – it happened. What we believe about things matters a great deal! If we believe the world is an angry or hostile place – a place where no one should be trusted – it tends to become such a place for us and we tend to become hostile persons ourselves. Put simply, “Hate triumphs over love” – then, again, what one comes to believe about reality becomes crucial.
And, an answer to it: He says, if things get bad enough, we may become estranged from ourselves and from others, from the basis of our being. We may have lost our orientation – become estranged from the origin and aim of our life and do not know where we have come from or were we are going.
“We are separated then from the mystery, the depth, and the greatness of our existence.” We hear something from the depth, but close our ears. Something is demanded of us, but we fight it. We try to escape from the urgency within us.
One is estranged or alienated from his own being – from death – from love. Then, there may come a change. … One’s world is transformed!
As Tillich puts it: “It happens or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it shall not happen so long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it.”
“(It) strikes u when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deep than usual (or) because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure has become intolerable to us. I strikes us when, year after year, the longed for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.”
“Then,” says Tillich, “Sometimes, at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted, finally. You are accepted, ACCEPTED by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know.
“Do not ask for the name now,” he says.
“Perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” “After such an experience, we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. …”
What one has received, as a gift, is the certitude of acceptance.
Tillich gives this experience a name but it doesn’t matter what it is called. This reality – this religious or motivational or psychological experience does happen. I have seen it happen to people. But most of us, I trust, do not experience things so dramatically.
Our day-to-day experiencing and coping are much more ordinary and appear to come more as the result of deliberate effort. And, some people, through tenacity of a certain maturity, can live by their own internal formula – by inner direction – like that of one woman whose life reflected her way of living internalized long since.
She would say to herself, “I will not whine – be mean – or gossip.” And she lived that way. Her “shalt nots” – three key words: no whining, no meanness, no gossip – might seem a narrow (and negative) basis for a life, but it helped keep her a pleasant and constructive personality.
One might have internalized another rule: “Put one foot in front of the other.”
Or, “The only way through trouble is through it, not around it.”
Or, “I’ll say what I mean
and do what I say,
but be open to change
when I find a better way.”
No one can give another his or her formula. One internalizes his own, but again, many of us may not experience this. We may not experience the gift of acceptance Tillich talked about – and we may not have internalized a formula for living. That seems too facile. Life is not like that – where a few words make one feel better and try harder. Life is full of contradictions. One may come to this – saying to himself or herself: “I feel what I feel, and though I wish I could love that someone, the truth is, I hate him.” Or, another person may realize denying that I hate anyone because I like to think of myself as a loving person. Nevertheless, I can’t understand why I feel so depressed so often or when I am around him or her for very long.”
Love and hate: One can feel them both at the same time and not even be aware of it. But, hostility and aggression are normal, we ought to know. They can become neurotic if they are not handled when they are normal. We’d be better off if we did not fear our anger. Some people become very shaky and depressed because they are full of rage. They are afraid because they are afraid of what they might do if they acted the way they felt. What they need is some understanding of what they feel and why.
Paul Tournier, a Swiss physician, psychotherapist and well know European religious layman has said that: “Many a discussion would tae quite a different course if we were to admit to each other the emotional and quite personal basis of our opinions: – we think we have a political ideology, the real basis of which is emotional– the bitterness again his father which turns a young man into an anarchist; the fear of losing money which makes the rich man a stern adversary of communism; the jealousy which makes a committee member oppose everything suggested by one of his colleagues; the desire for revenge which turns a young woman into a feminist because her father used to bully her mother; or, which turns a man into an anti-feminist, because he is dominated by his wife.”
And Tournier goes on to exclaim about: “the starling light that would be thrown on the discussions of any committee – even one composed of psychoanalysts – if one were to set about analyzing the dreams of its members! Long standing antagonism would be explained at once, and would be easier to resolve.” Let’s admit that feelings have a lot more to do with what we think and do than reason has.
What do we do about feelings? Recognize that we have them first. Express them constructively – or cool off a while – think before we leap – and accept our feelings! Which is not to say we will be happy about them – only that they are normal, because we are human.
We may as well accept that we can hate and learn something about that in ourselves if we expect some relief or change.
The philosopher Nietzsche, was a great psychologist without knowing it.
Freud said, “Nietzsche had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.”
Nietzsche believed that a man’s fundamental drive is to live out of one’s “potentia.” That is, “not for pleasure does man strive, but for power.” Potential. Or, we could say, for potency – or, again, for fulfillment of potential.
Happiness, then, is not the absence of pain, but “the most alive feeling or power or potential fulfillment” and joy a “plus-feeling of power.”
In other words, if he is correct, what most, perhaps all, people want is to express themselves – fulfill themselves – be themselves and do so with a sense of confidence – a will to personal power, the empowerment of one’s talents and abilities. I would add, Empowerment With Meaning!
If one does not affirm his own being – his own individuality, his worth and dignity – he can lose them. He becomes less himself.
If you do not fulfill your potential, you are, to that extent, estranged from yourself, and it makes you mad. That is the way we become mad at ourselves – because we did not express ourselves ¬ we remember when we get home what we wish we had said to someone who angered us earlier. We can be angry with ourselves for being conformists. Angry because we did not say what we meant and did not do what we said – because we did not live up to our own potential and others took us to be something we were not.
Because we did not – or believed we could not be ourselves – we, if Nietzsche is correct, turned hostility and resentment inward and what is the result – bad conscience, and depression. Or, at Nietzsche put is, “bad conscience is nothing other than the instinct of freedom forced to become latent, driven underground, and forced to vent its energy upon itself.”
If the hostility becomes sever enough, one curtails or destroys his or someone else’s being. But, things get worse only because the individual has been unable to accept and deal with normal hostility and aggression, to use today’s example, to take the into consciousness, and handle them normally.
Again, paradoxically, we work out hatred by accepting it, acting out of it in its normal and appropriate mixture with the wish to love and be accepted.
So, it should not be surprising if we find that we want to be warm accepting persons, but something find that we are harsh and rejecting – that we want to be scrupulously moral, but find our consciences may hurt. That we want to be loving, but find we can be hostile, even toward the same person at the same time. From what reading, training and experience seem to be telling me, it looks like one has to learn to hate properly first in order to be freed to love properly.
If you’d like examples from religious literature, just think of Jesus and the apostle Paul. Jesus is the exemplar of a religion and ethic of love – but according to the record, he could blow-his-top fairly well – driving out money changers, damning fig trees, telling the representatives of law and order where to get off, upsetting the society, doing his own thing (as it were), and bringing a message from his tradition of love they neighbor as thyself.
But, remember, it says as thyself and if we do not love ourselves, our neighbors will be better off not being treated as we treat ourselves or as we get others to treat us because we want to be punished.
Or Paul – all of that beautiful stuff, seriously meant, about being as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal if we have not love – the same Paul who chewed out the Galatians – saying “I am astonished that you are shifting … and going over to another gospel. … Whoever preaches a gospel that contradicts the gospel I preached to you, God’s curse be on him! … O empty-headed Galatians, who has bewitched you? … Are you such fools?
Did you begin with the Spirit only to end now with the flesh?
Then, he tells them about the sins of the flesh and says, “See what big letters I make, when I write you in my own hand!” Pow! Paul is mad – maddest at those he loves most.
Paul, who years to inaugurate a new religion of love and the spirit – a loving man who can express his wrath like the best of them – and the very same man recognized his own bad conscience when he said:
“I cannot understand my own actions. I do not act as I desire to act; on the contrary, I do what I detest!” Amen! So, human nature hasn’t changed much. OK.
Love and hate we find in one continuum – on the same spectrum – and we all have them both within us. Denying what we feel is no way to love. It is a way to make worse the unpleasantness of that which bugs us. The way to love properly is to learn to hate properly – that is, recognize that we do sometimes hate – or dislike what we or others say or do. We do not have to hit them for it – only know what we feel. Accept it. Accept ourselves and our hateful feelings, because it is still all right to be oneself. We are not bad or evil because we have felt hostile or have acted that way on some occasion. It is all right to be oneself! It is all right to be me – all right to be you.
And this, friends, is what the small groups are about – or is at least what lay behind them when I started the first pilot small group and then asked the adult programs committee to take over the organization of the groups each year.
I will not go very much into details about the small groups, but will leave that to your questions if you have them, and some of you are in small groups. They are not group therapy sessions, but they can be therapeutic.
That is, they may help a person find himself a bit more and discover that it is all right to be himself, even if it is painful to discover some of the less pleasant feelings he has been hiding and begin to accept them.
Originally, the idea was quite simple. I thought of the theology of Martin Buber – what might be called relationship theology. The fact that so many people relate to other people as mere “its” – things instead of as persons. Buber wanted to see I-Thou relationships develop in the place of I-It relationships.
The Small Groups are places to do this. … Where the point is to talk about one’s own honest feelings – share them with the group – loving feelings or hostile feelings – and begin to validate himself or herself in a group in which it becomes safe to be as one is!
Of course, the groups may not all click. People may persistently avoid themselves and their real feelings. They may prefer to talk about Vietnam or the urban crisis or the children or their club, or a book, and that is all right. But, it is not getting down to the business – the only business of the meetings. Feelings. Often topics are usually handled as abstractions and someone ought to raise his hand – thus – to let the group know they are evading feelings – being abstract – therefore staying on the “it” level more than the “thou” level.
The point is not deliberately to wade into someone else and tell him what a crumb you think he is. That would reveal more about the teller than the receiver – though, if it is necessary, it might just have to happen.
But the group itself becomes protective of its integrity and will not let things go too far too fast. If two in the group are having-at each other in a subtle or direct way – that should become the topic of the group – and it is important how it is done. Someone else should ask: “Now what is going on here. … How did you feel about what she was saying. … And what did you feel when you said it?”
One may be quite surprised to find out just how hostile he was ¬– or that he was hurting someone else – or be surprised that the group could still accept him after he had released angry thoughts.
Well, I shall be glad to talk more about the groups but add a word now. These small groups bring added benefits, at least potentially they do – beyond the self-discovery of a person or the acceptance of oneself with one’s angers and warm feelings.
The make possible real communication on a more intimate level than we can have in most church meetings or on Sunday morning. Sunday is worship and attunement with an enhanced quality of life. But, small groups help enrich the quality of the life we celebrate on Sundays.
In small groups, or in one’s own ways – through reading, thinking, working hard at what one learns, one can, if he is willing to take the risk, begin to be himself and become what he is by accepting – then going beyond – hate to companionship. It works best, I think, in groups. It can work with a friend – if you can honest with each other.
It can work well with one’s spouse, so long as you learn that just because you hate each other that does not mean you do not love each other.
It is a life-long job – becoming real.
We do not have to follow Nietzsche to do this. He said, “Follow not me, but you.” The wise old Buber set it down in a most wonderful little booklet – “The Way of Man”– and I repeat it here as I do from time to time in church:
“There is something that can only be found in one place. It is a great treasure, which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure may be found is the place on which one stands.”
I’d encourage each of us to find out where we stand. If you have no angers – no hostile feelings ever – either you are kidding yourself or the gods have most unfairly smiled upon you.
But for the rest of us sinners – if you do sometimes get riled up –
If you can be angry – all right. Know you have that in you. Use the anger constructively. Learn to hate properly by being real about what you feel before the hate gets so big it fills you up and you can no longer discover you loving side.
Hate properly – so you can love properly….
Slowly, love will win if we keep open and honest and stick with it.
