Hate

I have been saying that for years, in one form or another. Some people put it as drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Same poison, same result. It makes you sick, and nobody else.

Why it is poison

Think about where the other person is right now.

They are off living their life. They may not even remember the day that still keeps you awake at night. And you are the one swallowing the poison, dose after dose, year after year.

Hate and resentment aimed at something outside of you are causing you harm. They lower your energies.

They do not stay inside you either. Holding on to those emotions affects your environment, and your environment affects the people around you. Your partner, your children, the people you work with, all of them are living next to the poison too.

Holding hate feels like power. It feels like a way of making them pay. What it actually does is tie you to the very person you most want to be free of. Every time you go over it again, you hand them another night of your life. They get to keep renting space in your head, and they are not even paying rent.

Where hate sits

There is only one emotion. LOVE.

Every other emotion is a degree of a lack of love, or no love at all.

Anger is often where it starts. Anger can sometimes be justified as a response to a situation. But is it really? I can come up with very strong arguments for both sides of that debate. What I cannot argue against is how you feel.

Life teaches us to respond to a given situation in a certain way. Some of those situations become triggers, and a trigger fires a strong emotional reaction before you have chosen anything at all. Those reactions will often hold back your spiritual growth more than anything else you do.

Name it precisely

The first step is to name what you are feeling, exactly.

Most of us were given a very small vocabulary for feelings. Happy, sad, angry, scared, fine. That vocabulary keeps you stuck.

"I feel bad about my family" gives you nothing to act on. "I feel resentment toward my sister" is something you can work with. Each precise word points somewhere different, and each one asks something different of you.

Your body already knows. It gives you the signal in the felt sense long before the words arrive. Tightness in the chest. Heaviness in the stomach. Heat in the throat.

The body names the emotion through sensation. An emotion wheel, the chart of feelings with the family names in the middle and the specific feelings around the outside, gives you the language to meet it.

Naming what you feel precisely is the first step in being able to change it.

Start by noticing. What kinds of emotions do you mostly feel, negative, positive or a mix? What do you feel when you wake up each day? What do you feel as you go through your day, and as you are going to sleep? What emotions are in the dreams you remember?

Find the trigger

Then look for the trigger.

Can you identify what sets it off? A name. A tone of voice. A certain kind of slight. A date on the calendar.

It can help to keep a simple journal of your days, the way I suggest for watching for signposts. Pretty soon you will see a pattern emerge.

Like any learned response, a trigger can be recognised. Recognising and identifying it is half way to healing it and leaving it in the past where it belongs.

And the more triggers you release from your life, the happier you will become.

Forgiveness is for you

Forgiveness gets misread as letting the other person off the hook.

What forgiveness does is let you set the poison down and walk on. It is you deciding they no longer get to live in your head for free.

You do it for you, never for them. They do not even need to know.

You also do not have to like them, or have them back in your life. On an old list of things I have learnt in life, number six says that some people are simply not nice people, in rather blunter words than that, and that you accept it and let them go.

You cannot bite into a banana and be angry that it is not an apple. People are who they are. Seeing someone clearly and letting them go is a very long way from hating them.

Forgiveness works inward too. Sometimes the person you have not forgiven is you, for something you did or did not do back then. Hindsight is a trap with greasy walls. You cannot climb back up to the moment you were in. At the time you made what you thought was the best decision with the view you had. Loving yourself and forgiving yourself is the path forward. The Life Lessons page has more on that.

When it will not shift

I do understand that some things in life evoke emotions that are very challenging to get rid of. Some of what has happened to people is awful, and I would never tell anyone that their hurt is small.

There are methods that help in working through these feelings. Quiet inner work and daily meditation help. Skilled help from someone who works with the subconscious can carry you further, whether that is therapy, hypnotherapy, Time Line work or EFT. The method matters less than the willingness to put the glass down.

You can change your past, present and future by changing your perspective. Think about that.

You cannot change what they did. You can change what it means to you, and how much of your life it gets from here on.

The Letting Go page picks up from here. Deciding to put the poison down is one step, and letting go is how you keep it down.

Something to sit with

Who are you still drinking poison over?

What does it feel like in your body when you think of them?

And are you ready to put the glass down?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.

Related pages
Signs and Signposts