This article talks about how to get rid of your feelings of hatred whether this is towards a friend, family member or sibling. If there are a couple of siblings who hate each other and who are constantly fighting – you don’t need to learn to completely love each other and be best friends for that to change it only takes one of you to make the change happen and it’s not as painful as it sounds. Here is the key to getting rid of those feelings of hatred what tends to happen most easily for us is when someone is doing something that brings up those feelings of pure hatred for us, is that, we start to think that it’s the person doing those annoying things that’s the cause of the problem. In a sense, I understand the logic of that, I can see why you would think that way.

To feel that hatred a little less, we need to stop thinking about how much we hate the person and separate who they are as a human from the thing that they’re doing which is the thing that annoys us.  

You can hate the behaviour, you can hate the way that they speak or their attitude but don’t hate the person. When you hate the person you then start to see everything that they do through that hatred. Everything they do or say will annoy you because you’ve made the problem about them as a person rather than the initial problem.

When you separate those two things from each other and you just focus on the things that they’re doing and saying that you dislike then you don’t have to apply that ‘I hate them’ rule to everything they do. This means you will feel less annoyed with them because you don’t hate them as a person you just hate the things that they do.

The other thing that you can do is to start adjusting the way that you speak both out loud and inside your head because there’s a big difference like literally try this on as if you were trying on a designer jacket there’s a big difference between ‘I hate them’ and ‘I don’t like that’ like one of them feels much more severe and strong than the other. Whereas, if we take it down a notch. If we change the actual words and phrases that we use we can make it a bit more digestible for ourselves we can make ourselves feel better or not feel as bad as if we were using much more harsh and strong language in our descriptions of someone or what they are doing. 

Therefore, if you want to not poison yourself with bad feelings then start adjusting the words that you use, the things that describe the other people that frustrate you and annoy you to a lower level so that they you know still express your unhappiness but without necessarily putting you into a bad headspace at the same time.

When there are times when someone that you dislike is doing something all right like maybe even pretty good, it’s really important that you acknowledge it out loud. That’s not for them! That’s for you – this is you being selfish looking after yourself because what you’ll start to do is you’ll start to rewire your own brain to think of them more fairly and to not just be drawn into those feelings of loathing and hatred that you previously felt towards them. You’re doing yourself a favour here. You’re freeing yourself up from feeling those bad feelings all of the time and you’re going to be retraining your own brain to accept that actually sometimes they’re not so bad sometimes they’re maybe even quite good sometimes they’re perhaps funny sometimes they come up with good ideas so when you acknowledge those things for them but most importantly for yourself then you are allowing yourself to move away from feeling such deep dark emotions towards them.

Sometimes people are hesitant and they don’t want to do that because they quite like the idea of having such strong repulsive hateful feelings towards somebody else and that’s okay but just know that that’s not going to be making you feel good. It’s not going to do anything to them it’s just going to make you not feel good and ultimately it’s much nicer when we feel good right so why would you not want to do that? If you want to be feeling good more of the time then give yourself that opportunity to not just see other people in a more balanced way but perhaps to see life in a more balanced way and not just zooming in laser and focusing on the bad stuff that’s happening out there but acknowledging and responding to the good stuff too.

By Gemma Bailey
www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org