by John Welwood
You may imagine that acknowledging feelings of anger or hatred will make you a more hateful or vengeful person. But in fact the reverse is true—as long as you consciously relate to the hatred as your own experience, rather than using it as a weapon for blaming and attacking the bad other. Denying or resisting your anger or hatred sets up an opposition within you that squelches your energy and diminishes your power. This keeps the aggression frozen inside you.
Yet when you can open to and stay present with the aggression, you free up the energy and power locked up in these feelings. The key is to give the energy of the anger or hatred plenty of room, and to ride the wave of that energy without focusing so much on the person with whom you’re upset. Doing this lets you step out of the aggrieved victim role. In this way you find, paradoxically, that directly experiencing your hatred helps free you from hatred.
Hatred actually contains its own intelligence and truth. It is a signal that we are cut off from ourselves and the power of our being. This is what we most hate—feeling cut off from our power, our juice, our freedom, our ease, because of this bind we’re in with another person. Through facing and directly experiencing the hatred, we can begin to decode the specific message that is hidden within it.
One day I asked the students in my group to explore their hatred in a conscious and deliberate way by first acknowledging the feeling in their body and then seeing what exactly they most hated in their relationships. These were a few of their responses: “I hate it when you turn away from me.” “I hate it when there’s no space for me in this relationship.” “I hate it when you tell me how to be.” “I hate it when you don’t hear me.” “I hate losing myself when I try to please you.” “I hate the deadness I feel when I’m with you.”
What my students most hated was how small and shut down they felt around another person. They were essentially saying, “I hate the way I shrink and lose touch with my own juice when I’m with you.” And the crucial positive message hidden within their hatred was: “I want myself back. I don’t want to let myself be so overwhelmed by how I feel with you that I lose myself.” That is a statement of power.
Hatred is at bottom a cry for help, a cry for attention from a place in us that feels lost and disempowered. Recognizing hatred as a sign of disempowerment and helplessness allows us to make friends with it instead of regarding it as something evil. It becomes destructive only when we turn it into a weapon to use against ourselves or others.
Kind Understanding
What continues to fuel our grievance against other people is our aversion to the intense emotions—especially hurt, anger, and hatred—they trigger within us. Thus, to lay down our grievance and live at peace with the human race, or the person we live with, it’s essential to make friends with these feelings. Learning to allow and open up space around the intense feelings and sensations in our body is a profound act of kindness that starts to melt down the ice of resentment that hardens the heart.
This inner kindness lets us take a further step in letting go of grievance: bringing understanding to the childhood circumstances in which our love-wound originally formed. A very special type of understanding is essential here—what I call kind understanding or feeling-understanding because it flows from the heart rather than from purely mental comprehension.
Why didn’t your parents love you better? Why was their love so conditional or inconsistent? If you consider your parents not from the perspective of the aggrieved child but from that of an understanding adult, what you see are people who are hurt and wounded just like you. They also had their own share of burdens. They were struggling to make ends meet, keep their marriage together, and find themselves and their own way. All of these constraints and stresses made it hard for them to be there more fully for you.
In a tribal culture, others in the tribe—aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, neighbors—would have been there to take up the slack when your parents were not up to the task. But in our culture, the nuclear family is on its own. And the culture itself provides little wisdom, help, or guidance in raising children in a healthy way. So all the weight was on your parents to give you what you needed, and it was too much for them, given the other burdens they were carrying. No wonder their love seemed inconsistent and unreliable, and no wonder you came to distrust love.
On top of everything else, your parents had their own legacy of not knowing they were loved, which made it hard for them to love themselves. When parents don’t love themselves, they inevitably wind up using their children to shore up their shaky self-esteem. It requires a high degree of maturity to let loved ones be the unique, separate people that they are, with their own different needs, perspectives, and feelings. So, to the extent that your parents were not fully evolved themselves, they couldn’t let you be who you were and simply love you for that.
This doesn’t mean they were bad. Not knowing and loving oneself, not being confident in the beauty of one’s own nature, is a general affliction that has been passed down through the generations. Your parents simply suffered from the same malady that afflicts everyone. Like everyone else, they were helpless in the face of their own conditioning.
Kind understanding is not a way to make excuses for your parents or condone the ways they were hurtful to you. Rather, recognizing that your parents’ hurtful or negligent behavior arose out of their own wounding and lack of self-love is a step in liberating yourself. What does it feel like to see your parents’ woundedness, without either justifying or condemning their behavior? They could not know or love you any better than they knew and loved themselves. If you have a little feeling of understanding for them and what they were up against, even the tiniest glimmer, this will help free you from the burden of grievance that you carry.
Not Taking It Personally
Just as your parents’ imperfect love was not their fault, because they had no control over that, so too the lack of love that flowed your way is not your fault. In fact, it has nothing to do with you. For in truth, there are very few people in this world who have the capacity to truly see or know you as you are. No one else can see you or your beauty in a consistently accurate way. Your beauty is not a tangible thing but a subtle, inner quality that is often not visible from the outside.
There is no way to free yourself from the mood of unlove and the mood of grievance as long as you take it personally when others treat you badly. Taking it personally means imagining that it indicates something about who you are. As long as you take it personally when others don’t see or appreciate you, you keep yourself imprisoned in the mind of the aggrieved child.
So when people treat you in negligent or hurtful ways, you could practice seeing their unkindness as a symptom of their inner tension and distress, arising out of their own inner disconnection. The man who tailgates you and insults you as he passes in his car is only acting out his own inner turmoil. He is in so much pain and stress that it clouds his consciousness. Unloading on you is a way of trying to reduce his tension and find some relief inside. If you take it personally, then you let his emotional turmoil enter your system and poison you. But if you don’t take it personally, this frees you from the victim mind-state.
If your pain or anger comes up despite your best intentions not to take things personally, then don’t take that personally either. Hurt and anger are just feelings, responses in your body arising out of your very human sensitivity to the events around you. You don’t have to make them mean something bad about you. The more you work with hurt and anger in the ways described earlier, the more freedom you will have with these feelings. Then you can give them space, breathe into your belly, and open yourself to their energy as they move through you.
The Taoists have a famous teaching story about an empty boat that rams into your boat in the middle of a river. While you probably wouldn’t be angry at an empty boat, you might well become enraged if someone were at its helm. The point of the story is that the parents who didn’t see you, the other kids who teased you as a child, the driver w
ho aggressively tailgated you yesterday—are in fact all empty, rudderless boats. They were compulsively driven to act as they did by their own unexamined wounds; therefore they did not know what they were doing and had little control over it.
Just as an empty boat that rams into us isn’t targeting us, so too people who act unkindly are driven along by the unconscious force of their own wounding and pain. Until we realize this, we will remain prisoners of our grievance, our past, and our victim identity, all of which keep us from opening up to the more powerful currents of life and love that are always flowing through the present moment. Not taking it personally when someone hurts us is a profound practice of compassion, for ourselves first of all. It provides a breath of relief, allowing us to relax and let be in moments when our first impulse is to freeze up or lash out.
Loving-Kindness
Despite all the ways in which your parents failed to love you perfectly, you are only as healthy as you are today because of the ways they did care for you. Granted, their caring wasn’t consistent. But if they hadn’t shown you any kindness at all, you would not be well enough to be sitting here reading this book. You might be in an institution somewhere, or be a homeless person or a serial killer. So if you are relatively sane at all, this means that you most likely had what D. W. Winnicott calls “good enough” parents. If you find this hard to accept, you probably have more work to do unpacking and making friends with the hurt and anger you are carrying from the past.
In the final year of my mother’s life, as it became apparent that she was on the decline, I was introduced to a powerful Tibetan contemplative practice that involves remembering the kindness of one’s mother. The Tibetans use this as a first step toward developing compassion for all beings. Of course, this is easier for Tibetans because they cherish their mothers unequivocally. Like those of many American men, my feelings for my mother were clouded and ambivalent.
My mother’s decline forced me to come to terms with an unpleasant reality that had marked my whole life: my grievance about her not being able to see or respect me as separate and different from her. All my life I had also felt burdened by her suffering, and by wanting to make her feel better so that I would feel better myself. And I had failed at that task, which left me filled with guilt and resentment. Again and again I had suffered the consequences of holding on to my grievance against her, the worst of which was my difficulty in letting myself be loved.
When I discovered this practice of remembering the kindness of my mother in the last year of her life, I felt immediately attracted to it. Though I had worked on my relationship with her in therapy with some success, this practice provided a simple, concrete method to reorient my whole attitude toward her. Letting myself remember and recognize all the countless ways she had shown me kindness helped me release my bad-other projections on her. I came to accept the fact that she could love me only in the ways that she was able to, given who she was and what she had been through.
Contemplating and appreciating her kindness also helped me open up my own in-channel so that I became more receptive to love in general. This helped me see the beauty of the practice of remembering others’ kindness, for it is a way of learning to let yourself receive love, which is the basis for loving others. For this reason I am presenting a condensed version of this contemplative practice here. (People who still carry a heavy load of resentment toward their mother will probably not respond well to this exercise. If that is the case for you, I suggest not pushing it but working more on your hurt and anger first, or doing a similar exercise with someone else in your life who has been kind to you.)
Since it is easy to remember only the times when we think our mother harmed us20 and to forget her kindness or to take it for granted, we need to remember in detail how our mother has been kind from the very beginning of this life. In the beginning our mother was kind in offering us a place of birth. If she had wanted to evict us, she could have done so and we would not have been alive today to enjoy our present opportunities. When we were in our mother’s womb, she protected us carefully, more carefully than she would guard a precious jewel. In every situation she thought of our safety. Even during the agony of childbirth, our welfare was foremost in her mind. When we were newly born, even though we looked more like a frog than a human being, our mother loved us dearly. Who cared for this scarcely human thing? It was our mother. She clothed it, cradled it, and fed it with her own milk. She removed the filth from its body without feeling any disgust.
While we were small, our mother was constantly watchful. Each day of our early childhood, our mother rescued us from many disasters. In the winter she would make sure that we were warm and had good clothing. She always selected the best things for us to eat, and she would rather have been sick herself than see us sick. As we grew older, our mother taught us to eat, drink, speak, sit, and walk. She sent us to school and encouraged us to do good things in life. When we became adolescent, we preferred to be with our friends and would completely forget our mother, and remember her only when we needed something from her. Yet our mother remained continuously concerned for us. Even though she may be old and weak and scarcely able to stand on her feet, she never forgets her children.
As you read this contemplation, you could see how it feels to consider these and other ways your mother may have cared for you. What kind of effect does that have on you? What happens to your grievance against your parents when you remember a few of these ways in which they did show you kindness? Assuming that you had “good enough” parents who were not total monsters, then recognizing their kindness can feel like letting sunshine into a dark dungeon.
Notice any tendency you may have to discount the kindness your parents or others have shown you. This is a barometer of your investment in grievance. There is a common tendency in relationships to focus on what is missing while underappreciating what is positive and available. We tend to take the good things for granted and fix our attention on what is wrong. This of course only leads to perpetual dissatisfaction and frustration, since no one else can give you everything you need or always love you in just the right way.
This tendency to focus on the negative—what’s gone wrong, what we’re not getting—and to discount the positive—all that’s going right, all that we have been given—is surely one of the most pernicious habits of the human mind. If we watch our mind at work, we can readily see how much more emphasis we put on the few things going wrong than on all the infinite things going right. As a chain saw starts up next door, our attention fixates on this disturbance, causing us to forget all about the lovely hours of silence that preceded and will also follow it.
There is a meal chant from the Zen Buddhist tradition that begins, “Seventy-two labors brought us this rice, we should know how it comes to us.” Similarly, seventy-two labors have brought us everything we have, for we live in a network of human interconnectedness that supports our existence in every way. Even though life may not give us everything we want and contains all sorts of shocks and disappointments, everything that comes along can be a gift—by helping us wake up, develop new strength and resources, and become more loving human beings. In that sense, life is still generous and kind even when it manifests in shocking or ferocious ways.
At every moment we have the choice of either feeling gratitude for what has been given to us or indulging in grievance about what is missing. Grievance and gratitude are polar opposites. Grievance focuses on what is not there—the imperfections of relative love—and looks for someone to blame. Gratitude recognizes what is here—the simple beauty of human presence and contact—and responds to it with appreciation. When we reflect on how our life is possible only because it is held, surrounded, and nourished by a field of kindness, this gives rise to natural gratitude.
Of course, when we’re in the grip of grievance, it is easy to discount the kindness that life and other people have shown us. If that is your tendency, see if you’d be willing to take a moment and explore how it feels to recognize just how much
has been given to you. Or maybe you have a hard time acknowledging kindness shown to you because you feel undeserving, or guilty about not reciprocating. Yet despite these reactions, if you simply tune in to how your body feels when you receive kindness, you will notice the heart naturally expanding. No doubt this is why Rumi recommends that “whenever some kindness comes to you, turn that way, toward the source of kindness.”
As the heart expands in gratefulness, we feel a natural desire to repay the kindness we have received, to give it back somehow. Gradually this develops into a basic wish that all beings be well, that the world live in peace, that everyone find true satisfaction. This is what Buddhists call loving-kindness. And out of loving-kindness arises compassion—not wanting anyone to suffer needlessly.
Notice the difference between how loving-kindness and grievance feel in your body. Grievance is tight, closed-in, and hard, while kindness is an expansive warmth, soft and open. This radiant warmth is your true nature finding its natural expression. Let it shine. This is natural forgiveness arising spontaneously—the beginning of the end of your investment in grievance.
CHAPTER FOUR
From Self-Hatred to Self-Love
There is no weapon for the realization of truth that is more powerful than this: to accept yourself.
—SWAMI PRAJNANPAD
You will never feel loved until you love yourself.
—ARNAUD DESJARDINS
IN THE END, we cannot hope to free ourselves from the stranglehold of grievance unless we relinquish the most destructive grievance of all—the one we hold against ourselves. Grievance always cuts two ways: Every grudge against the bad other for not treating me right or loving me properly is accompanied by a sense of bad self—a grievance against myself for not being good enough or worthy of that love. Bad other and bad self are two sides of the same coin.