How Not To Hate Hateful People (Pt. 1)

A two-session deep dive into overcoming resentment

by Siavash Ghanbari on Unsplash

As the doctor giving me an injection recently said: this may sting a bit.

I often write about the fact that grief and anger are logical bi-products of being a person of empathy witnessing the fractures in the world. It’s reasonable and actually quite healthy to be outraged at the inhumanity some human beings are capable of and even revel in.

But today and tomorrow we’re going to talk about what happens when those emotions become a toxic cocktail leading us into something unhealthy and unhelpful: resentment.

Resentment is that step beyond the natural frustrations with another human being that (at least in myself) comes from a desire to make someone pay: for their vote, their politics, their theology, their hateful words, their beliefs, their caustic actions.

We want people to be held accountable (whatever that looks like to us) and for most of us, that accountability usually involves us wanting them to feel remorse or sorrow. We’re looking for them to confess, to show contrition, to express regret (or at the very least to admit they’ve done something wrong). Resentment demands that people who’ve hurt us or someone else face consequences, and it is born out of the frustration that we can’t manufacture enough sorrow in them to get them to have the wisdom to agree with us.

And the problem is, these admissions of culpability often things they aren’t able or willing to give us at least right now—otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are and we wouldn’t be in this conflict with them.

There’s an irony in all of this grudge-holding for me, because I realize that I find it extremely difficult to have compassion for human beings who seem to have no compassion. The people I most struggle to manufacture empathy for are the people who rarely manufacture it for others—and the fraudulence, hypocrisy, and inconsistency of this isn’t lost on me.

Resentment always hurts us more than the person it is directed toward, because it leaves our peace in the hands of someone else: needing their sorrow or their admission of guilt or their confession of wrongdoing in order to be released from our anger—and that makes us dependent on something that may never come.

What if these people never have that moment of clarity and understanding, a moment that as basically good people we should want for them? Are we trapped in permanent resentment.

The idea of vendetta or revenge or payback is an emotional intoxicant. It feels good to want justice, to demand consequences, to take moral high ground but it doesn’t really do anything aside from satisfy a base desire in us to meet violence with violence, which is a slippery slope. We don’t want to oppose something we believe is monstrous by becoming monsters.

Since what are we looking for in our resentment isn’t really worth chasing, perhaps we can pursue something more redemptive if not substantially more difficult.

I want to suggest a way to reframe the people in our lives in a way that might help us transform or diffuse that resentment and it isn’t going to be easy.

Check in tomorrow for part two, and a specific strategy for not hating the people we find hateful.

And like my doctor said: it might sting a bit…

Share in the comments, how you’ve found resentment surfacing in you lately.