The Bad Witch’s Guide

June, 2018


The Bad Witch’s Guide to Hate

There is this idea amongst some lovely people that you can “fix” a hateful and intolerant person. That if you just love them enough, are kind to them enough, forgive them, talk to them, you can heal them.

Now maybe for some of them that is true. Those whom are genuinely ignorant. After all we don’t know what we don’t know. If we only know and respect people like us we have no clue what it is like to be different.

However those folks that hate, really hate with a blinding burning passion? There is no logic, no amount of love or compassion, no act that can sway them.

The truth is they don’t want to stop being hateful. They don’t feel like they are in need of anything because hate is like a drug. It feels righteous and pure and even beautiful. It is the drug of certainty. Of order in a way. It isn’t healthy of course. It’s hard work to hate. You have to tend it, to give fire to the cold hardness in the chest or belly. Outrage, wild conjecture and plain made-up weirdness as well as other people who feel that way. It feels great to hate.

Hate makes you feel powerful and invulnerable and right. It puts the world in order. It removes the chaos, uncertainty and stupidity with a villain, or group of villains. Its chem-trails, and vaccines and the Government or “the Gay Agenda”. Its Jews and Black people, Mexicans, the French or the Damn Chinese!

Because it couldn’t possibly be complicated, and messy and really, really stupid? Do Governments do shady crappy things? Are some of them deliberate? Probably. In all honest greed, and stupidity, human nature are the things that actually things mess up.

You can’t explain to people who hate logically and calmly that there is no “gay agenda “just people who want to be treated as people. People who love and eat and pray (or not). It is those who demonize and dehumanize those whom are “other “whom cultivate hate because they feel threatened and vulnerable. Hate makes them feel strong.

How could you change this with a hug?

You can’t fix an addict easily either. They often have the same root cause, pain, trauma, and self-loathing. More importantly they have to want to get better. Funnily being “other” doesn’t make you immune to hate either. You can be gay and racist, black and homophobic, and I won’t go into some of the most hateful vegans I know of.

So what does “cure” hate?

Most addicts are miserable, either from trauma or from something in their life that feel like injustice. Happier healthy populations and cultures are less prone to hate and addiction. Rehab and therapy would also do wonders too.

In all honesty I don’t have the answers. I just know that you can’t “pray away” the hate from someone any more than you can the “gay” in someone, I know people have tried and still bi-sexual as hell! That someone filled with hate is just as deadly, and far more common than someone on crack or PCP. We have to look beyond what they are saying and doing and address the problem, the hate its self.

Hate is a psychological temporary field dressing that stops someone in trauma having a mental breakdown at that time. Whatever the wound, the trauma, the trigger will probably become the shape of the hate. It, like addiction is there to fill the void that makes us feel vulnerable and deeply hurt. Break downs can also be a break through and those whom don’t hate or have healed and moved on from it. Hate can tell us where are traumas are, what they are, when they started. They can give us clues to healing ourselves. It is often painful and difficult.

A good therapist can help but acknowledging our hates in ourselves might be the best beginning to healing others too.