Recently I attended a workshop on the impact of interparental hatred on children, where it was presented that children do not fare well in the presence of ongoing, high parental conflict, especially when they are drawn into the conflict. Research shows the longer the conflict goes on, the greater the damage to children. The damage can last into adulthood where they can have difficulties with intimate relationships and managing conflict. Interparental hatred, especially if it is entrenched, needs to be named – it is not just anger.
In my mediation work, supporting separated parents making plans for the care of their children, I have often experienced this conflict and there is sometimes even hatred. I often come across parents who are very nasty to each other when they separate. They really seem to hate each other. The way people can act and speak to each other with hatred really disturbs me because I know it is far from the truth of who they are inside. We are not born hating each other. Do babies hate anyone? When we are born, we are pure love, so human beings are naturally loving. So then, we perhaps need to ask, what do we allow to come through us, when how we are behaving is not truly us? And why do we let the anger, the poison, come through us? And why do many of us allow the hateful behaviour to go on?
What I have observed with my mediation work is that, although it may appear as though the separated parents hate each other, I can feel that is not the absolute truth, because underneath this hate are layered the many hurts they have experienced, either in their childhood or in previous relationships; and that they are expressing in that way as a result of one or any combination of all these hurts. Therefore this expression is often what comes out in their behaviour.
In other words, it is not the other parent they are hating; they are hating what has hurt them.
Many seem to lace new relationships with the hurts they have felt in previous relationships, either with their parents, siblings, friends or previous partners. In truth, we are not hateful people. I know as human beings that we are capable of so much more and that, inside our hearts, we are all equal. I also feel that when we show hatred towards another person, that hatred boomerangs back on us.
For example, whenever I experience nastiness from another now, or what can appear to be hatred, I bring understanding to why the person is acting in that way because I know there is always a hurt of some sort underneath the behaviour. This understanding stops me both from judging the person, and from reacting to them. This is the true power of love in relationships – offering others space to feel their hurts without judging their behaviours. Of course I am not yet perfect with this, and sometimes I do find myself reacting with anger, sadness or blame, when the behaviour pushes one of my buttons and brings up a hurt of my own. However, more and more now I am aware of the reaction and knowing that that energy is not who I am, I can stop it quickly from escalating into something that both harms me and the other person. This supports me to see the love that we all innately are first, and not the hate we can project onto the world.
So, whilst it is important to call out this hatred towards others, because otherwise we can be in the illusion of thinking everyone is ‘doing their best’ and that everything is going to be ‘alright’ – The ‘Pollyanna’ syndrome – the truth is, everything will not be alright until we stop our mind, hurts and emotions from running the show, and return to living from our heart. Only then can we let go of hating and hurting people we once loved deeply.
By Anne Scott, LL.B (Hons), Dip. Sport Sc, IYTA Dip., Dip. Chakra-puncture, Mediator, Esoteric Healing practitioner, Exercise instructor, Lifestyle consultant, Auckland, New Zealand
Further Reading:
A true family model for the 21st century
Every Move Matters
Relationships, Me and God
44 Comments
Thank you Anne, as much can open up to us when we start to explore relationships and how they work. As one day what was a truth becomes a lie and it can be highly likely that part of us still loves another while another part is saying no to being in that relationship and the love we still have for them, so it becomes important to explore our relationship with our Soul as apposed to our spirit and this sheds light on this conundrum.
What hurts us most is that we are being manipulated and hurt by a for now unseen energy that plays with us and our emotions as this is what it feeds off. If as a society we could truly come to this understanding we would curtail if not stop this way of living, so that the energy had nothing to feed off. We haven’t yet come to this awareness, but we will.
It is very inspiring to read about bringing this understanding to ourselves and others; that when things are going off course we can stay really steady and bring ever deeper understanding to why we behave in the ways we do. This provides everyone with the space to observe what is going on and to realise that love, respect and care, for example, are a much more natural way for us to express.
This is a very simple way to understand emotions of hate and resentment in relationships. When we deal with our hurts then we don’t have to drag that baggage into every encounter and relationship we have with people. It’s exhausting to drag that baggage around, and just as exhausting to work hard justifying our reactions because we have hurts that we need to protect, so as not to feel them. This blog explains much of human behaviour, and provides a very big key to healing. We really aren’t living as ourselves, but are living from hurts; playing them out over and over again so that they are all that we know.
What I so appreciate about these blogs and the comments that are made is that they support everyone to come to a deeper understanding of what may be occurring in our day to day lives. What struck me Simone about your comment was
‘It’s exhausting to drag that baggage around, and just as exhausting to work hard justifying our reactions because we have hurts that we need to protect, so as not to feel them.’
Because as you say we are living from these hurts and the way we interact with life is very much coloured by them.
There is no situation or relationship where love can’t be brought in and yet we live in a world where almost no situations or relationships contain true love.
Alexis, I feel we are living at a time when there is a movement occurring where people are waking up and starting to question what is going on in our society. Is it possible that we are waking up to the fact that we are controlled and numbed so that we cannot feel the truth of who we are; it lives within us all it cannot be erased and we will all come to this understanding that true love is the very essence of who we are.
Everyone of us have a reference point of what love is and it is from there that we recognise love in others. We reflect to each other what we are in our essence and sometimes this is the initial point of a relationship. When the cohabitation starts, we also reflect each other what we are not. Depending on how strong it is our own connection and relationship with love and how we had dealt with our past hurts, there will be more or less understanding and love available to deal with what may emerge between each other. At the end of it all, it is the love that we individually live, what may embrace us as a couple, come along with us in the passage through what hurts us and support us to come back again to what unites us.
Anne you ask the question
‘And why do many of us allow the hateful behaviour to go on?’
You also provide the answer that we are very sensitive from birth and consequently we absorb the barbs, the put downs of not being good enough, life is saturated with such negative energy that we grow up in that negativity so that by the time we reach adulthood that’s all we know about ourselves and other people.
“it is not the other parent they are hating; they are hating what has hurt them.” This is such a powerful understanding to offer anyone feeling the stress and pain of separation.
We all have a choice in every situation. We can choose to go deeper and appreciate the reflection another is bringing as there is within us an understanding of what is happening if we want to go there. Energetic responsibility – free will, we choose, it is up to us
Thanks Anne, what a great article exploring an important topic, handled without judgement and with understanding. We all carry hurts and can react to people in unexpected ways, one of the things we aren’t supported with in education, and often not in family life, is to handle how we feel and lovingly support ourselves and others, especially in these kinds of relationship difficulties. How different our world would be if we were raised and educated to know we are love first, and how to handle what comes through us that is not love, like reaction, blame, hate, etc, so we can heal and return to our natural loving state. Having harmony and love between people surely must be the most important thing humanity needs to work on.
Absolutely Melinda. We can all feel when there is disharmony. It feels pretty yucky in our bodies.
Melinda I agree this is a great topic of conversation, I feel education has certainly not supported humanity to see that what comes through us at times is not love, we are not taught to question what comes through us, indeed it is encouraged and constantly promoted to get us all to believe that our thoughts are our own and that we own them. I’m discovering more and more that this is a lie which keeps us trapped into believing we think, we think and there is a part of me that knows this is not true at all. We are either tapping into a consciousness that gives us all the reactions, blame, hate, justifications, pictures etc., or we can tap into a consciousness that is loving. Our bodies however are so saturated and corrupted by the negative energy that has us believing that we think that this is what we actually believe, so that if this way of life is ever questioned, we get extremely defensive. But what if we don’t actually think; but what if these thoughts we have are not ours, what then?
Sure teach kids to understand why people behave when they have been hurt by something but I reckon take it a step further and teach kids about alignment. The ABC of alignment which is that there are only two types of energy that we are all aligned to at any one time and if someone is being emotional (screaming/hatred/jealousy/anger/resentment) then at that moment in time they’re aligned to a consciousness that’s not true. Now the name of the game is to stay aligned to a consciousness that is true and so it’s for all of us (kids included) not to get drawn into emotions as a reaction to other people’s emotions because that then switches our alignment to a consciousness that’s not true. Do I expect every kid to be able to stay aligned to a true consciousness? No but how powerful would it be for kids to understand this basic lesson about how life works.
Alexis I’m in total agreement with you to teach not only the children but adults too that there are only two energies to choose from and depending on which one we are aligned to will move us in a way that will show the alignment. I allowed myself to get caught in an energy recently and it felt horrible in my body but I was at a loss how to get rid of it out of my body I was fortunate that a friend saw I was not myself and supported me to release the energy and bring myself back to the alignment of truth. There is no perfection just a constant willingness to align to the consciousness that supports our bodies to truly evolve.
Indeed Alexis. Children would understand this easily -probably more easily than adults would if they have not been brought up with this understanding of life.
When I read the title of this blog it took me back for a minute – as if it’s actually hard to admit that this hatred exists. Yet my experience is just as you say Anne – this conflict is super toxic and it’s side effects are devastating as the recipients reproduce the abuse in their future relationships too.
Yes it can become a generational pattern Joseph, a very harmful one.
Imagine if we were taught this as part of our education
‘I experience nastiness from another now, or what can appear to be hatred, I bring understanding to why the person is acting in that way because I know there is always a hurt of some sort underneath the behaviour. This understanding stops me both from judging the person, and from reacting to them. This is the true power of love in relationships – offering others space to feel their hurts without judging their behaviours.’
This to me is just as important as learning to read and write or understanding a mathematical equation because we are in relationships all the time. For example just going to the grocery store and chatting to the checkout assistant is a relationship
“This to me is just as important as learning to read and write or understanding a mathematical equation because we are in relationships all the time” and Mary it is for exactly that reason “because we are in relationships all the time” that I believe that learning things like this are even more important than learning to read or write or understand a mathematical equation.
Absolutely Mary. Relationships are one of the foundations of life. If our relationships are harmonious it has a positive effect on our work, family and wellbeing.
Anne I could so relate to just the opening paragraph because I was one of those children and the knock on effect of living with interparental hatred has affected my life. I am 64 and there is still stuff coming up from my childhood that seems to float up into my consciousness to be looked at and let go of. The effects are crippling as a we are extremely sensitive and so there is a tendency to shut down and withdraw from life which has a negative impact on everything we do, say and touch.
We are so incredibly sensitive, especially children but because most adults have hardened beyond recognition we lose sight of our sensitivity, basically we stop feeling. And this is part of what enables us to scream at our spouses in front of the kids because we can no longer feel the harm that we’re doing to them, our spouse or ourselves. Emotion although believed to be ‘feeling’ also blocks our ability to truly feel as it’s not a true way of feeling but something that has been manufactured to prevent us from feeling the truth of all things. Emotions are an incredibly crass and bastardised way of feeling.
Yes Alexis, we are all sensitive, so when we feel something, such as anger or sadness, we can often react to that feeling, which brings in emotions. When emotions get in the way we can no longer feel. Hence it is easy to hurt another.
Thank you for sharing your own experience Mary. When parents are in the middle of conflict they so easily seem to lose sight of the effects on their children -and they can be very long term, as you describe.
It is easy to accept that divorce can only be hard, negative and full of emotions but if we are willing to look and feel deeper what it brings up for us there is actually another way.
There are so many experiences in human life that we have collectively decided are almost solely negative. These pre-conceived ideas serve to lock down our ensuing experience as it conditions us and everyone we come into contact with to act in a certain way. We feed the images ourselves by behaving in a certain way and it’s only us that can pull the plug on these ingrained pictures that we all hold by changing the way that we think, speak and act when we come into either direct or indirect contact with them.
Indeed Lieke, there is another way. But we can have these pictures which we identify with, then we seem to be stuck with them.
We also need to look at the fact that lawyers make a lot of money out of divorce cases, I know from my own personal experience I could see that the lawyer I went to see for advise was going to make the situation far worse very protracted and adversarial, so I took the decision not to use them. Divorce can be full of broiling emotions but as you say Lieke if we are willing to look and feel deeper into what is being brought to the surface for us to look at it can be a time of great healing too.
This is great Anne what you are sharing is absolutely powerful, especially for those adults who were brought up in parental conflict and still carrying their hurts. How we mask them in every day life, I like this Pollyanna effect expression, and then triggers bring out causing devastation. Living with understanding about our hurts and having courage to heal them with absolute love..
Thank you Anne, such a powerful reminder of our responsibility in all situations: “However, more and more now I am aware of the reaction and knowing that that energy is not who I am, I can stop it quickly from escalating into something that both harms me and the other person. This supports me to see the love that we all innately are first, and not the hate we can project onto the world.”
How amazing it is when we claim the love in us first and foremost as it enables us recognise that the real enemy here is a foreign energy that has entered the game. This is a truly powerful way of preventing any misunderstanding escalating into a one on one war very quickly and restoring us to our truth, the tender love that resides in us all.
“However, more and more now I am aware of the reaction and knowing that that energy is not who I am, I can stop it quickly from escalating into something that both harms me and the other person”, this weekend I have noticed more than ever before the subtle and not so subtle ways that I react with my family and as a consequence how I block my access to the consciousness of God by allowing the consciousness of ‘not God’ to come through me. Anne your words serve as a great reminder “that that energy is not who I am” because when I’m in the thick of it this is something that I don’t always remember.
Thank you for your honesty Alexis because I have found it is by being honest with ourselves that we can make the changes so that when the trigger point is released we can feel it in our bodies and bring ourselves back lovingly knowing it is not us but an energy we are choosing due to something we have reacted to. The more we bring awareness to these trigger points the less we react. The less we react the more harmony can be restored.
When emotional love between two people fades and is lost in the everyday living it can be that blame, resentment and buried hurts raise their head. Reconnecting to the true love of the inner-heart, which never fades, offers the opportunity to heal our hurts and feel the true love in us all.
Living life with unresolved hurts turns us into veritable time bombs, ever ready to explode, implode and cause untold harm, to ourselves, others and, as this article shows, to our children. Rarely ever is it the other person right in front of us who has ’caused’ us to react; it is that something they said, did or didn’t do became a trigger and the old stuff comes tumbling out or, more likely, is hurled at another/others.
So true, Anne. We all see this all the time. Like you, imperfectly, whenever I can, I’ll pull people up and say it’s not OK – because wherever there was love, there always will be love even if the outward form of the relationship has changed. Remember that love, connect to it, heal your hurts instead of lashing out at others. The children I’ve seen caught in this storm of hurt expressions do indeed get hurt, and the cycle keeps propagating. But as you say, it’s well within our power to stop it.
We say that human-beings are the most intelligent species on this planet but this cannot be true because if we are so intelligent then why do we abuse ourselves and other people in such harmful ways. As you say Dianne the cycles keep propagating – to me we seem powerless to stop it. So I have to ask the question why is this. Why do we consistently choose to harm ourselves and others?
Human beings don’t have an intelligence that is theirs, we have an intelligence that comes through us and the way that we move determines which one of only two intelligences will come through us and move us again. The only way to change the intelligence that comes through us is to change the way that we move. We are fleshy portals, we are not the originators of anything, no-thing, not one single thought, word or action is ‘ours’. Sobering isn’t it?
Most of the time when we say that there is love or that there has been love we are referring to a very loveless type of love. True love when it’s felt isn’t directional and so can’t be confined to a relationship with one other person. If we think that we used to love someone and then say that we no longer do then it was never love in the true sense of the word to begin with. Love isn’t something that we can fall in and out of, it’s a radiance than comes through us and expands through the bodies of all those around us and even through the bodies of those who aren’t even in close proximity to us. Love is a vibration, you can’t direct it like a torch beam.
Anne, what a beauty of truth you’ve presented here. The very unnecessary hatred does need to be called out. Hating what has hurt us rather than the person reflecting it back to you, feels to be a key to bringing that understanding. The projecting of hurts onto another leads to much unnecessary angst, anxiety and fear that can be long lasting and as you say, may taint future relationships. This has been my experience and the knowing of how it harms children caught in the crossfire of warring parents adds to the devastation if it isn’t called out for what it is.
It’s interesting because hate stands out to most of us as being something abhorrent and those kids that live in abusive households may well dream of living in a family where there is no screaming and the family go off for holidays twice a year and have what basically looks and feels like a happy family but there can be hidden evil in this, an evil that is undetectable because this scenario is what most of us look to achieve. But and it is a massive ‘but’, the only thing that’s gonna get us out of the absolute mess that we’re in is to switch our alignment from a consciousness that’s not true to a consciousness that is because with that comes the clarity and the light that’s needed for true change. ‘Happy families’ comes from a consciousness that’s not true and so fuels the families that are openly abusive, same energy, very different pictures.
A great article Anne. so refreshing to look deeper at the truth of things rather than just reacting to what is superficially presented.
Our entire world is superficial, even the things that we think are ‘deep’ aren’t deep at all they’re just manifestations of a consciousness that is forever trying to prevent us from going deeper into the belly of Life. But there are hundreds of us that are now going deeper despite the obstacles that have been purposefully placed in our way and we’re here to reflect to the rest of humanity that life as most of us know it is a set up, a total and utter set up. And this is something that we will all eventually come to know and we come to know it by gradually changing our movements so that by default we switch the consciousness that we’re aligned to, so that eventually all is revealed.