Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Hatred as a Conflict between Dependency and the Pseudo-Autonomous Self

How do we come to know and make sense of the unexpressed and expressed hatred we experience in our daily lives? Using vignettes and my reflections, this article will describe how hatred, masked by anxiety, is related to unmet dependency needs that may not be in our awareness at the time. In the examples, you will meet people who became the objects of my hatred and in other instances, I became the object of an other’s hatred. In each event, I or an other, became unfortunate containers of anxiety, embarrassment of lacking knowledge, shame for an inherited history or transgenerational hauntings, and repressed rage that belonged elsewhere and to others. I suggest that we get in trouble and transmit hatred because we have unrealistic expectations of others to meet earlier dependency needs that our caregivers or parents failed to fulfill. The felt experience of failing to get what we wished to receive relationally, may aid in the development of a pseudo-autonomous or self-sufficient self to ward against the feelings associated with the deficits of significant others who, because of their own psychology, generational and environmental traumas, and socio-cultural contexts, were unable to provide the support, coaching, knowledge, or love we so strongly desired.