I don’t really hate you, honest; I’m just afraid you may hurt me

It happens more often than I like to admit. There’s an angry inner voice that seems to have a mind of its own.

“I hate everybody!” the voice hisses angrily in my head.

For years, I’ve joked that there’s a wide-ranging conspiracy to make me a misanthrope — and I fear it’s working. The joke has been my attempt to reconcile two things which can’t be reconciled:

— I choose to love others, for their benefit and my own.

— I hate so many of the people around me every day.

Those two things can’t be reconciled, so I make jokes about it. The more contact I have with humans, the more I feel like a misanthrope — and I hate feeling that way. It makes me feel so wrong inside, but something in me wants to lash out — needs to lash out — as though I’m defending myself.

And I think I finally understand why.

My unconscious reactions of anger toward others are really about fear and hurt. I don’t like admitting that — to myself or to you. But it’s true. Without any conscious intent, I react as though I’m defending myself from being hurt again.

When that child-like voice in my head screams, “I hate everybody!” something old has been triggered. It isn’t always a specific memory. It’s more like an emotional echo — a buried link between a present moment and past pain. My body reacts before my mind understands what’s happening.

In those moments, I feel boxed in. Attacked. Certain I’m right to be angry, even if I couldn’t explain why in rational terms. The intensity makes it feel obvious that the other person is at fault.

But often the rage isn’t really about that person at all. It’s about what the moment represents. It’s about a frightened child who learned that criticism meant danger.

I spent much of my childhood feeling hurt and scared, though I didn’t know it at the time. If I expressed even the slightest disagreement with my father, I could be beaten or screamed at. Sometimes he would stop speaking to me for weeks. A child doesn’t interpret that as abuse. A child concludes that he must be bad — and that he must try harder to earn love.

As an adult, that old programming followed me. Every boss became a potential threat. Even mild criticism could trigger the panicked feeling that I wasn’t good enough. And because I was no longer a powerless child, the fear often turned into anger instead.

For years, I didn’t understand what was happening. I knew only that I could suddenly feel paralyzed with rage. It took a long time to see that my body was reacting to old trauma in present-day situations that weren’t truly dangerous.

Our reasons for feeling anger and hatred toward other people are trivial in the objective sense, but all of us know what it feels like to be triggered by such things.

For many years, I explained my anger and occasional feelings of hatred as evidence of how terrible the people around me were. Part of me still wants to believe that. But in my heart, I finally know that when I feel angry with you, it’s because I’m terrified you’re going to hurt me or humiliate me or shame me — in some way that brings up what happened to me as a little boy.

The same principles apply in larger group dynamics, too. You can develop feelings about other groups which push buttons in you — in places where you didn’t even know you had buttons. You have no real reason to be angry at political opponents or work rivals or anybody else. But because we fear loss or hurt, we react in rage and hatred.

Admitting the fear — to ourselves and to each other — can go a long way toward allowing us to defuse the anger into which we turn the fear. If you’re able to say, “I’m angry at you and I think it’s because I’m afraid you’re going to hurt me,” we can lay the foundation for conversations of empathy and understanding.

But it can be terrifying to tell someone that you’re afraid he or she is going to hurt you. That is admitting weakness and vulnerability, which is why our unconscious minds find it easier and less threatening to feel anger and hatred instead. And when we lash out in fear, we then have to justify to ourselves what we feel — and it can become impossible to back down after that.

I am most afraid of two types of people.

I am afraid of anyone with power over me. Even the slightest exercise of that power means I fear that I’m going to be under someone’s thumb in the same way that I was controlled and manipulated by my father. I feel rage at that — and I want to fight back and then run away.

I am afraid of any woman who I love, when I feel insecure in her love. I am terrified that she is going to abandon me and leave me without the thing I need most. I feel tremendous anxiety and hurt about that — and I fear I will never be loved as I need to be.

The first of these groups is best symbolized by my father. He hurt me in all those ways (and more). The second is symbolized by my mother. I grew up without her — and hurting deeply as I needed her love — which left me feeling on an unconscious level that I must not be good enough for her to love.

This is a fairly straightforward cognitive explanation for the anger and hatred I can sometimes feel for people, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to instantly be able to turn the mechanisms off when I’m triggered. I can try — and I will try — but it’s going to be a long process to try to change these triggers.

I don’t want to feel angry at other people. It’s absolutely useless and it does harm to me on the inside. And I really don’t want to feel hatred for others. I want to love others. I believe that we’re all better off if I can love you, even if you still feel anger or hate for me.

The Peanuts character Linus famously said, “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.” I would like to suggest that a more accurate reading of his heart might be, “I love humanity, but I am afraid of the real, flesh-and-blood people who keep hurting me.”

In order to love other people — and in order to get love in return — we have to be vulnerable. It is impossible to really love someone without giving that person the power to hurt you. And if that person hurts you enough that you close yourself off emotionally, you soon realize you don’t love the person anymore.

There is no love without risk. To care about another person is to give that person the power to hurt you — and to trust that he or she won’t. I can live in a guarded and closed off way — and slowly become a man who really does hate people. Or I can step forward and risk being hurt again.

I choose vulnerability, even though it feels like walking a tightrope without a net.