Hatred and anger toward someone who worked double time and a half to make your life miserable are perfectly justifiable. Face your feelings but at the same time, don’t get mired in the quicksand.
Just about anyone who is going through a divorce or has been through a tumultuous relationship faces down “Hate,” a combination of disgust, anger, and regret that you ever got involved in the mess. The prescribed goal when divorcing is to get past the hatred to a more peaceful acceptance where you’re appreciating he’s the father of your children and it’s important to build a civil co-parenting relationship.
And complaints about unresolved issues with your ex are met with platitudes from friends like “There’s a fine line between love and hate,” as if passion is a one-size fits all emotion.
Is it ever OK to hate your Ex?
Little girls are often raised to plaster a smile on our faces. Nobody likes a girl who isn’t happy and it’s not nice to hate anyone. Kill them with kindness. We bury any emotions we consider to be “ugly” until those emotions erupt to the surface.
Sigmund Freud explained, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” Emotions like anger, disappointment, and, yes, hatred, cannot be swept under the rug or placed in that storage box with your wedding dress. At some point, you’ve got to deal with the negative emotions you have for your ex it.
We accept anger and hatred under certain conditions, perhaps the most significant being infidelity. Gather a cabal of wives discussing some women in the tribe whose husband was caught “cheating” and the ire is palpable in a “Throw all his belongings out the window, change the locks, and take every penny” sort of way.
Adultery aside, though, we expect women (and men) to “let it go.”
When we’ve given unresolved feelings a guest home in our emotional core, those feelings don’t just go away. They fester inside us and mushroom, kind of like when you’re overwhelmed because you haven’t cleaned out your closet since the 1990s.
If you’re co-parenting with an Ex, the conflicts of your marriage continue to boil over, only now there are all these unresolved issues beneath the surface, things like competition, anger, blame.
None of us wants to be a bitter, angry person who holds onto every conflict from marriage or childhood. But, it’s unrealistic to believe we can brush it all aside with that plastered smile we are taught to wear as young girls.
It’s okay to be pissed off. And it’s okay to hate someone for how he treated you and in some cases, continues to treat you. It’s hard work to move past our autopilot response to old stuff but making changes in how we respond does not mean we can’t still feel.
Feelings aren’t so much the problem as what we do with the feelings. It’s really uncomfortable to sit with anger, disappointment, and hatred. It’s a whole lot easier to bury those feelings with a few glasses of wine, a Xanax, a pint of ice cream, or an hour on the treadmill.
Anger and hatred can be powerful motivators if channeled towards growth. Maybe there’s some truth to “living well is the best revenge.” Take what you’ve learned from the relationship and forge ahead. Practice setting boundaries and expressing emotions without being paralyzed by fear.
There is a balance, though. Working toward growth and change does not mean you should feel guilty for your emotions. It’s okay, scratch that, healthy, to be pissed off, to cry, to be sad, to be disappointed. Moving on doesn’t mean you’re going to magically stop having negative feelings because sometimes our experiences or circumstances kind of suck!
Hatred and anger toward someone who worked double time and a half to make your life miserable are perfectly justifiable. Face your feelings but at the same time, don’t get mired in the quicksand.
Is it ever OK to hate your Ex? Abso-f’ing-lutely!!
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