On Hate and Hurting – Ep. 174

In this episode, Dr. Jade talks about the concept of using the things that once hurt us – and the hate derived from them – to be better people. It’s important to remember that we all have a choice: we can be destroyed and worn out by those hurtful experiences or we can use them as fuel to become heroes. This concept also creates a connection between staying in the “base level” stage and achieving the “next level” stage.

In addition, Dr. Jade explains that we can all use hurt in life the same way as we use compliments: being aware of it and recognizing it in ourselves. Another significant course of action is learning from the pain, creating something good from it, and helping other individuals who are going through the same thing. This is the only way to deal with hurt/hate: quitting the victim mentality and taking sole responsibility for our wounds.

Connect with Dr. Jade Teta

Website: www.jadeteta.com

Instagram: @jadeteta

Transcription:

Podcast Intro: [00:14] welcome to the Next Level Human Podcast. As a human, you have a job to do. In fact, you have four jobs; to earn and manage money, to attain and maintain health and fitness, to build and sustain personal relationships, to find meaning and make a difference. None of these jobs are taught in school and that is what this podcast is designed to do. To educate us all on living our most fulfilled lives through the mastery of these four jobs. I'm your host, Dr. Jade Teta and I believe we are here living this life for three reasons and three reasons only; to learn, to teach and to love. In this podcast, I will be learning, teaching, and loving right along with you. I'm grateful to have your company; here is to our next level.

Episode Intro: [01:18] alright, everybody, welcome to today's show. Today, we're going to cover a self development topic, a personal development topic, one that is really tough for many of us, and one that is really important for our emotional freedom. And this is going to be on the concept of hurt, and haters. Now, the issue with us humans is that we make many assumptions. And we live out of stories. And you may have heard me talk about this before. But we need to cover this in detail. As we get into this discussion about how to handle hate, and hurting. We live from stories, I call these seed stories, because they are the growth potential of all of our ideas. In fact, the seeds stories are unconscious, for the most part, and they influence the filters by which we see the world. And so when we are interacting with the world, one of the things that we have to be aware of is that we are living narratives that we perhaps are not aware of, or have thought about, for example, we humans go through different stages of development. And so as children, I oftentimes talk about this in terms of the base level behavior, we are relatively base level base level in the sense that we believe necessarily that we are the center of the universe. Of course, it works that way and should work that way because we're not yet aware of other people. In fact, when we look at development of humans, they really look at the idea of consciousness is not really the way it isn't an adult, we don't get conscious in the way we think about consciousness in till about the ages of one to two years old, of course, then it takes about six years old, to become consciously aware of others. And then of course, it takes into our early 20s, for our brain to be fully matured. And so when we are children, we certainly see ourselves as the center of the universe as the only people who matters get my needs met. That's all we care about. Now, of course, if we have siblings, and we interact with other people, it may hurry the trajectory along in terms of how we see other people interacting. Now when we do this, and when we're becoming conscious, there are certain stories that we will internalize, if we are teased, if we are abused if we are punished if we have scary things or traumas happen to us, these things can become imprinted on our psyche and become stories that we then will live from throughout the rest of our lives. Likewise, we are domesticated in a sense by our family, and the society in which we are raised in to believe certain things if we're raised in a more agnostic, liberal progressive family, we are much more likely to be agnostic and liberal and progressive in our ways of viewing the world. If we are raised in a Christian, more conservative family, we are more likely to continue living those stories. We are domesticated in a sense. And this happens from a very early age. And we begin living these seeds, stories, these things that influence us unconsciously, and determine how we see the world and how the world shows up for us as humans. Now as we continue our development, we get into more of the adolescent state, which I oftentimes correlate with the culture level mindset, we become aware that other people matter and our needs go from stability and certainty and safety, which is the base level needs more to popularity and status seeking, which are sort of the Adolescent Needs. And we pick up more views about ourselves and more seed stories at this time, first loves for sexual encounters, whether we are smart or dumb, whether we're a good athlete, or not, all of these beliefs around what we're good at what we're not good at what we're accepted for, what we're not accepted for, whether we are worthy, or not, et cetera, a lot of these seeds stories continue to be implanted. And by the way, they're most impacted by difficulties and traumas and pains and things like that, that we suffer from. And of course, as we age and become more mature, we wish and hope that we get more into the next level human state. But the fact is that most people stay in their base level or culture level states their entire lives. And that's partly what we're going to talk about here as it pertains to getting hated on and dealing with, hurt.

[06:42] And so what happens is, if you understand this aspect of children, and adolescents coming up, and having these stories that they live from, that are more domesticated beliefs handed down by our friends and our families, and the need to be accepted, and some of the things that we will do, or think we have to do to become accepted, or these traumas and pain points in our lives, that are difficult. Suffering oftentimes is a source of these seed stories. And then of course, we live forward with these stories. And the reason why I bring this up first is because when we talk about getting hated on, and we talk about hurting, oftentimes, what we really need to be working on is our own seed stories. We all know what it's like to be offended, or triggered, or to have a particular view on what happened only to discover later, that that was not how it went down, that we filtered it that way. A popular saying, and I'm going to paraphrase here is this idea that if you see life as a war, you will find battles everywhere in life, whether they exist or not. And this is essentially telling us that a lot of the pain and hurt and hate that we feel, really comes down to the way we filter what happens to us, I can give you an example from my own life. And when we talk about suffering and hurt, we had to be careful not to compare suffering. I didn't grow up in a war torn country, or with food not available and starving. And those kinds of big traumas that we think about I was not physically abused, I was not sexually abused. So I didn't I don't have any personal experience with those kinds of traumas. And so I do have my own traumas, though. I have a trauma of being left at a baseball field once when I was little, because my parents forgot about me. And that had a traumatic imprint on my brain; I had a trauma around being teased by my brothers. And that had an impact on my brain. I've had traumas around. Other things that have happened being redirected being betrayed, you know, having things taken from me being talked bad about by my, you know, friends or family, same, perhaps as you know what you want to be looking at is you want to be looking at all of these stories, what we tend to want to do, especially in the Western world, where we live these very comfortable lives, is we want to go well, I've got nothing to complain about because I wasn't, you know, I didn't, you know, have any of these capital T traumas that other people have. But what you don't understand is that whatever traumas you do have as a child, you don't know the difference. You just know that this is traumatic or difficult or painful for you, and then we will react in certain ways now oftentimes use the emotional wound and the way we handle emotional wounds and contrast that with physical wounds and the way we handle physical wounds. And I want to go through this exercise with you really quickly, because it will be very important to this discussion in today's podcast. If you and I were in the kitchen cooking, and we were chopping up vegetables and cutting things up, and your knife slipped and cut your finger, you would deal with that in the same way, many of us deal with that you would first cover the finger, you would then tentatively look at it to see how deep the cut was, you would then wash it, bandage it, perhaps go and get stitches, you would tend to this wound, and you would do it pretty instinctively and pretty quickly. And then what you would probably do the next time we were in the kitchen cutting vegetables together or the next time you pulled out a knife in the kitchen, you would remember that painful moment, you would remember that wound, it's a good thing that our brain does this doesn't it because then you would be more careful. You also may go online and look at cooking shows and look at how to cut vegetables better and learn the proper cutting form. Or maybe you get some kind of glove protection, you know one of those, you know, wire net gloves that keep you from cutting yourself but you would do something to keep that pain from happening again. And all of this would be logical and wise for you to do and that's the way we naturally handle physical pain.

[11:38] However, when we're under emotional pain, we often handle things completely different. We cut ourselves. And then what we do is we shove the thumb or the finger in someone else's face. And we start screaming out help me as if the other person is responsible for helping us we oftentimes put our pain on display this way, wear it as a badge of honor and use it as a way to blame, complain, whimper and whine and wallow, especially as it pertains to other people, it's a great way for us to blame and complain and point the finger at other people by shoving our wounds in their face. That's one way that we deal with emotional wounds. Another way we might deal with emotional wounds is sort of this learned helplessness where we just sit there and stare at our finger, let it bleed all over us. And just sit there in whimper woe is me, I'm bleeding and not doing anything about it. Another way we oftentimes deal with this is to just stick the finger behind our back, ignore it act like it didn't happen or distract ourselves and pretend nothing is wrong. You know, another way we oftentimes handle this, while we're doing any of these other three things is we will curse ourselves blame ourselves and beat ourselves up and say how can I be so stupid for cutting myself? Every single one of these approaches to emotional pain is not healthy. And just like with physical pain, a betrayed heart, a bleeding heart, a bleeding slash emotional thumb, emotional finger is not going to heal itself in the same way an actual physical wound is not going to heal itself and is on us to heal that. Now this is the first lesson and perhaps the first triggering moment of this podcast. It is not for someone else to heal our pains to this is a universal truth. And the reason it's so powerful as a universal truth is because one of our seed stories as humans is that other people are supposed to take responsibility for their actions that life needs to be fair that I deserve to be treated with respect as a human. And of course, none of these are guaranteed, therefore, they are not actually adequate and accurate stories for us to live from. Even if we're in the kitchen and I'm the one who reaches over and cuts your thumb, you are still the one that's going to have to deal with that injury. Why? Because I may just deny it, I may disappear. Or I might blame you or I may just disregard the whole thing. Maybe I even did it on purpose to hurt you. And I'm just going to run away and leave you there. Now if you chase me around, asking me for an apology forcing me to fix it. Meanwhile, you're bleeding all over the place doing double damage to yourself. And this is the first rule of thumb as we begin to deal with how we escape hate and hurt from other people. The first rule role is to break through some of the seed stories regarding I deserve regarding life should be fair. And regarding this idea of you need to treat me with respect, and I deserve that respect, we have got to take care of our own wounds, that is our job, regardless of whose fault it is, if there is something in your sphere of awareness that you want changed, you are responsible for dealing with that, regardless of whose fault it is, in fact, fault has nothing to do with it. This is on you. And this brings us to perhaps the most important aspect of how to deal with hate and hurt. And to get into this discussion, we'll talk a little bit about some of the next level concepts that I addressed with you all, often, you probably heard me say this before, if you are a listener to this podcast, you are unique, there is no one like you on the face of this earth nor has there ever been anyone like you in the whole entire history of humanity. Furthermore, there will never be another human like you again.

[16:32] Now, if you understand that it's kind of awe inspiring, in a sense, isn't it because what it means is, regardless of your life circumstances, regardless of what you think about yourself, you are a unique purpose potential a unique spiritual fingerprint, there is something that you are uniquely suited to do, in fact, lots of somethings that you could choose to do, that only you can do in the way only you can do it. So this is a very powerful realization. Now what makes you unique? Well, lots of things. There's your personality, which constitutes your perspective, your unique psychological tendencies, the way you see the world that is different from everyone else. There are your passions, your interests, your likes, the things that draw your attention, there are your people, the people you currently engage in, and the history of people, people who have influenced you, people who have hurt you, and helped you, there are your powers, your superpowers, right your talents, the things you're really good at the things that you excel at that maybe very few other people do. And then most importantly, in my way of looking at it, there is your pain, and there's the hate that you've been exposed to, and the hurt that you have endured. Now what we normally do as humans is we'll own our personality, and we'll own our passions, and we'll own our superpowers, and we'll own our people. But we oftentimes try to disown or disregard our pain, we either ignore it or blame it on someone else, or wallow in it. And this is the victim mindset. And a victim mindset is a mindset that tries to outsource the tending of their wounds to other people. Now, don't get me wrong here because this is where another place where a lot of people get triggered, every single one of us should have compassion and empathy for anyone who has been harmed. And we oftentimes do, don't we, however, we also have to acknowledge the fact that a victim who stays in victim mode the rest of their life after the initial hate or hurt or wound is now making the wound bleed more and making the Scar Deeper. In other words, a victim takes what happened to them and prolongs the suffering simply by the act of needing to outsource the tending of this wound. And the fact of the matter is, while we can be compassionate and empathetic to anybody who has been victimized in any way, and we know this world can be cruel and indifferent. While we can have compassion and empathy, we also have to admit to ourselves that this at some point becomes a choice to wallow in it to blame and complain which only serves to degrade us, or it becomes an opportunity to become a hero. And I talked before in past episodes, there's a whole episode on being a hero, and I contrast that with being a victim and so this podcast is going to dovetail into that a little bit as well. And so now we have this unique spiritual fingerprint, this purpose potential that we all are. And then we have this very interesting conundrum that we focus on very human, I do it, you do it, we all do it, which is this need for people to own what they've done to us to apologize for what they've done to us. But the fact of the matter is, apologies often never come. And by waiting for them, we are doing two things, we are not tending to our wounds, and therefore making it worse and making the scar much deeper. And we are not realizing the lessons and the power in being hated on and hurt by other people. The fact of the matter is, if we can begin to look at hate, and hurt as our unique spiritual canvas, as the way that our art as a human, the art we bring to the world manifests itself. If we look at we have this canvas, or this block of clay, and we have these raw materials, and we get to do with them the thing that only we can, then why would we want to throw out our artists tools when the pain and the hurt and the hate that we get is valuable feedback. And it's what makes us who we are. It's part of our uniqueness. It's part of our power. And so our job is to take hate, and hurt and turn it to our advantage. And so we're going to talk a little bit about how we do that. But the first piece of doing this is to realize that the stories, the seed stories we live from, especially this idea that life is supposed to be fair, that I'm supposed to be treated with respect that I deserve to live a life free of harassment and suffering is simply not true. And as upsetting as that is, we know it to be true. I regard it as a universal truth. In fact, the Buddhists call this duhkha life is duhkha. They say duhkha translates into suffering or unsatisfactory. In other words, many religions, many philosophies have said for, you know, since the dawn of man, that life is not going to be easy. And our job here is to take those lemons and turn them into lemonade to use a modern cliché, that's our entire job and in fact, perhaps the entire point of pain in the first place.

[22:58] So what we must then do is become aware of the stories aware of the idea that when we blame and complain when we insist on apologies, when we have the need for acknowledgement and reciprocation and reward. And for someone to say, Yeah, you were harmed, and for people to bow at the altar of our wounds, it's normal again, I do it, you do it, we all do it, but it does not help us live our best lives. And so we have to dismantle these ways of being we have to dismantle this victim mentality. And the way that we do that is we take the pain and the hurt and the hate. And we use it the same way that we use compliments. And people telling us that was great. Think about it. If someone gives you a compliment, what do you normally do? Of course, it makes you feel good. But you also check in with yourself, don't you? Right? If someone tells you something that you don't, and it's a compliment, but you don't feel that way, or you think they're just blowing smoke, you check in and you see it's called self verification theory, when people say something about us. What we do is we say am I that way? And we ask ourselves that question internally, like in a split second. And if we don't see it as accurate, it oftentimes has one of two reactions. If we're mature, we kind of just go we dismiss it. It's not feedback we can use. But if it's feedback, we can use we often go, I can use that I will get better. And that is sort of the hero's mentality. The hero's mentality goes, that's not true feedback for me, I will discard that. Or that is good feedback from me and I will do more of that if it's a compliment. Now that victim mentality does what searches for more compliments it. And if it's a criticism, the victim mentality gets mad and sees it as an affront and holds on to it and uses it as a another form of evidence that they are a victim. And they amplify the criticism. So what I'm saying here is the first step, or one of the first steps to dealing with hate and hurt is to look at them the same way you deal with compliments, and things that people say nice about you, which is to check in and go, Okay, here's some feedback for me. Is it accurate? Or not? Do I want to use it or not? Can I use it? Is this something that can be useful for how I show up in the world in a positive way? Or is it not?

[25:56] Now, here's the thing to understand about hate and hurt. Here's how to know if it's accurate or not. We humans are constantly growing and constantly interacting with people and constantly being out in the world. And the world is constantly providing feedback for us and so whenever you see recurrent themes, recurrent obstacles, repeated patterns, pains that recur again and again, emotional, repeating patterns, the same emotions, the stuck emotions that happen again and again and again, when we see repeat repeated patterns, stuck emotions and recurrent obstacles. This is a sign that whatever feedback we are getting, it is indeed about us that hate and that hurt that we are getting. In the same way cutting our finger should prompt us to heal our own wounds, take responsibility for our actions and learn to cut the vegetables better, and be more skilled with our knives in the same way hate and hurt emotionally should trigger the same response in us. Is this accurate for me? Have I been told this before? Have I seen this pattern before? Have I felt this emotion before? Is this obstacle something that looks familiar? And I've dealt with before? If the answer to all those things are yes, then that hate and that hurt is a gift for you? Now it doesn't mean you are a bad person. What it means is life is giving you a gift. Now this is a hard turnaround, isn't it? The idea that someone's saying something nasty to me, or hurting me or portraying me or any number of some of the big wounds in our lives, losing a loved one to death having an illness being abused in some way? What a big turnaround right to essentially say is this something that I can use. Now notice that I'm not saying anything about deserve? We've already talked about the idea that this idea of deserving something is wrong, you don't deserve good things to happen to you. Nor do you deserve bad things to happen to you life happens, your only choice is to use the tools and the artistic paint brushes that you've been given. And certainly that means the pain and the hurt as well. So here's one of my favorite stories I say a lot but drives this home when I was young and a teenage boy actually younger than that, because I'm a child of the of the 80s. So this would have been, you know, I was in high entered high school in the late 80s graduated in 1992. But so in my childhood, my childhood was all about you know, sitting at the dinner room table dining room table for kids, pouring myself a bowl of cereal, and sitting there looking at the milk carton and in the 80s the milk cartons had these little missing children icons on them there would be this little picture printout of a child who was missing. And I used to sit there and look at those things and later on in my life in my 20s and 30s as I was building a business and struggling to get noticed and all of this kind of stuff. I oftentimes thought back to this because I was like how in the world that did that come about? How difficult would that have been in the day and age of you know no internet for someone to make this happen? How did it happen did the milk companies do that did government's mandate that what happened? So I look in I looked into this and the story goes somewhat like this. A family one day kiss their child goodbye watched him get on the bus to go off to school he went to school and on the way back, the bus dropped him off after school and he made the short walk back to his house, except he never made it back to his house. He was kidnapped, he was raped, he was murdered. Now this is the most tragic as I say it right now. And maybe as you hear me say, you feel this visceral sadness come over you this heaviness. It's one of the worst things that we can imagine and imagine those parents, imagine that hurt and that hate evil on a level that most of us cannot fathom. Now, no one would blame them and this is the thing with being the victim mentality. Victims are real things.

[30:41] No one blames a victim for being a victim. No one would even blame a victim for continuing to choose to be a victim, we all feel sorry for people who have been hurt, we all feel sorry for people who continue to feel that hurt. However, we also know internally and intuitively, that there is a choice somewhere there whether people want to admit it or not to either become the hero out of that hate in that hurt, or to continue being the victim. And in my mind, there's no right or wrong here. So I'm not saying that someone who is a victim is somehow a bad person, or somehow less than I'm simply saying; we have a choice. When we deal with hate and hurt and suffering and the madness that life gives to us, we can either be degraded by it and destroyed by it and again, no blame, no shame. This is the most difficult stuff that we humans deal with. But we also can make a choice, we do have that potential to choose to be a hero, because just as many people who have continued being degraded and evolved from trauma, there are just as many people who have risen and become heroes out of trauma, this choice always exists. And so this family who lost their son turned this trauma into the hero state. And what they did is they decided to help other families who had lost kids get those kids home again. And so they went to the milk lobby, and they went to the state legislators, and they went to Congress, and they did everything they could to get these missing children, the police stations, every all of this public health, they basically did this huge campaign and got everyone involved and think about this, just as an aside, what this would take in that day and age in the 80s without the internet, right? Monumental effort and as a result of that effort, they save 1000s of lives, they took the worst evil, and blinded it with the most beautiful light. And it reminds me of a saying I oftentimes bring up as well, and that is this sang by Bonheoffer, who is the priest who stood up against Hitler in the early days of World War Two and was killed for that. But one of the things he said was the point of evil is not to hurt you. The point of evil is to make you do more evil. And so there's two ways to do evil. And we oftentimes do this with hate and hurt. One way to do evil is to continue to perpetuate that evil on yourself, to take away your purpose potential to take away your light to degrade yourself to not live the purpose you were meant to live here on the planet. Many people do that. Many people do the other thing, which passes the pain on, they're abused. So they abuse, their hurt. So they go in hurt, they've suffered, so they make other people suffer. That's what evil does. Evil degrades you and causes you to pass your pain on becoming the hero evolves you it basically says I will use this to learn the lessons that I need to learn, I will realize that whoever's fault it is, it's mine to make good from it. I will learn the lessons. I will then find that same pain in others and solve their pain. In other words, I will learn the lessons I will then teach those lessons and I will create something in the world that only I can as a result of all my special attributes, including my pain, I will own it, I will do something with it, and I will refuse to pass it on or let it destroy me. I will instead turn it to good. And this to me is the only way that we deal with hate and her so this goes to the most trivial matters. Your Online you're dealing with a troll who's telling you you're useless or stupid or whatever it is and your finger. You know feeling all this triggering going on and you stop and you simply say this is no different than getting a compliment. Is this true for me? Yes or no. Now, if it is true for you beautiful, then you've just discovered one place to learn and get better. And if it is not beautiful, because you get to just discard it and realize it's not about you at all it is about them. And it often is about them. We have cliché sayings for this, I oftentimes don't like cliché sayings, but one that I do love is that hurt people hurt people. Of course, they're not conscious of hurting them. And oftentimes, they're not even conscious that they're hurt, because long ago, they stuck their thumb behind their back and refuse to deal with it. And now it's coming out, and it's being projected on to you, your only job, our only job, my only job is to use it to grow and get better. We talk about the three imperatives, the only three reasons we are here on the planet to learn to teach and to love. This is what pain does, it's perhaps our best teacher. Now, who would we be without some of the pain that we've endured? That is a really big question. And so in that way of looking at it, you can become almost grateful for the worst things that have happened. And this is where and what I believe we are doing on the planet. This is where our power our true power comes from. We are meant to be heroes, we each live a hero's journey and hate and hurt, oftentimes are the lightning strike moments that set us on that path. And we either own it, or we don't own it. So if you're someone right now listening to this podcast, and you're waiting for the apology, and you're waiting for someone to say that they're sorry, or you're waiting for acknowledgement, and someone to say yes, you're right, you've been hurt, and no one's doing it, or you're waiting for it to be fixed, it's not going to be fixed.

[36:59] In the same way if you cut your finger, it's on you, you and you alone are responsible for healing your wounds. And the longer you wait for someone else to do it, the more you suffer, and the further and further away your next level hero self becomes. Now the final thing I'll say about this is that imagine taking all of that pain that has been put upon you, regardless of whose fault it is. Imagine allowing yourself to be a victim for the final time and say yes, I was hurt. Yes, I was victimized. Yes, I want an apology. You know, yes, I believe I deserve an apology. But it's not going to come and it's on me and I have a choice to make. And I will turn this to good. And I will go out there and do something with this pain. I will help my friends, I will, you know, be out there and be the warrior for others who are suffering a similar type of pain? Isn't this something that you could do if you chose to do it? And wouldn't it if you did that in five years, 10 years from now, when you look back? Wouldn't you be proud of yourself or have doing four have been the one to take one on the chin for humanity. Nowadays, we live in what I see as this polarized world. And on both sides, we have this extreme individualism on one side, you know, I guess we could call them the conservatives, they simply fold their arms and go, you need to take responsibility for yourself, I've done my part. And it's up to you. And there seems to be no compassion there. And that's a form of extreme individualism. And on the other side, it's like I've been hurt everyone in the world needs to bow to my wounds and, you know, coddle me and make sure I feel safe. And that's the other side. Now I can relate to both of these sides. It's not a judgment; I have both of these in me as well. The problem is this kind of extreme individualism is not what the world needs, what the world needs is heroes, the world needs people to put their chin out and take one for the team to take the punches to step back up and be like, I am here to learn and to teach and to love, not to hate and to her not to look out just for myself, which is the base level way of doing things, not to take care of only my team, which is the culture level way of doing things, but to take care of myself and you and everyone else simultaneously. And the way I start to do that is to own my pain, to use hate and hurt to grow and get better and then to go out in the world and heal the same pain that I myself self insensitive to. This, to me is the way we do this. This is the next level human way. This is how we handle hate and hurt. It's the only way it's feedback for us and it is the most difficult thing that we do as humans, but life is not going to wait for you. You either make the choice to grow from it, heal from it and heal others with it. Or you will be degraded and evolve and be an angry, shell, depressed, anxious version of yourself. This is how you begin to deal with this. And it is not easy, but it is absolutely possible. And you could be the one that makes all of the difference for others. You certainly are the only one who can do it for yourself. Thanks so much for hanging out on the podcast today everybody. I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you at the next episode.