Psychology of love and hate

Image By Lora-Vysotskaya

They arrived to the psychologist visit. At the first moment they showed cold, allowing me to see the distance that separated them. When they started to talk I could appreciate the resentment and bitterness which underlined their words, were the criticism and the reproaches which opened a crater between them. They did not hear, they interrupted each other with accusations.

"This is the last bullet", they manifested at the end. However, their gaze was more focused on the separation that in the meeting. To hear them I found how hard was to believe that they loved each other in the past. Each one appeared in front of the other blurred, stripped of the qualities that a day were recognized and valued.

"From the beginning we had a lot of physical attraction between us, it was like a magnet that attracted us forever. Each time that we meet, we were felt joy to see us again, until one day we let ourselves be carried away by the passion and we started our love story. I liked all of it," she said with glowing eyes.

"I saw her as the woman more special than I had never known", he added without just looking at it, as if wanting to enjoy those feelings of long ago.

This story is repeated in the talks between friends, in their visits of the psychologists. Love can turn to hate when you are not careful. In scientific studies, among then the investigations of Sterberg, it was noted that the hatred could not be understood without the love already that both are closely related due to the similarity of their components.

The triangular theory of love argues that in love underlies three components: intimacy, the passion and the decision and commitment. These components are not static, are in constant interaction among them which give as a result the seven types of love: love, infatuation, empty love, romantic, sociable, fool and consummated.

On the other hand, the triangular theory of hatred is just the opposite of the same components. Denial of intimacy, which seeks the untying emotional and is powered by the rejection; passion in the hatred in the form of fury and commitment in the hatred which devalues the person to justify the abandonment.

Also the neurosciences have obtained results which help to better understand why it is so easy to move from love to hate. From a biological point of view, hatred enables many brain areas and many regions that are activated when you hate are the same as when you are in love.

The hatred is brewing in the small things that we not resolve properly, as occurs in the case of our partner, and this creates circles of fire in which many times just burn us. We began to throw gas on the fire when the other does not meet our expectations with regard to what we expect of the people loved and we began to accumulate complaints.

The heartache arrives with the negation of everything we thought and imagined about the other person, we do not value and appreciate its qualities anymore and we blur internally the image of that person unique and different who we fell in love with.

In this process there are usually at the beginning many attempts to cover up or justify the pain that produces the disappointment. However, progresses the experience of disagreement, converts the relationship in a big black dot, from which we only see the negative. At this point, it is already installed the hate in our hearts and established the mechanism of projection, we blame the other of our suffering and you hate because it leaves naked our weaknesses, our dependence and our insecurity.

The people most vulnerable to accommodate feelings of hate are those which have low self-esteem, because they feel attacked more easily than people sure of themselves. The insecurity that prevails in the people with a self-esteem devalued, coupled with comparisons, the feelings of inferiority, the low tolerance to the frustration, fear, the complex and intolerance, avoid to manage appropriately their emotions so they are sources of hatred in their personal and social relations.

The hatred corrodes who feel it; generates bad mood and may even lead to health problems such as insomnia, stress, anxiety or depression and considerably weakens the immune system.

The hatred equal to the love implies a "Installation". When we cease to be installed in the hatred, we recovered our ability to see the other in all its dimensions, and we can look from the loving feeling that favors the encounter.



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