Anger and hate are interesting emotions in that they usually aren’t the core issue that the person is facing. Instead, they often serve as a mask for other, more vulnerable feelings or characteristics that people struggle to express or confront.
This creates two distinct groups of seemingly hate-filled people. First, you have a core of genuinely hateful individuals, where there is something deeply psychologically wrong with them. Nothing will help those people short of serious mental health intervention, and even then, they would have to want to change to even have a chance.
Then you have a lot of “hate-filled” people who aren’t actually hate-filled. Instead, they may have any of these 8 psychological characteristics that they mask with anger, because they believe anything else would be socially unacceptable.
1. Deep-seated insecurity and a fragile ego.
Anger is often used as a way to deflect away from one’s own weaknesses and vulnerability. Insecure people will blame others for their difficulties rather than looking inward. But the problem is that healthy people don’t want to be too close to angry people. It’s like standing near a fire. Sooner or later, if you’re not careful, you’re going to get burned.
This only makes the hateful person angrier and more insecure, as it often either isolates them or draws them to other angry people. This is often what happens when particular groups of people are othered by hateful individuals. Hate can become a defensive mechanism because an othered person who is doing better than the insecure person fuels their resentment.
For example, a racist person may look at a person of color, see that person of color is doing better than they are, and automatically jump to the assumption that they didn’t earn or deserve it. It gets more intense when said hateful person believes that they were fully capable and deserving, but were somehow overlooked.
2. Projection of self-hatred and resentment.
Many people project their insecurities and negative feelings onto others. They assume that the other person feels badly about them and looks down on them because they can’t be proud of themselves. There’s something missing in their own mind that allows them to look at themselves with kindness and love, even for the parts of themselves they don’t like.
It’s easier to project because it helps keep them safe from their own negative thoughts about themselves. That kind of projection allows them to justify their hatred and ugly feelings, because they believe they aren’t worth anything, so why would anyone else value them? In their mind, it’s only logical that other people would see them the same way.
3. Emotional repression and suppression.
The hateful often bury their sadness and trauma instead of processing their pain and loss. As the CPTSD Foundation shares, many bury it because they don’t feel safe enough to express it.
Personally, this fueled a lot of my own anger and hatefulness. I was never racist, but I hated people because I was so bitter and angry that just being around happy people made me want to hurt myself out of spite.
But here’s the problem. When you suppress your traumas and negative feelings instead of feeling them, you are essentially creating a pressure cooker kind of situation. You pile more in, you close the lid of the cooker, and the pressure just keeps building, and building, and building until it starts to leak out. The leaks start causing you to seek relief from maladaptive coping skills such as drugs, alcohol, sex, workaholism, or anger.
You can’t ignore your pain and suffering. I know from personal experience how badly that ends – suicide attempts, self-loathing, decades of suppression, and then having to relearn how to experience healthy emotions through years of therapy. And, because I was so effective at squashing and suppressing my feelings, it also caused me to inadvertently suppress positive feelings, too.
You get to a point where your brain just says, “Oh, I’m feeling a strong emotion, shut it down!” Because it can’t intelligently differentiate what to suppress and what not to when you’ve spent decades suppressing strong feelings.
4. Need for dominance and control.
There are some people who are just wired in a way that isn’t healthy for themselves or others. That could be the result of genetics, trauma, or other environmental conditions, like being raised in an environment without love. Thus, they feel compelled to seek dominance and control over others to make themselves feel empowered. They can’t make themselves feel empowered, and they need to use others as a stepping stone to feel okay with themselves.
Hate and anger are unhealthy ways to express and cope with these feelings. However, hate is so much easier than going to therapy to address the trauma, learn new strategies to deal with it, and turn it into something positive through healing. Anger is easy, even though it’s a flame that will burn you and everything around you.
5. Chronic victim mentality.
Chronic victims are exhausting because they have to make everything about how the world has failed and oppressed them. They justify their resentment by looking at the people they hate as lesser, and they essentially give themselves permission to hate. The hateful will convince themselves that the hated person took something from them, even if that’s not the case.
If you look at the narratives around immigration, you see this on full display. “They’re coming to take your jobs!” Oh? Are they? Some people who can’t necessarily speak English? Who don’t necessarily have degrees or qualifications are coming to take our jobs, huh? People who are walking across multiple countries to seek asylum are somehow more qualified for the “good jobs”?
It makes no sense once you look past the anger.
6. A lack of empathy for other people’s suffering.
As someone on the autistic spectrum, I’ve struggled with showing empathy the way neurotypicals do all of my life. To be clear: autistic people do not inherently lack empathy; that’s a common myth about autism. Empathy in autistic individuals varies just like it does in neurotypical individuals. What is common in autistic individuals is that they may feel and communicate their empathy differently from how neurotypical people do.
For example, it isn’t that I can’t intellectually understand that my actions can harm others, or that someone is suffering when I look at them. The difference is that I don’t feel it the way some people do. For example, I can look at someone going through a real hard time, intellectually understand that person is experiencing a hard time, but not really feel anything. And then other times, I will feel a spark of recognition, of some emotion from my own past experiences that allows me to dial in to those emotions.
The thing is, you don’t actually need to emotionally connect to what someone is going through to empathize with them. You just need to believe them and hold space for them. And that’s something people who struggle to feel others’ emotions can learn to do, regardless of their neurotype.
On the flip side, a person may simply not care about others’ suffering, and as such, they aren’t going to take the time to try and understand it. Hate thrives on this ignorance – ignorance of the others’ experience and suffering. This can make these people easy to manipulate into hateful acts because they can’t connect to other people’s experiences, either emotionally or intellectually.
7. Black-and-white thinking.
Black-and-white thinking is also known as “all-or-nothing” thinking. It’s a way that people make sense of a difficult world by oversimplifying it. The world is not black-and-white, and in many cases, it’s not good and evil either. There are a lot of good people who’ve done questionable things, and there are people that society labels evil who were only acting out of trauma or circumstance.
Criminals and convicts are an excellent example. They’re vilified as the lowest of the low, scum, and not productive members of society. But what causes that? That’s the question that the politicians don’t want you asking, because when you look behind the curtain, you see that a lot of these people were set up to fail from the start.
How are you supposed to live a good and gainful life when you have overpacked classrooms, overworked teachers being underpaid, with schools being funded by local property taxes? Meaning, any school in a bad neighborhood or an impoverished one is automatically going to be worse than one that’s not.
The hateful paint groups of people with a wide brush. They ALL have this negative quality; therefore, I must hate them ALL, which makes no sense in a rational mind. Unfortunately, people aren’t rational when they’re drowning in rage.
8. Tribal thinking.
Hateful, angry people often flock together with other hateful, angry people. Being an angry person, there aren’t many groups where you’re welcome. As I’ve said, most people don’t want to be around that. Who does? Other angry people. Thus, you may find that hateful people gather together and inadvertently fuel their own anger and hatred to be part of that group.
It’s a crabs in a bucket scenario, where every time someone tries to climb out, someone pulls them back in to stay trapped in the group. In our society, community has crumbled for so many people. It’s easy to find oneself swept into that kind of anger when you don’t feel like you belong anywhere. The puppet-masters know this and use it to their advantage.
Final thoughts…
Hate usually doesn’t just spring from hate. It often springs from anger, trauma, and repressed emotions about oneself. It’s far easier to blame other people and hate them for your problems than it is to accept your own flaws, your own truth. Those who can’t, doom themselves to a perpetual cycle of unhappiness.
That’s why those of us who have struggled with anger or hatred need to confront it and overcome the causes of it. Otherwise, it’s just a flame that’ll burn you to a cinder.
