From love to hate, is there a step?

From love to hate there is a very thin line that we are not always aware of. In fact, We are all surprised when we observe those couples who loved each other passionately and, suddenly, they cannot even be seen in painting.. We are not talking about those who suffer estrangement, but about those men and women who, after having shared a torrid relationship, become the worst enemies.

Sometimes, a situation of this nature does not occur until after many years of living together. It is the result of a worn-out bond where, far from letting it go at the time, we continue to maintain it until the most extreme reverse appears. On other occasions, the transformation occurs suddenly. Yesterday they loved each other and today they hate each other. That’s when we ask ourselves: Could it be true that from love to hate there is only one step?

They are very common situations, relational dynamics that respond to a very specific emotional and neurological pattern that is worth knowing.

Love and hate

There is no form of love that does not contain a hint of hate, at least. We hate each other a little because sometimes they are not there when we need them. Or because he didn’t appreciate as we wanted some effort we made for him or her. We also feel the murmur of hatred when they do not understand us enough or when they are not able to tell us the words we wanted to hear.

They are small hatreds that usually do not transcend. They fade as quickly as they appeared and barely leave any trace, only in the most sensitive personalities. We can deal with them and keep the affection intact.

However, there are situations in which there is not such a happy outcome. Sometimes one of those small episodes of disagreement becomes the seed of a great jungle of hatred. Or they are the drop that makes the cup overflow of a poison that was already accumulating.

Thus, and as striking as it may seem to us, love and hate are not exactly opposite worlds. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.. Just as every love has some gram of hate implicit in it, every hate has a component of love in its core.

Intense emotions follow the same neural pattern

“Sometimes I love you, sometimes I hate you. But when I hate you, it’s because I love you.” This phrase that appears in one of Nat King Cole’s songs is very representative of this emotional duality. Love often becomes a very fertile territory for the prick of hate to appear, and This unique process has its scientific explanation.

They are situations marked by a very relevant aspect: emotional intensity. As revealed in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Hate and love are involved in a type of neural processing known as the emotion arousal effect. That is, the most intense emotions share the same neurological path, the same communication route. This explains why at a given moment we can go from one extreme to the other. Likewise, in this study it was also seen that when the feelings of love are stronger, the hatred and spite are also more intense in the event that a conflict occurs. breaking off. Which suggests to scientists that There is a link between romantic love and hate.Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, neuroscientists Zeki and Romaya (2008) studied 17 people who professed hatred towards someone. What both researchers observed was that structures such as the puten and the insula They were activated both for stimuli associated with hate and for those related to romantic love.

Hating who we love is possible and even logical within that cerebral scenario. Although in everyday life, it seems like a real contradiction to go from love to hate from one day to the next or even in a specific moment.

How do you go from love to hate?

The transition from love to hate generally occurs in two ways.. It may happen, for example, that a person “wakes up”, that he opens his eyes after a lethargy in which he was enduring what he did not want to endure. It can also happen that someone suffers an offense from their partner, and that their feelings of love give way to anger, contradiction and contempt.

This last situation is more common in people who have low tolerance for frustration or high narcissism. If the emotional resources do not exist to maintain emotional balance in the face of an adverse situation, it is likely that blaming others for the feeling of frustration one experiences. That is, we hate others because they expose our weaknesses, our dependence or our insecurity.

Narcissistic personalities do not differentiate between an offense and an act of self-affirmation of the other. If the other person demands space, recognition or autonomy, they will understand it as aggression. They assume that their partner must live according to them and they understand any act of freedom as a personal threat. That’s why they can even react violently.

Hate creates very strong ties with others. In fact, it can lead to bonds closer than those of love. The worst thing is that when a series of affronts gives way, The situation becomes a circle that constantly feeds itself. Neither one nor the other can make a healthy breakup. They condition their emotional life to the logic of harming and avoiding being harmed. They feel that they cannot give up on the situation, because that would be giving up.

This circle is highly harmful. A situation in which, no matter how much you win, you will always be losing. There is no way to solve it. The only alternative is to separate yourself from that person and renounce that hatred that can become an unbearable prison from which you will only emerge battered.

You might be interested…