The first reason is the threat. Not necessarily a real or conscious threat. Your presence may simply undermine a position, a certainty or a self-image. Someone who has built their identity on being the most competent, the funniest, the most attractive or the most cultured may find it very difficult to cope with the arrival of someone who unwittingly challenges that position. You don’t need to seek out competition: sometimes it’s enough simply for the other person to sense it.
The reaction then becomes strange. Your qualities are downplayed, your faults exaggerated, and your successes attributed to luck, connections or manipulation. Anything that helps to symbolically reduce the threat becomes useful. The problem is no longer what you do, but what your very existence provokes in the other person.
Second possibility: you represent something they detest. We sometimes find it hard to tolerate in others whatever clashes with our values, our history or our own contradictions. A very free-spirited person may annoy someone who has always denied themselves that freedom. Someone who embraces their individuality may irritate someone who has spent their life seeking approval. A forthright personality may unsettle someone who operates within the realm of the unspoken.
In psychology, the term ‘projection’ is used when a person attributes to others feelings or characteristics that they refuse to acknowledge in themselves. However, we must avoid using this concept as a magic explanation: not all criticism is projection, and not everyone who dislikes us is secretly jealous. Sometimes, someone simply doesn’t like us. And sometimes their criticism may even be justified.
That leaves the third reason, arguably the most uncomfortable: envy. You may have something that another person desires. A success, recognition, a relationship, freedom, a certain look, a talent, or simply a way of life that they do not allow themselves.
Envy almost never presents itself by saying, ‘I’d like to have what you have.’ It is more likely to take the form of belittling. What you have would, after all, be worthless. Your success would be suspect. Your work would be mediocre. Your happiness would be fake. Symbolically destroying what one does not possess is sometimes easier than admitting that one desires it.
But there is a trap that is exactly the opposite: believing that any hostility proves our superiority. ‘People criticise me because they’re jealous of me’ can become a convenient way of never questioning oneself. Others may also criticise us because we’ve been clumsy, arrogant, unfair or simply a nuisance. Narcissism loves to turn every criticism into proof of envy.
The right question, therefore, is not: ‘Why do they hate me?’, but: ‘Is there any truth in what they’re criticising me for?’ If several independent people voice the same specific criticism, it probably deserves to be examined. If, on the other hand, the hostility arises without any concrete facts and is accompanied by a systematic desire to belittle, humiliate or discredit you, it may say more about the other person than it does about you.
We tend to believe that love and hate are always provoked by our actions. It is not quite that simple. We also, in spite of ourselves, become mirrors. Some see in us something they like. Others see something they reject. Still others see what they might have wanted to become.
And perhaps one of the hardest freedoms to attain is understanding this: you can try to be fair to others, correct your mistakes and remain open to criticism, without necessarily devoting your life to becoming acceptable in everyone’s eyes.
For some people will hate you precisely for what others will love about you.
