Power of Hate: Part 1

The Power of Hate: My Story

I hated substance abuse. I hated addiction.

But if I’m being honest, what I hated most wasn’t the drugs or the alcohol. It was the attachment. The way the addict clung to a persona they played—someone unreachable, evasive, always just out of grasp.

I watched someone I loved choose that version of themselves over and over again. And instead of walking away, I tried to fix them.

I became codependent without realizing it. I mistook control for care. I believed that if I loved harder, showed up more, sacrificed enough of myself, I could pull them back into the person I wanted them to be.

I didn’t call it hate back then. I called it loyalty. I called it commitment. I called it love.

But underneath it was resentment—quiet at first, then loud. I resented the addiction. I resented the choices. I resented how powerless I felt. And eventually, I resented myself.

What I rarely admitted—what took me years to face—was the cost.

Time was taken away from my children. Emotional energy that should have been reserved for them was spent managing chaos that wasn’t mine to fix. I wasn’t the present, grounded mother I had hoped to be. My attention was divided, my nervous system constantly on edge, my heart stretched thin between survival and responsibility.

Money was spent trying to rescue instead of being invested in our future. Time was poured into meetings—not just to heal myself, but to learn how to accept a reality I didn’t want.

I told myself I was doing the work. But much of the time, I was trying to endure it.

The hate didn’t make me cruel. It made me tired. It made me rigid. It made me cling to an outcome I couldn’t control. And the more I fought the addiction, the more tangled I became in it.

What I didn’t understand then was this: Hate wasn’t the opposite of love. It was fear—fear of loss, fear of helplessness, fear of accepting what I could not change.

And until I faced that fear, I stayed trapped—bonded to the very thing I believed I was

fighting.

The Fear Beneath the Hate

When I finally slowed down enough to look beneath the hate, I saw fear.

I was afraid of being alone. Afraid that no one would ever truly love me. Afraid of being single, as if being alone meant I had failed.

I was afraid I would lose my family because I didn’t know how to stand on my own. I believed connection had to be maintained at any cost—even if that cost was myself.

Over time, that fear turned inward. I started to hate myself. I felt like a disappointment because I couldn’t fix the people I loved. My children loved them too, and I carried the weight of protecting everyone—emotionally, financially, psychologically.

I took on far more than was ever mine to carry.

Instead of opening me to solutions, hate narrowed my vision. It kept me locked in survival mode. I mistook vigilance for love and control for safety. The more I held on, the more afraid I became.

Hate didn’t give me strength.It blocked me from it.

Because as long as I was fighting what was happening, I couldn’t see another way forward.

Closing

If any of this feels familiar, you’re not weak. You’re not failing. You’re responding to fear, the only way you knew how.

When we’re afraid of being alone, of being unloved, of losing the people we’ve built our lives around, hate can feel protective. It gives shape to pain that feels too big to sit with. It convinces us that if we stay vigilant—if we keep trying, fixing, holding everything together—we’ll be safe.

But what I know now is this: Hate didn’t come from who I was. It came from what I was afraid to lose.

And fear has a way of convincing us to abandon ourselves while believing we’re doing it for love.

If you see yourself in this, let yourself pause here. You don’t need to figure anything out yet. Awareness is enough for now.

Next, we’ll talk about what happens when fear runs the show—and why responsibility, not blame, is what finally creates freedom.