And I enjoyed reading your response very much. I agree that the feeling of being seen in the buff isn’t of the same intensity as being betrayed by someone we’ve let in. I guess I should have worded that a little differently. The point I was shooting for was more along the lines of comparing the different between just being walked in on versus being walked in on naked and the difference between being betrayed by someone we care nothing for versus someone we care a great deal for.

I like the teeter-totter analogy, too. The only thing that I, personally, would add to it is the idea that both love and hate can co-exist in the same person at the same time and both be directed toward the same person. Perhaps not to the degree that they exist in their individual states, but the line is so close that I think it doesn’t have to be as black and white as one or the other. And that is something I left out of my original post as well.

What can I say? It was written 9 months ago… I’ve had more time to think about it. Haha.

Thanks again for the nice comment and the vote!

Rather than a fine line existing between Love and Hate, I believe they are on the far opposite ends of an emotional “teeter-totter”… just like “the agony and the ecstacy”. Our capacity to feel the one increases our capacity to feel the other.

I had to laugh about the comparison between emotional betrayal after exposing one’s INNER self, to the exposure of one’s naked body. We are TAUGHT the sort of physical shame that causes us to conceal our naked bodies… but to me there is no comparison between mere physical nakedness and the deep sense of emotional exposure that comes from revealing our inner selves. When we have trusted someone with our inner selves, and they wound us with that information, or betray our trust, or humiliate us with that intimacy, there is a profound woundedness that compares to nothing else. Nothing.

When that happens a little at a time, the teeter-totter begins to tip from unabashed love, toward hurt… then mistrust… then dislike… and if the betrayal continues, it tips all the way over to hate. It’s as if the hate is required to be of equal intensity as the original love in order to cancel out that love. The teeter-totter eventually (hopefully) returns to a neutral position as regards that damaged relationship.

Then there might be an opportunity for the healing balm of FORGIVENESS.

Namaste.

Little did I know it was jacked up. :P

It’s funny because one time at work my boss and I were talking about that book series by Dave Pelzer where he was talking about his life as a child…and we were talking about how horrible his mother did him when he was little, and she goes “What I don’t understand is why she chose him and not his siblings…because in the beginning of the book it talked about how he was favored the most out of all of his brothers and sisters up until she started abusing him.” and I was like “Yeah…I remember that…” and then I thought back to this post (I think you had just written it around this time) and I was like “Well maybe she chose him because at one time he was the one she LOVED the most at one time. Think about it…love and hate are basically the same definition and you can only hate things that have, at one time, loved.” and she sat there and thought for a minute..and she goes “Wow…that’s so true..it makes a lot of sense..I’ve never really thought of it that way!”

haha I was like yeah, I have a friend who is a psychologist and he has a really jacked up way of thinking :) j/k