Becoming What You Hate v. The Radicalism of Compassion

We’re living in a world where conversation often feels like combat. Politics, identity, morality… it’s all become a battleground. But real change doesn’t come from yelling louder. Being mindlessly reactive is neither power nor activism.

Can you stay in your body while someone speaks a truth that’s different from yours? Can you notice your own reactivity without turning it into a weapon?

Make space to hear what’s underneath the words that others share. Ask yourself: What fear might this person be carrying? What unmet need? What pain? Then ask yourself the same about your fears and your pain.

We project our unhealed ego onto others and onto the world.

This doesn’t mean abandoning your values. It means actually embodying your values. If you believe in peace, if you seek peace, then embody peace. If you believe in change, foster change by doing something different. Compassion isn’t passive. It’s radically political. In a culture that thrives on dehumanization, your choice to see other humans as layered and complex and as individuals rather than all being identified into some pre-conceived group is an act of resistance.

Hate and violence are not revolutionary. They’re as old as time for humans.

Compassion is revolutionary. To be compassionate and see others in all their humanity is what’s radical.

So when the world tells you to hate and to justify violence. Ask yourself what your values are and what you seek to embody. Do you value hate? Violence? Cutting humanity up into groups? Making assumptions based on someone’s “identity”?

Otherwise… You will always become what you hate, because you hate.

Hate is a self-destructive and self-feeding force. It feeds cycles, keeping them going on and on. When you don’t have personal values, the void gets filled with what you hate instead. The latter is easier to identity and doesn’t require any growth, wisdom, or inner power.

You don’t have to agree with everyone. If fact, you rarely should and would if you truly have your own views. But you don’t need to agree with everyone to see their humanity. If that sounds hard to do, to still see the humanity in others, then welcome to the spiritual journey.

To be an activist means believing in change, which means believing that people can change. If you’ve lost belief in humanity, in your country, and in your fellow citizens, then you're not acting as an agent of transformation. You're caught in your own dysregulation.

There are real issues in our world that urgently need addressing, but meaningful change requires clear thinking and effective problem-solving. To truly solve problems, we must engage the prefrontal cortex, the center of critical thinking and decision-making, and step out of the overwhelm of the amygdala. The trauma response lives in the latter, driving black-and-white thinking (my side versus your side thinking), hypervigilance, and reactive behavior. These are not the qualities we need to meet the complex challenges facing our country and our world.

Anger without vision is not activism - it’s just noise and fuel to the fire.

If you care about the future, then connection is the only thing strong enough to hold our differences without breaking us apart.

And we’re going to need each other in these and coming times now more than ever.

Be truly revolutionary.

-Susan Reis