the PSYCHOLOGY OF REVERSE HATE: Why Hatred You Feel From Others Often Belongs to Them

This book began, as most honest books do, not with a theory but with an observation - repeated so many times, across so many different kinds of people and relationships, that it became impossible to ignore. In our combined clinical work spanning attachment therapy, trauma recovery, and relational psychology, we noticed something that was hiding in plain sight. People who came to us bearing the marks of another person's cruelty - verbal, emotional, relational - almost universally presented with one devastating assumption: that the hatred they had received was a verdict about who they were. They believed it had something to do with them. They believed they had provoked it, earned it, or that some deficiency in their character had made them a natural recipient of contempt. We disagreed. And our disagreement grew sharper over time, not weaker.