Search any human heart and you will find contempt. It comes in many forms and is unfortunately as natural to us as breathing and eating. It organizes us. Somewhere along the way (probably in adolescence), we start identifying everything we hate – everything we think we are not and everything we do not want to be. This is probably a necessary process of forming our identity; the problem is too often we get stuck there and believe that is the only way to “be somebody.” Long into our adulthood, we continue to define ourselves by what we hate. Some people die full of contempt, fairly certain they have things figured out and other people don’t.

The allure of contempt is that as long as we can hold someone or something else in a lower position, we can be somebody and have a sense of control. As long as you are on the top and they are on the bottom, you can have some feeling of put-togetherness. You don’t even have to be that successful or beautiful or smart. You just have to be “better than” someone else. It’s amazing what we will do to keep others on the bottom so we are not.

Another infectious form of contempt is “being right.” There’s a lot of this going on right now. Did you notice that with everything going on in our social and political environment, everyone feels it necessary to form an opinion about everything all the time? If you can be right about things, then someone else is wrong and you retain your sense of self, your identity. You’re ahead of the curve, even though most of us are proved wrong about a lot of things a lot of times. We don’t admit it; we just keep talking. 😊

Yet another form of contempt is to hold someone in debt to you. If someone has wronged you, you might wear your victimhood like a blanket. It shows everyone you are owed something. Contempt does not let others grow and change. If you keep others the way you have characterized (read: judged) them – then you can feel like you are better than them. You might have someone you hate now – do you want them to get better or change? Or would you rather they just stay the way they are so you can go on hating them? If they do get better and change, I suppose you will have to find someone else to hate.

As long as you can find someone else who is an “awful person” and hold them in contempt, you do not have to deal with the awfulness inside you.  Now you might be right about some things and you may have been wronged by someone else, but if holding onto your contempt is what is making you who you are, maybe you should get busy finding some other way to be somebody. A healthy self can define its boundaries and differences with others and also possess love and patience for those who are different, being present with them without feeling insecure or needing to measure whether we are better or worse, richer or poorer, smarter or dumber. They just are, and so are we.