For a number of years I thought about why I immediately disliked someone without ever getting to know them. Quite often I’d remark that I can’t stand this person or that person for no reason other than that it was my immediate thought at the time, and it would last until something changed my mind about the person. After carefully thinking about it, I’ve come to a reasonable conclusion that makes a lot of sense, at least to me.
The one thing that stands out when it comes to an immediate dislike for someone I never met, especially when it comes to celebrities who may star in sitcoms, or soap operas, or whatever, it doesn’t really matter, I will remark that I can’t stand that persons looks. I won’t watch a great show because one or more who star in the show makes me ill to even look at them. This is really sick on my part, but I don’t think I’m alone when it comes to sharing the same with a lot of other people who have the same feelings. So at one point, it was time to evaluate the reasons why, and it wasn’t long before I was able to figure that one out. Now I’m referring to those who I’ve mentioned so far, the ones you never met or don’t know at all, but hate the sight of them.
Well, I think all can agree that it isn’t a normal thing, and something must have caused us to have such a dislike for someone’s looks when they really never did anything to provoke such a feeling. I believe I’ve narrowed the few of the reasons down to what may have happened in our young childhood. The way it works is that as a child, anything we are exposed to will carry over into our adult lives, and even to the day we die if we don’t do something to rid ourselves of this way of thinking. When I see someone either on TV or in the movies that I find hard to look at, I rewind the tape in my mind that covered my childhood years, and there it was, all my answers as to why I have such a unhealthy attitude towards those I don’t even know. It seems that at one time or another during childhood, someone, whether an adult, or just some other kid that may have been a bully or a tormentor, did something to make me hate that person, and anytime I see someone that jars my subconscious resembling someone who made my life uncomfortable, I find I can’t deal with it.
Classic example would be where this little kid in a commercial where he’s allowed to play with this nice toy truck only to have it taken away from him and replaced with a cardboard cutout of a truck. He looks at the guy who gave it to him, and says “this is a piece of junk.” the guy says to him “that’s because you didn’t read the fine print.” If you know the commercial, then you would know the little kid I’m referring to here. Well, because of some little bully that looked just like the kid in the commercial, and that I had to face daily in grade school, just made my life miserable when he was around, which in turn caused me to dislike anyone that would resemble him, and therefore, the poor kid in the commercial got my undeserving dislike for him. Poor kid might just be as nice as a altar boy, but he just looked too much like that bully that I disliked so much.
Only realized it because I wanted to find out why I immediately disliked the kid in the commercial, and there was the reason, the bully kid I remember. There is one very popular show where the entire cast is made up of faces I couldn’t imagine having to be in the same room, or share the workplace with. After thinking it out why, I came to realize it was because I was able to remember who it was in my childhood that made me feel so much dislike for these people who had nothing to do with what happened in my childhood. I then painstakingly, one by one, try to reverse my feelings as I realized that it wasn’t them, but it was me who had the problem. Some, I still find it hard to reverse the feeling, but I’ve been getting better at it, and the plus side is that I’m able to enjoy more programs that I normally would skip by because of my unwarranted dislike for those on the show. Okay, this is just one example of what I’ve come up with about the subject. Another example, just might not sit right with many who read this article, simply because of denial. But the fact of the matter is, we all started out doing something or other, and as time went on, we would realize that it was either lame, or we just didn’t know any better. The kicker is when we see what we ourselves have been guilty of doing, whether it is something innocent, or not so innocent, it doesn’t matter, but when we see someone else going through the same thing that we have left behind, we smugly point our finger, or make remarks about how much it turns us off about the persons behavior.
Every guy who entered a nightclub with the intentions of picking up a date for the evening has stumbled through the same lines, the same approach, with basically the same results. When I would see this, I’d almost always remark “look at that idiot, thinking he’s making time with that girl,” when the whole time he was as obvious as mushrooms sprouting on a golf course. We tend to find all the things in another person that perhaps we ourselves during our early days, may have behaved in a similar manner, but we’ve grown, and thinking back in retrospect, we’ve come a long way since those early days. So now that we have matured and grown much wiser, we tend to spot ourselves in someone else, but fail to recognize that we are doing so without ever thinking that we were there at one time doing the same thing. Doesn’t have to be a nightclub or a bar, it could be anything that at one time or another where we found we did something, that when we spot it in others, we tend to find a way to dislike them. Well, I guess I could say I dislike myself for doing all the things that I find fault with in others, because I’m just seeing me all over again. The problem is, we just don’t take the time to think back to what we were all about, but we can sure find it quickly in others when there is a resemblance to our own personality that we left behind as we matured. So the next time someone you never met is in the same room or event, and you find yourself feeling you don’t like that persons behavior or looks, think back a ways to see if it’s because it may be something familiar in your own past that is providing
