Ginger

At dinner last night when I ate salad, I found it unusually tasty. I am not a big fan of salad.
"It's good." I said.
"To think you got to like ginger!(ショウガが好きになるとはね）" My wife said.
I didn't notice there was ginger in the salad dressing but I knew what I'd felt tasty was exactly the taste of ginger.
When we got married I hated ginger. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to make a sort of experiment. Things like ginger won't kill me if I put it in my mouth just because I hate it to death. If it won't kill me I can examine its taste. So I put a tiny slice of ginger on my tongue. Then chewed it once. It was awful. But I tried to concentrate on the taste itself just like a scientist observing a chemical reaction. It was bit hot. It had a strong flavor which possibly I didn't like. "Possibly". By this time, I was not 100% sure what taste of ginger I hated. Then I suspected "Do I really hate ginger?" A few weeks later when we went to a sushi-bar, I tried pickled ginger which I had never had. I was surprised to find it was not terrible. From that time on I eat ginger.
Now I understand how I had feared bad tastes. The moment I sensed the slightest taste of it, I had ran away immediately from it. That's where the fear starts swelling to become a panick. But once we can face them calmly and hold out for some time instead of getting panicky, the fear is gone, and as I demonstrated by the case with ginger, we even come to like it. I suspect most of the hatred are the child of run-away impulse, very close to "食わず嫌い".
It is also true of other things you have hated or avoided. If you hate someone, try to observe or talk to him / her with your scientific interest. Maybe you know that he / she is not such a bad person you hate, if not lovable.
Apply this theory to many things you don't like.