When someone does something to you to intentionally hurt you, it can make it much worse than if they were to do the same thing accidentally. When speaking of mental wounds, part of the reason for this is that you feel like there must have been something about you that made them want to hurt you.
That is almost never, quite possibly actually never, the real cause. The real cause is nearly certain to be the internal pain that they feel from something in their own life… it could be something from early childhood, or it could be something from earlier today, but the desire to inflict pain on someone almost always originates from your own pain.
Think back to the last time you did something to intentionally hurt someone, even if it was very small. What were you feeling at the time? It wasn't sweet, sugary feelings of happiness and love, was it?
You may not have thought directly of pain… you may have been angry, or jealous, or some similar emotion. Those feelings only come from pain, however… you don't get angry, for instance, without feeling that someone has done something wrong to you.
The same is true of others… no one truly does things just because they enjoy inflicting pain. Even if it seems that way to them, THAT feeling in turn is caused by some pain from their past.
That doesn't mean that their actions are justified, by any means… it's still wrong to hurt someone intentionally, regardless of how badly you've been hurt in the past. Your own pain isn't a valid excuse for inflicting pain on others.
On the other hand, once you realize that the harm comes from the pain of another, it does make it far easier to forgive them, and somewhat easier to not take hurt from the actions in the first place, even when they are intended to cause pain. It takes away their power, because you realize that they are attacking from a place of weakness, not a place of strength.
And it's amazing the amount of relief that you feel when you truly forgive someone… it takes a lot of energy to hold a grudge.
Try this, when you have a chance: Think back to one of your hurts that you carry with you… it doesn't have to be a big one, but it could be if you choose. Now think about the person who caused that hurt, and picture them as having done it because they were lashing out from their own pain (a feeling the vast majority of us are familiar with). Let yourself feel that feeling, the conscious knowledge that you are saying or doing something you don't really mean because of your own hurt, and then understand that whatever they did came from a similar place, that they had just as hard a time controlling it.
It changes the way you feel about it a lot when you look at it that way, doesn't it?
November 14, 2010
So many great articles you have written. I would greatly like the opportunity to forward some of these great articles to friends but could not email them. I wish it were set up to easily forward them by email other than setting up a “pop” account.
November 16, 2010
Give me a bit of time and I’ll get it done. I changed sharing tools a while back, and hadn’t checked that particular thing. The previous sharing tool DID allow you to send it without having to send it through a separate system.
July 14, 2011
I have often heard the phrase: Hurt People Hurt People. I think that that aptly summarizes your above post. When we’re hurt, we feel powerless – especially when we ask people to stop hurting us and they ignore our requests. We know that being ignored is wrong! We get angry! We try to get our power back.
Often we try to get our power back by taking it out on ourselves and others. Instead of being assertive and dealing with our problems head on, we become aggressive and start attacking everything in sight.
You’re right that a lot of hurting behaviors stem from one’s own pain. As a person who lives with depression and childhood trauma, I constantly have to remind myself that my rage and anger often stem from the fact that I’m really just hurting. When I find myself starting fights, I have to stop and breath and look for the stressor that’s causing me pain and I go about dealing with THAT. Instead of going on the attack to defend myself from everything in sight.
These topics come up a little bit in my own blog Cutting Knots: http://cuttingknots.blogspot.com/
I think I will have to come up with a post that talks about steps that I have to take to avoid being hurtful to others when I’m feeling hurt. Its really a good topic.
July 14, 2011
Unfortunately, it’s not something that goes away, really, either… it can get better, but you will often still have to bite back the urge to hurt others.
Some people, on the other hand, tend to hurt themselves more when they hurt.
None of the possible responses to emotional hurt make sense.. Hurting others because you hurt makes little or no sense, and hurting yourself probably makes even less. It’s enough to make you wonder how in the world we got this way… I can’t see how it could make evolutionary sense, and I certainly can’t see a reason for God to make it this way.
The reality of something, however, has no bearing on how much sense it makes… and emotional pain is one of the worst pains, and often very hard to heal.