Who hurt you?
As children usually get hurt, I had bruises, cuts, fractures, illnesses, swellings and a dozen other things while growing up. I was a playful kid. Well, an accidental kid to be precise. And these pains would eventually heal. But I also felt a pain that at the time I did not know how to heal from, the suffering that was usually invisible – emotional damage. And sensing the unusually quiet kid, my mother would enquire, ‘What happened? Who hurt you?’
Words. A bunch of letters is all they are. But said with enough malice or spewed around with hatred can bleed your heart. Unknowingly distant relatives would inflict pain by forcing me to talk about something I was conscious about or poking their noses where they shouldn’t. Sometimes people trying to show sympathy would hurt me even more by making me feel inferior through their tone of condescension. Or I would feel pain from receiving unhelpful and obvious advice I did not ask for. But sometimes, the hatred would be showered with the sole intention of causing emotional damage. It would be simple and unadulterated malice.
But the sharpest of pains were created by people close to me. Strangers can hurt you, but people who are close to you have the potential to cause immense grief as they know your trigger points and what can inflict the most pain. It could be an emotional reaction to something you said that hurt them, causing them to use your deepest darkest vulnerabilities to wreck you. Or a relationship barely hanging at the last strand, where old scars were scratched open, leaving wounds that lasted for years and scars that never healed.
Because we love them, the opinions of the people we are closest to might matter to us more. We quite often seek their approval. At the same time, we barely practice self-restraint around them and can be our raw selves, creating conversations that could cause conflicts.
So, strangers, distant relatives, friends and even our loved ones can cause real emotional damage to us.
But can they?
Are THEY the ones causing us the pain? Or is there anyone more obliviously sinister at work dealing emotional damage that is at the source of it all? A person we mostly ignore?
Now when I am feeling hurt, I recall the below question.
Who hurt you?
And I usually receive a different answer from within.
Mostly me, to be honest.
The mistaken source of emotional damage
Words we hear from others have tremendous power. They can make or break our world by transforming into our thoughts which govern our emotions, speech and actions. But are the words hurled at us responsible for causing emotional damage?
Imagine someone decides to hurt you. The person picks your eyes, the third eye to be precise, to insult you. You obviously have just two eyes. They pass on passive-aggressive remarks, use sarcasm or outright insult you about this third eye. Comments like, you look ugly or weird with that eye are common, or insults passed on under the guise of a joke are too frequent.
You get the point.
What would your response be to these insults?
I only have two eyes. What rubbish are you talking about?
Right? Maybe you use a harsher or softer version of this to reject the claims they are making. It is complete crap, and you know it.
Now replace this ‘third eye’ with something that makes you uneasy when someone talks about it. It could be your weight, the colour of your skin, your height, your intelligence, how you look or dress, the amount of money you make, your age, your parenting style, your relationship with someone, your failures, etc. Imagine they use it at every opportunity, in private or public. The badgering keeps going everywhere.
How would that make you feel?
Seething anger? Rage? Intense desire to hurt the person back? Or maybe sadness? A feeling that the world is cruel? Or it becomes impossible to stop your eyes from flooding with tears.
What changed? Why did THIS cause you emotional damage while the ‘third eye’ example could not?
What was different?
Your belief that it was true.
Emotional damage created through our belief system
Do you notice things that trigger you? Things that send you into an intense emotional upheaval which causes anger, defensiveness or grief to rise to the surface, or you feel like storming away from everyone. You think you are on the verge of losing control, or sometimes you do.
Do you notice that there are certain things that you are sensitive about? A set of vulnerabilities you guard so preciously that only a handful of people are allowed to know about it. Or maybe you don’t trust anyone with it. Things that could be a source of sadness if used against you.
Do you notice how rage takes over you when some topics see the light of day? That anger becomes your defence mechanism. The way you use this anger to numb the grief you never want to feel within yourself.
If we notice, the emotional damage doesn’t come from the other person. They are just the triggers of the pain we already hold inside of us. The belief about what they are saying is true.
In the ‘third eye’ example, as we did not believe it, it failed to cause us pain. However, when we used an example of something already ingrained in our belief system to be true about us, it caused emotional damage to our being.
We get hurt because we give power to the other person to hurt us by believing what they say. That is why we raise our voices, get angry, cry, get depressed, give up, shut off or become distant. We would not give a damn if we did not believe what they said.
It does not mean the person hurling insults at you or passing passive-aggressive remarks is not wrong to do that. The important thing is THEY never had the power to hurt you. That is real learning.
Our belief in what they say to us is at the root of our suffering and the emotional damage.
Common beliefs we hold against ourselves
What are some of the common beliefs we hold against ourselves to hurt us?
I am ugly/fat/skinny/too tall/too short.
People hate me. / No one likes me.
I always fail.
I do not deserve it/him/her.
No one understands me or my pain.
I always hurt people / I push people away / I am unfriendly.
I am awkward/weird.
People judge me for my financial condition/lack of intelligence (that I perceive as truth).
I am not a good child. / I am horrible at being a parent.
I always get blamed for anything that goes wrong. / I am at fault or responsible for everything.
No one cares about me.
.
.
The list can go on.
So, if the other person is not the source of our emotional damage, and our belief in it is what is hurting us, is it our fault? Are we to be blamed for believing in what hurts us?
No! It is NOT your fault.
Even if the other person is not the source of your emotional damage, this does not mean you are at fault
Even if the source of our pain from others is our belief in the things said to us, there is a reason why we believe them in the first place. There is a reason why this belief is created within you and hurts you. It was instilled in us through our past experiences.
Some of these beliefs could be due to our observation of the average person and how we are not conforming to them. So we keep reminding ourselves how we are outliers and unintentionally install a belief through our thoughts. This belief, when verbalised by someone, causes us emotional damage.
Other beliefs could be instilled in us through a few temporary experiences which when magnified by our self-blaming tendencies created permanent false beliefs. A few consecutive failures might make you think YOU are a failure rather than you failed at a particular instance. The tendency to find faults within yourself might make you think you are never good enough for anything or do not deserve something. A few mistakes along the way in life might make you believe you are a horrible person.
Interactions can also create some of these beliefs. It can often happen with people who we trust and seek approval of, that intentionally or unintentionally installed these false beliefs as truths within us. The below could be examples of a few statements said to us and their corresponding underlying beliefs that might get absorbed within us.
No one else seems to fall and get hurt so much. Then why do you always end up bruising your knees? -> You are careless. You are at fault for the pain you feel.
Why can’t you be like XYZ? Such a good boy he is. -> You are never good enough. I am not proud of you.
You know how much he earns. When will you be serious about your life? -> You are a failure.
Why are you such a crybaby? -> You should not be sensitive. Crying when you feel pain is wrong. You are weak.
How can you talk back to elders? Why are you disrespectful? -> Being assertive is wrong. Establishing boundaries to protect yourself or verbalising your needs means disrespecting.
Why are you saying no to the plans? You are boring. -> How you live life is sad as it does not conform to my idea of a happy life.
There could be dozens of such seemingly meaningless taunts when said enough times by people who matter to you or stated when you were in a vulnerable state that can make you believe these incorrect correlations. Our upbringing, life experiences, situations of our lives or things said to us in our childhood form impressions in our minds which create these beliefs. And most of them are absolute crap.
Healing the emotional damages by noticing the patterns
So how can we begin to tackle the false beliefs instilled within us?
First Step
Accept that there is a problem. That there are things that trigger you emotionally. It is okay. You don’t have to suffer through the burden of being perfect. It is human to feel hurt.
The first step to solving anything is accepting that there is a problem in the first place.
Second Step
Find where the problem lies. And the easiest way would be to notice our trigger points.
What statements are you sensitive about? Which things said to you can make you angry or sad? Is there anything that makes you hide away from the world?
For example, statements like below:
You couldn’t do it, didn’t you?
Let me guess, you forgot the one thing you were supposed to do, right?
Or it could be as simple as the below.
Let it be. I will do it myself.
Yes, the triggers could be as simple as these above statements. These seemingly innocent comments that could be the external trigger points could lead you to a single false belief ingrained deep within you. More of it is in the next step.
Third Step
The next step would be to figure out what lies at the root of these statements that are so hurtful to you. When we can find the cause of the problem, we can begin to solve it. For example, the above statements might hurt you because of a single false belief ingrained within you.
I am not good enough.
So any statement questioning our capability might cause us emotional damage and an equivalent emotional outburst.
Fourth Step
The next step is to analyse if this belief is based on any objective reality. And these deeply held beliefs, most of the time, are based on false premises. They are instilled in us during our childhood, the formative years, temporary experiences, through our self-blaming tendencies or due to the interactions with people who mattered to us the most.
Now this will require a bit of digging into our past. But this realisation that the belief is false is enough to break the hold of it that is triggering the emotional damage within us.
Fifth Step
Practice.
Practice noticing the statements that trigger you based on this erroneous belief you found. You might have emotional outbursts first and then, after contemplation, realise that these trigger points were due to a false belief you already figured out.
It is okay.
This realisation itself will reduce the amount of time these statements affect you. And slowly, with practice, you will start realising the ingrained false belief the moment these seemingly hurtful statements are said to you.
And that is how you will have trained yourself to deflect the emotional damage to stop hurting you anymore.
Remember, it is not the other person that has the power to hurt you but your belief in what they say about you that hurts you.