Dealing with Hurt

[Bill]

I think I may have covered this subject before but I feel it’s worth covering again because it seems to be a common cause of anxiety.

These are a few things I've learnt.

We are often born with a sensitive nature so we are often affected by other peoples behaviour towards us, especially from those we are closest to such as our parents and relatives. Mistreatment can take different forms. It could be physical or emotional. It could be belittling or being abandoned etc.

If therefore we are mistreated from a young age and the hurts and pains we experience are suppressed and not released in the correct way, we often develop different forms of anxiety in later life. Often though, we are unaware that the mistreatment in our past and our present day anxieties are linked.

My anxieties started a long ago in my past and different events have contributed to them but when I spoke to a counsellor about my anxieties and explained to her about how my wife treated me in recent years due to her illness, she said to me, well, actually you’ve been emotionally abused even if it wasn’t intentional. She then explained how my abuse and anxieties such as my panic attacks were connected. This though is just the most recent contributing part to my puzzle.

When we experience hurt, we tend to absorb and lock the feelings up because we don’t know how to deal with them. This suppression of emotion then causes feelings of anger and frustration. We become stressed and irritable which often leads to a depressed state because we feel trapped by our emotions.

Together with this, the constant belittling and other forms of mistreatment create a sense of low self esteem. We feel worthless and unloved which lead us to hating ourselves for what we feel we are and blaming ourselves instead of those at fault. Sometimes it can lead to self harming as a negative method to release the pain together with feeling that we must be a bad person so we need to punish ourselves just as others have punished us in the past when in reality we’re kind caring people.

However, in another way hurt can affect us, we can begin to create barriers in an attempt to protect ourselves from being hurt because of the fear previous hurts have created. This “safe” world where we only rely on ourselves and cope alone because of not feeling able to trust people because we feel they’ll always let us down as others have before can also create anxiety and panic within us because our fear isolates ourselves from others.

Just as in so many other ways, once we feel restricted by fear, our whole outlook on life and interactions can be affected so that there is a knock on effect.

Living though means experiencing hurt because it’s unavoidable so we have to learn a better way of dealing with it. This is where a counsellor can help us to release these emotions to allow healing within. They help us to learn for ourselves how to come to terms with our past, to accept rather than confront and to lower barriers to live a more relaxed approach to life.

Counselling brings suppressed hurt that we’ve placed in a box and kept bottled to the surface which often means that counselling can make us feel worse before we begin to feel better. Therefore, since we’ve suffered for so long and become so used to suppressing hurt, it can take a long time to heal. Understanding the causes to our anxieties can though be a first step to recovery.

[sagey]

Hi Bill, lots of people have read your post though no one has responded, possibly like me they have discovered lots of things to think about but haven't the energy to reply !
It made me think about an incident in my garden last september. I was mowing the lawn and a face appeared over the fence, it wasn't my neighbour but a guest she had staying. My intial reaction was , great, a friendly greeting, passing the time on a sunny day and here's me , very socially isolated and really pleased for some social interaction. I stopped my mower to hear what he had to say, me ready and willing for a friendly gardeners exchange, and all he did was start a discourse about the overgrown ivy from our adjoining boundary fence which he insisted was growing from my side of the fence and that I should remove it - sheesh, I was really taken aback but I heard him out and said I would bear his comments in mind, though I'd sooner have told him to stick the ivy where the sun don't shine !
Afterwards I thought how typical it was of me to accept an admonishment and critizisism (?) in such a meek and accepting manner, I'm so used to being at fault, being rubbish at life, not being able to get on with living like everyone else, always being defeated, always acknowledging my inferiority.
I finished mowing the grass before going indoors and exploding to my o/h about the effing cheek of the bloke who didn't even live there but was telling me what to do in my garden and I stood there like a prune, very politely being subservient to him.
I discovered in January that my neighour was selling the house and then I could understand that her friend was probably in the know about this and trying to assist her in presenting a tidy garden. Her garden has always been imaculate and she has a bloke in for 2 hours a week for mowing and weeding.
Anyway, I'm going off track now and not helping your thread.
This incident caused me hurt, anger and increased my low self-esteem because I'd been too polite and compliant to call the bloke a t****r and tell him to get out of my anxiety, quit interupting my recovery and give me a chance to present myself to the world as a worthy human being.
If any other incident like that should take place I'm just going to let rip and say "I've had enough and I won't let you make life worse for me ".

[Bill]

Thank you for the reply Sagey.

This is speaking "generally".

I think there are 2 ways we often react when we feel people are getting us.

Sometimes we take their comments personally and react back because they've touched on something we're sensitive about so we zap them as if they've touched a "live wire" in us. Sometimes though, they didn't actually mean to upset us. It was just the way we took it because sometimes we tend to look for people to attack us because that's how people have always treated us in the past. However, that's not to say people do also actually mean to hurt us.

The other way we often deal with hurt, is to take what was said personally but not react back. Instead though, we absorb the hurt and beat ourselves up for not standing up to them.

If we react back, the incident then becomes conflict. If they meant to hurt us, the conflict could become a slanging match or worse and we'll end up feeling more hurt and stressed out due to the tension it's caused.

If they didn't mean to hurt us, we can up feeling guilty for attacking them and so beat ourselves up as a consequence for reacting as we did.

If we don't react back, we can still beat ourselves up for feeling we weren't assertive enough by allowing them to walk all over us.

When we feel hurt, if we don't tackle it in the right way, we can either stress ourselves out through conflict or absorb it and feel weak. Either way will cause more anxiety.

There is however a third way to dealing with hurt that doesn't cause conflict or stress which doesn't add to our anxiety.

This third way is to create a "thick skin" and allow what we feel are hurtful comments to go through us without causing a reaction within us.

Of course we should be assertive and stand up for ourselves when we feel in the right, and everyone should accept when they're in the wrong. We need to be firm but not beat ourselves up when we make mistakes.

If someone is right in what they say, then I feel we should accept and be positive by doing what we can to make things better rather than being negative by beating ourselves up.

If they're wrong, then I feel it's best to try diplomacy but if things get heated then to walk away without their opinions affecting us by reminding ourselves we are in the right.

The general rule I use is to try and avoid conflict and don't absorb hurt either but instead be firm and allow others bad opinions of us to go through us so that they don't cause us harm, either from them or to ourselves.

[sheba2]

Hi Bill

Your post put me in mind of that old saying, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.'

How untrue is that. I have always taken hurtful comments to heart. When I was little my mum was always telling me to stand up for myself etc. It just made me feel more inadequate. like I was a failure. This has led me to always having a low self esteem and its normal for me to beat myself up about this. I'm going to have a think about what you've said and see how much relates to what I am doing that way I may be able to change things.

[Bill]

Hello Sheba,

I think hurtful words will always affect us to some extent about it's about damage limitation so that we don't allow people to add to our anxieties.

I just feel we need to try to avoid deep arguments and not dwell on hurtful words but be more relaxed in our approach to prevent others twisting up our insides.

If we allow others words to affect us, then we're allowing them to ruin our lives so we have to learn how to defend ourselves without flying off the handle or absorbing because of our sensitivity.

Perhaps creating a thick skin is too strong a term because instead of hurtful comments bouncing off us, we need to learn how to let them go through us by not dwelling on them.

The same really about all our worrying thoughts. The more we dwell on them, the worse we feel.

[bluebottle]

Boundaries, that is the answer, but its very hard to enforce them when your not used to doing it, and its very easy to rip them down when you just want the horrible uncomfortable feelings to just stop. So we often just give in because the anxiety is too much to stand. Also we think everyone else knows better than us, so if they are hurtful or say something we don't like we tend to take it as gospel. Setting boundaries and enforcing them protects us, but it isn't an overnight thing. I am still really hurt if a friend says something hurtful, but that is my self-esteem and I need to work on that. Guilt too is hard to bare. But unless you intentionally hurt someone then your guilt is misplaced. Sorry if I've waffled on, but a lot of these things are connected.