Hurt People Hurt People

 

One day, I had a conversation with an acquaintance.  Out of nowhere, the tone of the conversation went from amicable to mean-spirited.  One minute, we were friendly, and the next minute, he was lashing out at me for seemingly no reason.

“Hurt people hurt people, Jennie,” he said with a shrug by way of explanation, staring at me defiantly, waiting for me to disagree.  I didn’t know at the time that he was quoting a sentiment that’s been said by a lot of people in a lot of forums.  I thought it was a clever turn of phrase, his clever turn of phrase.  But regardless of its origins, something felt wrong about his use of this as a justification for why he had just said something biting, something hurtful.

The thing is, it’s not an excuse.  It’s not a rationale.  It’s a statement of responsibility.  Because once you acknowledge that the reason you have a desire to make someone else hurt is that you, yourself, are hurting, you have a lot of power to perpetuate or end that chain.  If Billy has a broken heart and lashes out at Suzy, who then snips sarcastically at Amy, who invalidates Anthony, who kicks his dog, who bites the mailman…. Well, you get the point.  It goes on forever, and we then live in a world where people are forever hurting others.

But this is also a recognition that can be wielded for the power of good.  If you can find the emotional distance from your impulse to react to someone who, perhaps, did not mean to make you upset, then you have the ability to remind yourself of that simple and catchy phrase: Hurt people hurt people.  And then, when you say, “I, myself, am a hurt person in this moment,” you own that feeling.  When you own the feeling, it’s difficult to blame someone else unless they truly meant to hurt you. 

And then you have the power to end that cycle.  You can acknowledge your own pain, process it as a thing separate from your interaction in the moment, and respond more calmly.  If you were impulsive and acted on that pain before processing it, you can own it as your own and apologize, letting the person know that it had nothing to do with them. 

But what if the person who hurt you DID intend to hurt your feelings?  Well then you can use this frame of thought to understand their actions from a place of their pain.  You can think, “they’re being cruel to me because they’re in pain, not because they’re inherently mean or awful” and respond to that pain instead of the cruelty. 

If enough people saw this point of view, thought to themselves, “hurt people hurt people” and followed it with the self-reflective thought, “what can I do about it?” there would be a lot fewer hurt people to hurt other people in the future.  The effect would trickle down, and pretty soon everyone would be kinder to each other.  Perhaps this is naively utopian.  Maybe it’s unrealistic on a large scale.  But the chance that as an individual, we can take the first step towards a kinder world…

Well that’s a very powerful thing.