Hurt people hurt people. But why do we always hurt the ones we love the most?
Whether we like it or not, everyone who is capable of love is also capable of emotionally abusing the people they love. That’s not because all people have cruel intentions. That’s because when you love deeply, with all of your heart, and this love is mutual, you expose yourself and become vulnerable. And unfortunately, this vulnerability makes you an easy target.
Furthermore, there is a high chance we might hurt the ones we love if we have been hurt in the past.
If you have suffered an emotional trauma in your childhood, you might unconsciously be passing on this pain pattern into your relationships. And you may not realize that you’re trying to punish your partner for the things someone else did to you in the past. Oftentimes, when we act out of anger, we hurt people we never thought we would hurt.
Childhood traumas are so damaging, they can hunt you throughout your whole life. As kids, we don’t question anything our parents do because we unconditionally believe in everything they do and say. We don’t understand that they might be a little damaged or a little hurt. We perceive anything they do, and we often follow their example, even if we don’t do it intentionally.
One day we just wake up, all grown up and mature, and we realize we have become an exact copy of the people who raised us.
For instance, if you grew up with a lot of distance in your childhood, you avoid closeness and intimacy as an adult. Or if there was an intense feeling of chaos and drama around you, when you grow up, you can’t perceive harmony and silence as something normal. Therefore, you constantly trigger these familiar feelings of distance, chaos, or drama in your relationships, even if you don’t realize you’re doing it.
The truth is, we accept the love we think we deserve. And we learn how lovable we are, only by interacting with our loved ones. Hence, if you judge how lovable you are based on someone’s abusive, damaging kind of love, you will most probably have an unreliable view of yourself as a person who can love and be loved.
Unfortunately, most of the time it’s exactly like that. Someone couldn’t love us the way we truly deserved. Someone couldn’t see our worth. And this someone made us believe we are not good enough to be passionately loved. They made us believe love is nothing but a series of pain and emotional abuse.
That’s why when someone better crosses our paths, we can’t see their worth because our perception of love has been brutally damaged.
We tend to use anger and resentment to punish the people we love, not because of something they did, but because we still haven’t healed from our own issues.
Sadly, that’s why many relationships with great potential fall apart. We pass our past issues on the people that have nothing to do with them.
Moreover, we unintentionally hurt them because we don’t know how to properly love them.
Sometimes, even if we do realize that our actions are hurting our loved ones, we simply can’t figure out how to change our behavior. The pattern of hurting the people we love has been deeply incremented in our minds, and there is often nothing we can do about it.
Or at least, we believe there is nothing we could do. But there is. We just have to come to the realization that the people we love now have nothing to do with the ones who hurt us before. And even if they do, we shouldn’t treat them the same way someone else mistreated us.
You are powerful enough to break the chain of emotional abuse.
You can turn anger into sympathy, cruelty into compassion, and hatred into tenderness. All you need is a little courage to accept the pain and start healing from it, instead of passing it to someone else. You are able to love and be loved without hurt.
