We All Need To Talk About Our Pain

There is no shame in being hurt and expressing how it makes us feel—processing your pain makes you stronger and healthier.

Recently I had someone close to me break my trust and I was immensely hurt by it. This wasn’t the first time this year I have been hurt by someone close to me. Relationships are built on trust and when you break that trust it is hard to gain it back.

I have every right to be angry, and by all accounts, I should be, but I am not.

I don’t know if it is because my son has bipolar or I am submerged in this mental health world but I find when someone has hurt me I try to figure out why it occurred and where it stems from.

Theory 1: No one would intentionally hurt someone they care about.

My theory is that no one would intentionally hurt someone they care about. I’d like to believe there are very few people in this world who actually have malicious intent. So why do people hurt the ones they love? Well, judging from all my past experiences, I would have to say that we always hurt the ones we care about the most because we feel safest with them. Those who care about us the most allow us to be our most vulnerable and love us even when we are broken. I think we feel they truly won’t abandon us at our lowest point.

Theory 2: People don’t deal with their bad past experiences properly.

My other theory is that people don’t deal with their bad past experiences—those that have affected them the most and make them who they are. Not dealing with pain in your life will manifest into the people we become. How many times have you heard someone say “but it doesn’t bother me.” If it didn’t bother you why are they bringing it up in the first place? It obviously bothers them. People just simply don’t talk about the things that have affected them the most in their life. They keep it buried until it comes out in negative ways like drinking, fighting, being promiscuous, hurting the people closest to them, or self-sabotaging relationships. We will find ourselves in a constant state of emotional turmoil. It turns out that those things we think don’t bother us are probably what influences us the most, especially if it occurred during childhood.

My whole point to this is we just need to talk about the pain. There is no shame in being hurt and expressing how it makes us feel. We all get hurt at different points in our lives. Some will hurt more than others. Some will heal quickly from the pain and others will continue to suffer. It doesn’t matter if you have been hurt by friends, lovers, parents, siblings, or children—the pain is real. We can deflect the pain through burying ourselves in activities like working out or getting involved in projects, but it never really goes away. It is only temporarily compartmentalized, sitting and waiting for something to open it like a Pandora’s Box.

We are not any tougher if we carry around hurt and we won’t be awarded a superhero cape for all the bad things we have gone through. Asking for help doesn’t make you weak, it makes you human. Processing your pain makes you stronger and healthier. Showing vulnerability allows us strength. We need to let the pain out because if we don’t we could risk losing something very special in our lives and ultimately becoming someone we don’t want to be.

Maybe because I have been through so much in my life I empathize with people more than most. I still want to see the good in people even after they hurt me. No one is that broken that they shouldn’t be loved, even when holding onto pain can causes you to feel worthless and unlovable. We need to help them pick up the pieces and glue them back together.

I don’t know if I will ever trust those again who have hurt me, but I will continue to love them through my own pain until they can learn to love themselves. I see them, not for what they have become, but for who they really are. My love is unconditional. I pray they make peace with the past and learn to move forward with a pure heart.