How Your Pain Hurts Others

Welcome to expand your life podcast. This is Jc Jones and you’re listening to episode 43.

Welcome back. Everyone. Hope you had a great week today. We’re going to talk a little bit about the concept that we’ve all heard before, and that is the statement that hurt people, hurt people. You’ve probably heard it many times or read it many times in different books in the past. Every time I’ve ever heard that statement, it just has always made me angry. And I think it probably does a lot of people who feel like that statement puts all people who have ever been hurt into a bucket where they hurt other people.

I hear that statement being used and never hearing anyone say anything to negate that impression that it gives or to explain it in a way that makes sense to me. I’ve always felt like it’s been used incorrectly. Hurt people, hurt people. What that means to me is that if you’re hurt, you’re going to hurt someone else.

And my thoughts on that are that sure, people who hurt others are hurt themselves, but not all hurt people hurt people. Not all hurt people, go out and do things to hurt others. My idea was, you know, child molesters might’ve been hurt or hurting themselves, but not all people that are molested go out and molest other people simply because they’re hurt. I don’t know.

I don’t know if I’ve really explained what I mean by this. Hopefully I have, I was just very offended as someone who grew up being abused as a child and really going out of my way to not hurt others because of whatever I may or may not have experienced in my past anytime in my life where I’ve been hurt. The last thing I want to do is to put that pain on someone else. And I feel like the majority of people who have been hurt probably feel the same way.

But as I was thinking about that this week, especially after last week’s episode, I suddenly realized that that the concept really is true. I’ll share with you a little bit about my feelings on that.

If you’ve been hurt in the past and you haven’t been able to, or haven’t chosen to do any kind of healing work to heal that hurt chances are you’ve probably been stuffing that hurt or ignoring it or something along those lines in order to deal with it.

It’s really common for us not to want to have to deal with painful things that have happened in our past. And so we ignore them or pretend like they’re not there. But as I look back on my life, the things that have created hurt or pain in me have affected how I have acted in my life. The choices I’ve made. The reactions that I have to certain things. The way that I interact with others.

I’ll share some of those in a minute, but it made me aware that even the small ways that you react in a negative way because of the circumstances of your past can be harmful to others. It might be a little bit more of a motivator to deal with those things and to start healing from them so that you can create something new. You can keep from hurting others around you.

Sometimes we’re not even aware that we’re doing it until we take the time to reflect on how our actions or inactions are, or our reactions are affecting those around us. So it’s necessary to do that healing work so that you’re not continuing to hurt those that you’re around or your loved ones or your friends or your coworkers, or even strangers that you come into contact with.

And if you are the type of person that doesn’t want others to feel the pain that you have felt, you feel like you want to go out of your way to create something different. You’re going to face your fears. You’re going to face your pain, so you can give something more to those that you love. More than what you’ve received. You want to give them all of the things that you wish you had had, whether it’s your children or your spouse.

Now I’ll share some examples from my past.

Because I wasn’t shown affection or shown love growing up, I really didn’t know how to express it to my kids when I started having children. It was very uncomfortable for me to start with. I had to really push through that to find a comfortable way of showing them affection and showing them love. I pretty much had to learn on the job as you might say, I did love them. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was how do I show them? But because that was such a huge thing for me at the time, it didn’t take me a whole long time to figure that out. That was something that was really important for me to figure out quickly. And so I learned a way of showing affection and showing love to my children.

But it took me a lot longer to do some of the little things like telling them I love them. There were quite a few years from the time they were born to the time I actually started saying those words that I didn’t tell them. It didn’t even enter my mind. You know, I showed them affection. I showed them how much I love them by the things I did and the interactions we had, but I didn’t say the words. And so that really started bothering me, you know, a few years into starting to have my kids. And so I realized that that’s not what I want for my children. I want my children to be free to hear it. Not being uncomfortable with it. Not have the same issues with it as I had.

And so I just forced myself to start saying it. And it was really uncomfortable to begin with. I felt embarrassed. I felt weird. But over time it became more comfortable and it became natural.

Another example is people who are hurt by the people that they view as being the people who should ultimately be the ones that do love them. When you’re hurt by a parent or a family member or anyone in your life that you consider someone who’s supposed to love you or protect you.

A lot of times, you’ll put up walls over the years to prevent being hurt by others. And that’s one thing that I did for many years that I wasn’t even aware of. I tended to keep people at a distance. I was friendly. I was nice. I was kind, but I was also very distant in some respects, kind of an outlier. You know, you can blame it on being shy or an introvert or whatever, but if you really question your motives behind it, you’ll see whether or not it really is something that is a reflection of the hurt that you aren’t dealing with.

And if you’re not dealing with your pain, dealing with your past, dealing with anything that makes you super unhappy right now at this point in time in your life, it affects all of your relationships. It affects your relationship with your spouse, your children, your coworkers, your friends. It changes how you act and react with other people around you. It affects your attitude.

We don’t even realize it, but it really does.

Think of how your satisfaction in life or lack of it is affecting those around you. Instead of dwelling on just the fact that you are unsatisfied with your life, ask yourself how it’s affecting those around you, because of how it makes you behave.

And even the common self-destructive behaviors that we have when we’re having problems coping to help us cope, whether it’s food, alcohol, drugs, spending all your time on the internet or on the phone or whatever it might be, whatever your coping mechanism might be. How does that affect those around you?

So yeah, not dealing with and healing your pain does cause problems for everyone around you. You do hurt people if you’re hurting and you’re not healing from your pain. If you’re hurting and you’re just stuffing it, you’re hurting those around you. Sometimes that hurt come out in anger or you’re aggressive with others, or you feel like you need to attack others before you’re attacked. Sometimes acting that way makes you feel stronger, more in control,

But it all stems from your hurt, your pain, and you’re hurting others with it. Like I said, this is something that I was thinking about because of the last podcast I was doing. And it really made me question some of the things that I’ve done in the past, and just the realization of how important it is to deal with past hurts and past pain.

I’d really like to encourage you to think about seeking some help for it. A good place you can start is something that I’ll recommend to you to start with is a podcast by Shyla Cash called Grow, Heal, Change, Coaching Podcast. Excellent, excellent podcast. Word of warning though, if you’re having any issues dealing with your past, it might piss you off a little bit here and there. But only because it strikes a nerve because there’s something in you that wants to come out.

She’s got a lot of great episodes on there, and I highly recommend listening to her.

Anyway, I thank you for being patient with me. This isn’t a personal development type of subject per se, but I think anything that is holding us back, anything that is keeping us from growing to our full potential and limiting us is important to discuss when it comes to personal development. And this is a big one for people.

So check out the podcast by Shyla Cash. Start thinking about gaining some freedom from those things that have kept you in bondage.

Next week, we’ll get back on the regular schedule of personal development podcasts that I had planned. So next week we’ll be talking about the 6 Pillars of Personal Development. The 6 things, 6 steps that will get you from point A to point B. It’s the roadmap to achieving anything from organizing your house, to getting a dream job.

So check back next week for that and be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you’ll get updates and notifications when new episodes are released.

Have a great week. Bye for now.