Why Do We Hurt Ourselves?
Like moths to the flame, we fly towards it, again, and again, and again
Hurt people
When I was studying to become a counselor, my teacher had an adage he used all the time “hurt people, hurt people.”
On first hearing it, I have to admit to being guilty of putting some blame onto the statement and I saw that, well yes, people who have experienced trauma will themselves hurt those close to them because they don’t really know how to act best in the world.
I thought I was being compassionate and understanding towards why people hurt other people.
But I missed one glaringly obvious meaning to it. The people ‘hurt people’ hurt the most are themselves.
A burnt child
I came across an Oscar Wilder quote the other day, it’s from his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and comes from a conversation between Lord Henry and Dorian Gray where Lord Henry says “A burnt child loves the fire.”
It turns out that the phrase comes from an older one “A burnt child dreads the fire” but Wilde wanted to play with it, showing that humans are a masochistic steak within themselves as well as a fascination with what is seen as being dangerous.
“The other”
To bring things into a more modern setting, you can flick on your nightly news and you’re likely to see some crime story involving foreigners or immigrants and, of course, the finger is pointed at them for being different.
Since the invention of the mass media, editors have always singled out ‘the other’ At first it was the Irish and Italians (or Catholics) going to America, then it was the freed Black slaves, then it was Asians, the Hispanics, Muslims etc. etc. ad nauseam.
But what the mass media fails to mention is the fact that all of these immigrants had the same thing in common, they were traumatized victims of some god-awful event that meant they had to flee their homeland.
When I first started meeting immigrants fleeing their homelands I always though “well, they must be in a bind if they’ve been forced to come and live in this dump.” 1980s Ireland wasn’t much to be proud of.
It’s not really a wonder a small percentage commit crimes, it’s more of a wonder that more don’t.
Ownership
The fact that more don’t is because those who are able to deal with their problems better are able to take full ownership of their thoughts and actions and don’t fall into the whole hero/victim complex.
But those of us who do see ourselves as victims of circumstance (all the while playing the hero in our minds too) have a tendency to lash out, lose control of our thoughts, say and do things we later regret and end up both hurting those around us and ourselves.
But why do we do this?
The answer I’ve already given. Because we don’t take responsibility for our actions.
We blame other people, we blame our situation, we blame our circumstances, we even blame society and we blame ourselves while paradoxically forgiving ourselves all the while failing to change our behavior and, uh-oh, we’re doomed to repeat it.
And why do we do this?
Because we fail to learn.
This is why we hurt ourselves. We fail to learn that we need to change our behavior, our thoughts, and how we react when we’re in certain situations.
The only way we’re going to learn to change ourselves is to want to change ourselves too.
It’s the hardest step and it’s one that we all make on our own but we owe it to ourselves to be better, to make life easier and to stop hurting ourselves.
Would you like to work on self-sabotage and hurting? Contact me here if you’d like to book a one-on-one life coaching/counseling session with me.
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