By. Ran
People who are hurting, tend to hurt other people. But why do we always hurt the ones we love the most?
Being capable of love means being capable of hurting and mentally abusing the people we love. Not because we have cruel intentions; but because we reach our most vulnerable state when we love and we get to see people we love at their most vulnerable state. It is this vulnerability that makes you an easy target.
And if you have been hurt before, chances are that you will hurt the ones you love in the future. If you have had traumatic experiences in your childhood, you might be passing them into your relationship. You might punish your partner for the things that happened to you in the past and you might not even be aware that you are doing so. Childhood trauma lasts long; we don’t realize that our parents must have been a little broken and hurt too. We don’t realize that what they did may stem from their own traumas and we let ourselves be victims of childhood trauma for lengthy periods. And acting on these traumas, we hurt the people we thought we would never hurt – the people we love the most.
One day, we wake up and realize that we have become the people who raised us. Having grown up with a lot of distance in your childhood, you avoid closeness and intimacy as an adult. Having grown up with an intense feeling of chaos and drama around you as a child, now you can’t perceive harmony and calmness as something normal. So you try to trigger the familiar feelings of chaos and drama in your relationships; and the worst part is, you don’t even realize you’re doing it.
We accept the love we think we deserve. And if we judge how lovable we are by the love we deserve from someone abusive, someone who has been hurt in their past, we will have an unreliable view of ourselves as individuals. And this is what happens in most cases. When someone fails to treat us the way we should be treated, we tend to devalue ourselves, and to underestimate ourselves. Based on that experience, we think that true love is hurtful. 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 use anger and resentment because we haven’t been able to deal with our own issues yet.
And we hurt them unintentionally. Sometimes, even if we are aware of the fact that we are hurting the ones we love, we cannot change our behavior because we fail to break the pattern of hurting the ones we love.
And we believe that there is nothing we can do. But the truth is, we just have to understand that the people we love have nothing to do with the people who hurt us. That is all. We are powerful enough to break the chain of emotional abuse. And we are able to love and be loved without hurting or getting hurt.
