What NOT to Do When Someone You Love Hurts You
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Jennifer Cavalleri in “Love Story”
I hope everyone rolled their eyes when Ali MacGraw said these words in the 1970 film adaptation of Erich Segal’s book, “Love Story.” C’mon, Ali, really?? Even when I watched this movie as a child in the 80s, I thought, “That doesn’t seem right….”
Loved ones aren’t perfect, and sometimes they step on each other’s toes (literally and metaphorically). When you hurt someone you love, it only makes sense to say you’re sorry. But when people are in an abusive relationship, victims know there will be no apology forthcoming, whether the pain the abuser inflicted was intentional or not.
For many reasons, it’s not easy for victims to just up and leave their abusers, and they sometimes rationalize why they stay. Three common rationalizations victims use to explain why they disregard the pain caused by their loved one are:
What they did didn’t hurt me.
What they did shouldn’t have hurt me.
They didn’t mean to hurt me.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these ideas.
What they did didn’t hurt me.
Victims telling themselves, “What they did didn’t hurt me,” is a tactic to shield themselves from the idea that they could be hurt by their abuser. Imagine a teenage boy refusing to cry as his father beats him with a belt, or a man staring stony faced into the eyes of his wife as she tells him he’s worthless, incompetent, and a terrible husband. “They can’t hurt me,” they tell themselves. But when you share a connection with someone – including a parent-child connection, or romantic connection – that means you cannot be completely detached from the other person having an emotional impact on you.
When victims of abuse don’t acknowledge the pain that someone has caused, they are ignoring a critical Alarm Emotion that is meant to alert them to a malfunction in their life. By ignoring the alarm, they lose the opportunity to root out the problem and to find a solution, leaving them in a compromised position; just because they “don’t feel” the pain, doesn’t mean they’re not sustaining injuries.
The idea of not feeling pain reminds me of a medical condition called congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA), whose sufferers are unable to feel pain or temperature. CIPA might sound like a superpower, but the inability to feel pain and temperature often leads to repeated severe injuries. Repeated trauma can then lead to chronic conditions, ones that would have been avoided if a person was able to feel pain and learned to avoid the cause of injury.
For example, imagine someone who puts their hand on a hot stove and doesn’t feel any pain: their flesh will still burn, whether they feel it or not. If they don’t get treatment for the injury, their hand can end up infected, require amputation, cause sepsis, etc. – it doesn’t matter whether they felt the pain, the damage was done.
This is the same for a child being beaten with a belt: they’ll still have welts and bruising and bleeding whether or not they acknowledge they’re in pain. Or the husband who is verbally abused by his wife: he will still suffer from emotional damage whether he admits it or not. They may not allow the pain to enter their consciousness, but their bodies still perceive the injuries. (Side note: there is no difference between physical injuries and emotional injuries – all injuries have an effect on both mind and body.)
Pretending an injury doesn’t hurt doesn’t prevent the damage done; it merely prevents seeking treatment for the injury and learning how to avoid injury in the future. Even worse, it may cause an abuser to go even harder at their victim so that they know they’ve inflicted pain. These repeated incidents of trauma can then lead to chronic conditions such as C-PTSD.
By acknowledging that they’ve been hurt by their abuser, a victim can move on to assess the situation and figure out a way to avoid further injury. Remember, Alarm Emotions are there to tell us that a problem exists, and to prompt us to find a solution.
What they did shouldn’t have hurt me.
When a victim thinks, “What they did shouldn’t have hurt me,” it is the ultimate in self-blame: a victim takes responsibility for their own pain because the behavior of their abuser “should not” have hurt. “So my husband berated me in front of his entire family. But what do we teach kids about sticks and stones? Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Why do I care? They were just words. I’m being overly sensitive.”
This internal monologue is the result of the victim having internalized the abuser’s voice, and now the abuser can diminish their victim without even having to say a word. She knows from past experiences that expressing her upset over his behavior will not stop him from repeating it; on the contrary, confronting him might spark an even bigger fight. Worse yet, if the victim adopts the abuser’s words as their own, the abuser is let off the hook completely for having inflicted any pain at all.
When a victim thinks to themself, “What my abuser did shouldn’t have hurt me,” at least they are able to acknowledge their pain. They may even find a way to push away the pain, but they stop short of looking for a solution to avoid suffering the same pain in the future. This tactic comes straight from the Snake Brain: I have survived this before, and I can survive it again. There’s no need to do anything different.
We need to remember that Alarm Emotions are there to tell us that a problem exists in the situation we’re in, and that we need to engage our Sage Brains to look for the source of the pain so that we can confront it. There’s no such thing as “shouldn’t have hurt” – if someone feels hurt, that’s enough of a sign that something must be done.
Any time someone feels pain, it’s worth examining where those feelings come from. In our example, the victim needs to look for the lie that the abuser told about why she shouldn’t have felt hurt. Usually, the abuser’s defense is along the lines of, “I was just being honest.” Think back to what they said. Was any of it true? Of course not! So her pain is derived from her “loved one” accusing her of something that is not true, of thinking lowly of her.
And while it may have felt humiliating to endure this in front of family, the abuser is the one who should have been mortified, not her. In fact, a normal, healthy family would not tolerate this type of behavior from one of their members and would stand up for the person being attacked!
They didn’t mean to hurt me.
Another way we excuse the abusive behavior of a loved one is to say to ourselves, “They didn’t mean to hurt me.” A lot of abusive parents were themselves victims of abuse as children, and because their Snake Brain is stuck on pattern repetition, they think, “I survived my upbringing – and I turned out great! – so I will parent my child the way I was parented.” This is typical of punitive parents who either dole out heavy punishment or withhold care when their children do not comply with their demands.
When sympathetic children consider the past their abusive parents had to endure, there is a natural tendency to conclude, “They didn’t mean to hurt me, they thought they were doing this for my own good.” They want to give the person who hurt them the benefit of the doubt that there was no malintent.
But if a bad driver accidentally rolls over your foot and breaks your toes, their intent hardly matters when trying to heal your broken toes! If a person didn’t mean to hurt you, then you should be able to tell them that they did, and they will apologize and rectify the situation. Try this out: if someone you love hurts you, say, “Hey, when you did this, it hurt me,” and see how they react. People who have made an honest mistake will apologize and work to make things right and heal the injury.
Abusers, on the other hand, will deflect blame and not take any responsibility for the pain they caused, saying things like, “You’re overreacting. You’re too sensitive. You’re gonna have to toughen up or you’re never going to survive in this world. I’m doing this for your own good, you’ll thank me one day.” They are indifferent to the pain their words or actions cause others.
Not everyone who causes pain is an abuser. But just like the coverup is often worse than the crime, the abuse is often exposed in defense of the original transgression.
Conclusion
It’s hard to accept that someone you love hurt you. But we must heed the alarm of pain to examine the problem it’s alerting us to if we want to prevent further injury to our peace and happiness.
