H

Heal your Hurts

Do you bear grudges? Do you remember every slight, or insult, or rude deed that has been thrown at you and save

them in your memory bank? Do you plan your revenge on all those who have ever done you a mis-service? Can you go into minute detail as you plot your revenge and see the fall from grace of the person or persons who have caused your misery? Do you act out your revenge? If you do, do you really get a sense of satisfaction from it or does it leave a hollow feeling or a feeling that it didn’t quite do what you’d hoped it would.

We all get hurt! Life is all about getting hurt, brushing ourselves off, getting back up and learning from it. Some people seem to instinctively look for the lesson in the hurt, and then use that to move forward and help others. Other people, just as the hurt scabs over, pick at it and open the wound again, reliving the pain, almost wallowing in the misery, looking for someone to feel sorry for them and adding any lack of sympathy to the list of slights. They keep in doing it, over and over until the scab eventually disappears, but the hurt and misery remains like a mental scar. These are the people who take great joy in telling you how they or are going to “make them pay” for, or “got back at” whoever caused their misery. Most of us know one or two people like that and when we see them coming, we look for escape routes to avoid talking to them.

Carrying these type of grudges and hurts around becomes tiring. Getting on with life then becomes difficult as all our energy is focused on the pain we are feeling. But sometimes major hurts can be difficult to get over and we sometime sink into the mire of our own misery. Relationships end, friends fall out, we lose jobs, imagined insults. All of these cause hurt and pain. In fact anything that we haven’t had closure on will cause us some form of pain. We can suppress it, but it will keep popping up looking for resolution and until we acknowledge and deal with it, it will keep doing so. If we get caught up in the blame game we can end up escalating it into a huge blow-out where people stop communicating altogether and the friends and family stuck in the middle are left walking on egg-shells.

So, acknowledging our hurts is the first step in overcoming them. Once we acknowledge that we’ve allowed ourself to be hurt in the first place, we can then start to deal with it.

The exception of course is when someone dies. Of course it hurts when someone dies, but to refuse to move forward with your life is not reasonable. When you die – and we all will at some point – do you want your nearest and dearest to sit down and wallow in their misery or do you want them to grieve and then move on, bringing all their happy memories with them? I recently went to the funeral of a much-loved uncle. There was a huge attendance at his funeraland I yet hardly saw anyone cry.  Now it’s not that we weren’t sad that he died, it was that we all

remembered how nice a man he was and all the nice or funny or smart things he would say or do. On the other side of the coin when my last relationship broke up I felt dejected and abandoned and completely resentful. I’d given years to this relationship and couldn’t understand how he could walk away from it. I allowed that resentment get a hold on my life and it held me back for a few years, until one day I realised the only one suffering was me. He had moved on with his life and I was standing still, looking backwards, yearning for what once was. I looked at where I was in life, how much more I could do for myself and where I actually wanted to be and I realised I didn’t want to be lugging the baggage of something that belonged in my past around with me into my future. That brought the closure I needed to heal and then move on. It is amazing how once we realise how much holding onto a hurt and carrying it around with us, holds us back from doing what we want, we are impatient to just let go and move forward. I found making goals and looking forward helped me to actually move forward. But the biggest thing of all was realising that the only person hurting was me!