Why Does Hurting Others Haunt Us More than Being Hurt?
Hurt is everywhere. We hurt when we suffer, and we hurt when we cause pain.
I’ve been thinking about moments of hurt from my life a lot lately. Maybe it’s midlife reflections, maybe it’s the perimenopausal anxiety my Instagram feed won’t shut up about, or maybe it’s just that I’ve spent months (…ok, years) steeped in writing a book about hurt.
Whatever’s surfacing them, I’ve noticed a theme. The moments that haunt me aren’t the ones where I was hurt. They’re the ones where I suspect I did the hurting.
All hurts have the potential to land on at least two people: the one who was hurt, and the one who did the hurting. We tend to focus on the first. It can actually feel wrong or unfair to dwell on the pain of the second – especially when it’s us. But for the person who was hurt, there is a choice that can be freeing: to forgive.
Forgiveness has always felt like a power move to me. When I can reach it, it’s a way to assert control over my pain and to say, “it’s ok.” I find it empowering. The research suggests the same. In The Science of Revenge, James Kimmel, Jr. argues that revenge functions as an addiction. The act of revenge lights up the same parts of the brain as those activated in drug addiction. Forgiveness, by contrast, produces measurable, healing changes in the brain and body. He says that when we forgive, we’re not only letting someone off the hook, we’re actually releasing ourselves from an addictive cycle.
So why not just forgive? Because the mandate to “just forgive” has a catch. Two, actually.
The first is that forgiveness can be really, really hard to find. Holding it up as a cure for our rage and hurt when it’s entirely out of reach can leave us wondering if we simply aren’t good enough people. If forgiveness were the answer, why would it be so difficult to do, at times downright impossible? “Just forgive” can’t explain why it’s effortless one day and impossible the next.
When it’s easy, great. Forgive, by all means. But when it’s hard, that difficulty might be less a sign of some revenge addiction and more an indication that you have essential needs that haven’t yet been met. The way forward isn’t to grit your teeth and forgive anyway. It’s restorative justice. First we build understanding of the harm and its impacts. Then we look towards putting it right. Only then does forgiveness become possible. And when it does, it comes on all its own, without reaching. I’ve seen it happen in moments even the people involved never dreamed possible – pain and resentment held for decades, suddenly freed through the restorative process, the door to forgiveness finally swinging open.
That’s the first problem with the forgiveness mandate, and restorative justice answers it. The second problem is the one that’s been haunting me. What do we do with the hurt that we don’t own?
Why is it, for instance, that I can move on so easily from the hurt of the partner who left me in a dramatic storm of a breakup, but not the friend I fell out with? I don’t think it’s about whose fault it was, or which one hurt more. I think it’s that my own role isn’t as clear. In the breakup, I was blamelessly hurt, and later received a wholehearted apology that confirmed as much. But with the friend, there’s another perspective that remains unexplored. The ghost of how I have contributed to the hurt keeps the hurt alive. Because now I’m not only forgiving them. I’m stuck wondering whether I can forgive myself.
I think this is the difference. When I’m the one who is hurt, I own the pain. I can do with it what I want. Sometimes forgiving is easy, sometimes it’s hard, but either way, it’s mine to work through. When the pain belongs to someone else, and when I’m the one who’s caused it, I no longer own their hurt, and I don’t own their forgiveness either. Who am I to forgive myself for someone else’s pain? It isn’t my hurt, so it doesn’t feel like my forgiveness to give. Forgiveness was a power move when the pain was mine. Now it’s the opposite. That loss of control is what makes it so much harder to wrestle with.
So we hold ourselves hostage to it. The hurt, left there, can evolve into shame, which can grow our hurt into something far worse. Donald Nathanson’s Compass of Shame describes four ways we respond when we can’t work through our shame: we withdraw, we attack ourselves, we attack others, or we avoid. Each is a way of managing the shame without addressing the source. The inability to forgive ourselves can pull us toward any of these poles. We wind up hiding from the person we hurt, damaging our self-esteem, lashing out, or pretending the harm never happened at all. Every one of these paths only amplifies the hurt.
But forgiving ourselves doesn’t mean closing ourselves off to caring about the hurt we caused. It isn’t telling ourselves “it’s ok.” It means refusing to let shame pile more damage on top of the original injury. It means staying open to the person we hurt, instead of drowning in ourselves.
That openness is the same restorative approach. The same key that opens the first door. We start by recognising our own pain, rather than ignoring or running away from it. We try to understand it, what caused us to act the way we did, and to acknowledge the moments we got it wrong – both the pain we caused and the pain we carry. Then, we look for a way to repair it: the apology, the invitation to hear how it affected the other person, and the big work of learning, growing, and changing so we don’t repeat the same mistakes. Sometimes that means finding the courage to reach out to the person we hurt to begin doing the work of actually deserving their forgiveness. Sometimes, it’s too late, or they’re not ready or able, we’ll have to do that work without them.
We may not be able to forgive the hurt that doesn’t live in us. But we may be able to repair the hurt that does.