Why we hurt those we love? And why we allow them to hurt us as well? What is it in us that makes us prone to inflicting pain onto people we love and care about the most?
Sometimes, even a small lie from the person we love can hurt like hell and break our heart in a matter of seconds. However, there is a difference between someone intentionally hurting you and someone who does it without thinking. The former one doesn’t love you because you cannot hurt on purpose the one you love.
Most of the time, people act hurtful towards their loved ones because they have a void within themselves. They are hurting inside and that’s why they hurt others.
Here’s what The Relationship Institute said about this issue:
“So what can we do to stop hurting the one we love? We all have to take responsibility for getting clear and resolving our own emotional hurts from the past. We need to learn how to make it safe for our partners to express how they feel. We need to learn how to create a loving presence where we genuinely listen and validate our partners’ experience.
We need to learn how to express feelings in ways that bring us closer, not in ways that create more distance and hurt. We may need to do some work together to understand how and why we trigger each other to lash out in hurtful and destructive ways.
We need to respect the fact that in an intimate committed relationship, we have access to the most private and vulnerable aspects of each other’s lives. We need to treat that as a sacred privilege that we relate to with the utmost respect, not as an entitlement to trample upon for our own ego gratification.
We are all on a journey of awakening, and intimate relationships provide us with a powerful opportunity to see ourselves and our psychological and spiritual lessons more clearly.
We can hide from ourselves, from our therapists, from our bodies, from our spiritual teachers, and from our friends, but we cannot hide from the one we love and who loves us. All of our stuff will eventually come to light through this mysterious and wonderful process we call love. And when it does, we can choose to defend, judge, attack, and run away.
Or we can choose to be present, to look inside with acceptance and love for ourselves, and to feel gratitude that this aspect of ourselves has revealed itself. Then can we clearly see that any part of ourselves that hurts others is simply a part of ourselves that needs more love? From this perspective, we hurt the one we love so that we can learn to love ourselves and others more unconditionally, more deeply, and more completely.
And by loving and healing ourselves, we ultimately heal our partners’ wounds as well, because we make it safer for them to fully be who they are, and to experience the deeper Oneness and magic that only love can bring to our lives.”
Psychology Today wrote as follows:
“There are many cases in which lovers are likely to hurt their beloved without intending to do so. Love is a close and intense relationship. Lovers spend considerable time together, and many activities of each have significant implications for the other person. Naturally, in such circumstances, the lover may unwillingly hurt the beloved.
For instance, one may devote a lot of time to work, thereby neglecting, and unwillingly hurting, one’s beloved. In many cases, a by-product of an enjoyable activity to one person is an unpleasant situation for another.
The more time two people spend together, the greater the likelihood of such situations. The great significance in our lives of those we love is that these people are both a source of great happiness and deep sadness; they may benefit us as well as hurt us.
The phenomenon of hurting without intending to do so can also be explained by referring to the trust and sincerity which are essential in love. Accordingly, the role of politeness or good manners, which may prevent some kinds of insult, is of less importance in such a relationship, and lovers are less careful in what they say and do.
This opens the way for a lover to easily get hurt. The price of being able to behave freely without having to consider every consequence of your deeds is saying and doing hasty things that may hurt your lover.
There are many cases in which we unintentionally hurt our beloved as a result of external circumstances that are beyond our control. Take the case of two lovers who are married to other people, but profoundly in love with each other.
The woman, who can and is ready to get divorced, may be hurt by the man’s inability to leave his wife, believing it indicates that his love for her is more superficial than hers for him. However much the man might really want to make her the happiest person in the world, his external circumstances are beyond his control and make him behave in a way that hurts her.”
In conclusion, we all need to keep growing and be the best we can be to shield those we love from pain and suffering. We must have our partner’s best intentions in mind if we want our relationship to succeed. Only then, we can overcome any obstacle and save our relationship.
