How hurt do you have to be?

How hurt do you have to be to never risk ever being hurt by other people ever again?

How hurt do you have to be, to want to uphold something like that?

I can tell you from my personal experience. That I don’t want to ever get hurt by people ever again. This is how I used to think, and still do think….

Because whenever I get hurt, it takes me back to all the painful times in my life. And so, the way I’m reacting to the new hurtful event is basically reliving all the old hurt, but with an exponential effect. And everyone is very confused because they don’t understand that they’re seeing the compounded effect of my disproportionate response.

Whenever I get hurt by people the painful message that I am left with is: I am not worthy. That I do not matter. And there was no talk afterwards. No way of understanding otherwise, other than that I was the problem.

And in order to protect myself from experiencing that pain, I had to protect myself. Part of that involved never relying on people. Believing that people are out there to hurt me. And that people cannot be trusted. People don’t want to understand me, and that maybe I cannot be understood.

These beliefs made a lot of sense because I was always in an environment where people weren’t safe. And sadly, this was the case for the majority of my life.

And what was the cost of living like this for so long?

The cost was that, later in my adult life, it also meant I never gave the people who showed up and cared about me a chance to get close to me because of how hurt I’ve been.

And it’s a shame because I didn’t have those people earlier in my life, when I was still learning what real relationships were supposed to be like. And maybe it would even heal me and restore what should have been the case all along.

And it got me wondering, like, as a child:

How hurt do you have to be to become this afraid of being hurt again? How painful does it have to be?

How much pain does someone have to experience for it to result in them protecting themselves even from the people who now care about them?

I’m so afraid of the pain that the opportunity to be cared for is a massive risk to me.

And just think about how hurt you must have been…

to never feel safe enough to take that risk again.