What do we do when people hurt us?

What do we do when people hurt us?  How do we cope with the wounds?  How do we go from brokenness to healing?

Perhaps our first instinct is to hit out at those who have hurt us.  We want to hurt back.  This never worked for me.  I didn’t really take this path when I was battling my own hurts from people I trusted.

I tended to become introspective, and that’s not a bad thing in itself, but I spent too much time being bitter, self-pitying and wanting justice.  The justice thing is difficult.  It’s natural to want justice;  to have our name cleared, or to be vindicated.  It’s also natural to want to be recompensed for what we’ve lost.  But when we stray from wanting justice, to wanting revenge, we are entering a cavern of self-destruction.

But there are better things than revenge, and in my experience justice and vindication can be hard to achieve because it often depends on others and you can’t change others. 

Better than justice, is healing for you, regardless of what happens to those who’ve hurt you.  It may be good to try and get justice for yourself, but this isn’t always possible.  Healing, on the other hand, is something which allows you to triumph, no matter what has happened to you.

You being healed, happy and strong is the best kind of justice and retribution.  Hankering after “getting back at people” is one of the most destructive forces you can foster.  But it won’t destroy them;  it will destroy you.

If you find a way to hurt your abusers, there won’t be the relief you crave.  Or if there is, then you are a long way down the journey to becoming just like them.  Are you sure that’s what you want?

My advice to you is to spend your emotional energy on finding your own self. If you don't want to repeat the pattern, you must understand what mistakes you made, or why you trusted the wrong people or became vulnerable to victimisation. Sometimes these things are out of our control.  It's been my experience that some people will hurt you because they like doing it, and because they can.  They must face that on that Great Day when all will be revealed and all will be called to account.  But you must concern yourself only with yourself.

Use your energy in positive and constructive ways.  Leave the resentment and hatred of those who’ve hurt you, with God.

There may be people reading this blog who find the image of a Christian God unacceptable because of some hurt or abuse suffered at the hands of some phoney person in the organised church.

Go past them and find an image of God you are comfortable with;  whether it’s a gentle Shepherd Jesus, or a father figure God, or even a dying Jesus, asking forgiveness of His killers.  Put your negative emotions and feelings into the hands of this God.  Get them out of your soul and into the heart of the great Being who made us all. Acknowledge it’s there – acknowledge the destructive emotions, then say “I’m not listening to you. Go away”. And give them to God. Imagine them flying off from your mind and body, into the great Cosmos, and there they dissolve. You may have to take this action over and over again.  It may not feel like it, but each time, you are leaving a little more of it behind.

I also cannot stress enough,  the benefit of physical occupation during times of grief, anxiety or agitation. The physicality of moving or using your hands, especially if it’s creative, somehow provides a channel;  a mechanism which “uses up” or releases the negative emotions.  Find something you like doing;  something which makes you live in the moment. It might be gardening, or playing golf – any occupation in which you are only thinking about doing that thing. This also releases good chemicals into your body which helps you stay happy and balanced.

For me, it was bushwalking. I wore out at least two pairs of stout shoes tramping through the beautiful mid north coast environment of NSW in Australia.  I walked, with a social group, every Friday, through beach scapes and forest;  climbed the Fire Lookout at Comboyne plateau – it felt like I sat on the top of the world as I looked out across to the valley below.  Gardening was also a wonderful diversion;  knitting, sewing;  these too kept anxiety at bay. You are a strong, resilient person;  you can find strength you didn't know you had.  I did.  Peace be with you.

Time heals

I got a message on my voicemail that my Doctor wanted to see me.  I had done a bowel screen test about 6 weeks ago, and, because I didn’t know why she wanted to see me, I jumped to the conclusion that something must be wrong, either from the results of the bowel screen or the blood test I had for kidney function, about the same time.

When you’ve had quite a bit of bad stuff in your life, it’s very easy to think the worst will happen, because you’ve experienced the worst before.  You know awful stuff can happen.

I didn’t have a lot of time to get worried or upset about the Doctor;  I made the appointment yesterday and I saw her this morning. Nevertheless, I could feel myself start to think “what if this is serious illness looming?”.  I had lots of depressed, resentful thoughts, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to face serious illness, and all the negative emotions which would accompany it.  I shouldn’t have worried – she just wanted to do a review of all my meds.  The bowel screen was negative and the kidney function was fine.

It struck me today, when I was thanking God that nothing serious was wrong – I suppose if there WAS something serious, I would have eventually thanked Him for that too (give thanks in all circumstances)…. Anyway, I thought that time is a very valuable healer.  I am able to much more easily throw off negative thoughts because I am further away from the traumas of 2006.  I feel stronger now than I did then.  When you are in the thick of pain or suffering or anxiety, you don’t have the same “choice” to throw off negativity and stay afloat.  It’s harder to do, because the thoughts are darker, more intense, stronger and come more often. You are living in a stressful arena, coping with anxiety and pain from many fronts, whereas when the trauma or cause of the anxiety has passed, time begins to heal and gradually, as you face what’s happened, the positives begin to expel the negatives.

So now, in the last 6 months or so, I feel like my life’s arena is a brighter place – my brain chemicals are much recovered since the death of my son, Ben.  It’s been a gradual process, but negative and sad thoughts are the exception now, where once they were the rule.  There was quite a sustained period in my life, after my divorce, when positives were the exception and I had to deliberately think of them.  They didn’t reveal themselves – I had to search for them and it was only after Ben’s death that I realized this, and resolved to find the positives, even in his death.

I used to feel like my life was a page with my story written on it and great ink blots of terrible things were creeping down over it, obliterating all the good stuff.  Even before Ben's death, my life had been fairly difficult year in, year-out, for many years.

When I look back over the nearly 7 years since my son’s death, I can see the healing which has taken place.  Some things, like regret, disappointment, abuse etc, are things you have to actively try and heal by facing them, forgiving people, shouting them at God, even.  But grief is something which just has to be walked, a day at a time. In my case there was not a lot of other stuff (like a broken or dysfunctional relationship with Ben) to deal with.  So, as I met and touched the great chasm Ben’s death left in my life, there was a gradual climbing up the cliff of grief.   I can see that I’m much closer to the top now and can see over the other side. I have more capacity for joy now and am learning again to look forward with anticipation, to simple enjoyments. 

I will always be well acquainted with how precarious life is and how bad stuff can happen to me, and that brings it’s own price;  if I’m not careful I can easily imagine the worst possible scenario in any situation - as in the trip to the Doctor – it IS easy to imagine that life might deal me another body blow. It’s a sort of “mended frailty”;  wounds, newly healed can be broken open more easily.

But in general, I have a happier outlook and that’s because the wound and grief of losing Ben, the terrible bullying and the ill health that all happened at the same time, in 2006, has healed a lot.

It’s helped a lot to let go of all the bitterness I felt at my bad marriage and divorce.  It was such a long process – years and years of feeling so impacted;  so bitter.  I can hardly bear to think about what a struggle it was to overcome the grief of it. If I’d kept clinging to those thoughts of loss and injustice and resentment (anger, really), I would have still been so unhappy now.  I suppose a positive outcome of it was that when Ben died, I knew I didn’t want to go down that anger/self-pity pathway again, and resolved not to.  (How I did that is for another blog).

Time heals. It really does. But you have to give it the right environment.