The Hurt Code: Door Opener to Loving What You Do
For the longest time my presenting negative emotion was grief, especially after the untimely death of my daughter two years ago. Grief is such a challenging emotion to deal with, primarily because when it strikes, it takes your energy down. You feel depressed. It is no wonder that anti-depressants have been so easily prescribed by professionals who orientation to life is primarily physical/scientific disregarding the emotional states. If you feel down because of loss and cannot get back to an up state, taking a pill seems to lift the body for awhile. The problem with it is that you don’t learn what the grief is trying to teach you. Mostly, grief is about learning how to endure, to stay positive for a long time. If you do the grief work honestly rather than trying to run from it, knowing that you are going to have periods of feeling really down, then you end up so much stronger than if you only take pills to deal with the grief. I am not against taking pills. I am against seeing grief as a physical ailment. If you go to a family doctor because you are feeling down and he/she has 30 more patients to see that day, you are not going to get many questions about the spiritual state of your being. Still, there are many ways to boost the body physically while going through grief like homeopathy, traditional medicine, and naturopathic medicine to name a few. And antidepressants may be part of the healing, but it is never the full picture of healing with grief and depression.
Anyway, I do not want to write about grief. I am just happy right now that it is not the presenting emotion. What recently presented itself to me was hurt. I was so excited to be dealing with hurt because my experience has always been that when I process it, I get a ton of positive loving energy released. But before dealing with hurt it is important to realize that grief takes a lot of time, patience, and hard work to deal with. It is totally worth it. Read my post on grief. https://wordpress.com/post/dreamsforpeace.org/2949
Hurt is the emotion you get when you experience a lot of pain from what someone or something did to you. Whereas grief is about a loss that you cannot recover, hurt is very much present tense even though it may have happened a while back. For instance, your partner or co-worker can betray you, making you feel like you were stabbed in the heart with a sword, leaving you feeling devastated and holding negative angry feelings towards them.
The first step in dealing with hurt, which may be the most difficult, is to let go, to forgive the culprit. The reason this is not easy is because of how the pain feels inside to you. The tendency of the ego mind is to hold onto the pain so that something bad can happen to the culprit. It is an extremely dead-end approach to life. As has been said, holding onto hurt and then getting angry is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die. Or when you are seeking revenge, dig two graves, one for the other and one for yourself.
It is much easier to let go of the pain if you can see the positive energy that the hurt is trying to help you wake up to. The positive is always exactly the opposite of the energy of the hurt. I always use a metaphoric approach when working with hurt because it has such brilliant results. Think about all of the metaphors hurt can appear as. It can be like being stabbed, run over by a truck, burned alive, punched in the face, wrestled down and stomped on, pulled the carpet out from under, dragged around by rope, tortured, or any of a number of others. Once you have the metaphor, then you can find its positive opposite.
When you feel hurt, it means that the hurt you are feeling from what happened has the possibility of changing into a positive. Take for instance the most common form of hurting others, being put down or criticized. It can feel like you are cut by a knife, stung by a bee, or even shot down. If it is just hurt, then the relationship or situation can be turned around into hugely positive energy. If there is a lot of fear that goes with it, it is a different story. Hurt lets you know that things can turn pretty quickly. Fear of being hurt may mean that the relationship is not capable of being repaired because of the abusive nature of the person giving it. If you can read the emotions, you can know how to proceed.
When you have recognized how hurt feels in a metaphoric way inside, then you can ask yourself how it makes you act. Do you get protective, anti-social, combative, both anti-social and combative? Are you scheming about how to get back at the person? Whatever behavior that comes out of the ego mind tends to be bad for both sides. It further widens the gap that already exists. The first step is to forgive or let go of the hurtful behavior from the other person. Don’t underestimate how hard this can be and don’t try to fake about the forgiveness.
The second step is to find the positive metaphor that replaces the negative one. So if you feel cut or stung, then the metaphoric positive would be something like being in warm waters. What solves the situation is the opposite behavior, to find the positive in the other, feel their positive energy, and say it out loud. It is often a “big ask” when you feel hurt, because it requires trusting in the more positive energy. Where there is a lot of criticism, there is a lot of unrecognized positive energy that is having a hard time being accessed. Letting go of your protected state and feeling the positive energy and calling it out in another changes the relationship instantly. It is almost miraculous. There is one caveat to this solution which is why the differentiation between fear and hurt are so important. If you just feel hurt, the door is open to the relationship that was wounded, but if you feel fear it may be that you have to proceed with caution because of the danger of the criticism turning into abuse.
a. identify the negative metaphor and behavior
b. change the negative metaphor into its positive opposite, feel it.
The third step is acting in a positive manner that the positive energy in the metaphor calls for. In the above case it would be actually telling people about their positive qualities.
What is someone betrays you as in having an illicit affair when you are supposed to be in committed relationship? What to do always starts with how you feel, and then describing it metaphorically. What if when you found out, you felt as though your heart was cut out. There you are sitting in misery with no heart when you were the one betrayed. That is a big hurt. The key to a metaphor like this is that your heart is extremely damaged by the behavior of another. The opposite metaphor is to find your true heart and have it seriously beat in a positive way with a lot of energy.
The big issue with hurt is that you are the one feeling miserable when the other person did the wrongful act. It is totally unjust, right? They deserve justice, right? Revenge. The above steps, even if they take some time to accomplish, not only give you back a positive state, but they also strengthen that state to a brand new level. So actually the revenge is that they get back the negative energy that they were trying to put on you because you are no longer affected by it. If a person criticizes you, but it has no effect, then the power that they get from criticism, doesn’t happen for them. What they get instead is fear. In other words it goes back on them.
It is important when dealing with hurt and the transformation that it requires to not avoid the mistake of reacting negatively with your behavior immediately. Feel the hurt, transform it into new positive energy, then let the new positive energy be your guide with your behavior, not the hurt energy. For instance, if you have been betrayed, then it may be that is good to end the relationship, but it is untimely to decide that while you are stuck in hurt. When you are at a higher state of loving energy, your higher self can make the decision, but it will be much more detached and better for you.