On hurt
Quite randomly I was watching House a couple days ago. Now, the last time I watched House could have been something like 4 years ago. So, it was a strange coincidence that this episode happen to be about a woman who was not feeling emotions!
Anyway, they called her a psychopath. In my defense here, she was incapable of feeling emotions (because of some medical condition), while my mind/body/soul/little-elves-running-around-in-there decided to block all my emotions so that I wouldn’t feel anything. Ergo, I don’t think I was a psychopath, just a bit abnormal. Ahem.
At the end of the show, when she was “diagnosed” and healing, one of the doctors asked her how she felt, and she said “I don’t know, but it hurts!” That was a bit surreal for me because it’s exactly how I felt.
The thing about hurt, I realize, is that our minds seem to do everything it knows to block out feeling that particular emotion. I mean, no one likes hurt, but we don’t seem to react the same when it’s other dark emotions, like sadness, for example. In general, I think we can handle any emotion, good or bad, significantly better than we can handle hurt.
It seems that my defense against hurt is anger… I can deal with anger, it’s “my thing”… but sadly, no matter how much we try to hide from the hurt, or disguise the hurt, or how many years go by, it just does not magically go away. I learned that whatever we block out needs to be felt for us to be able to heal. That hurt has to be felt, no matter how excruciatingly painful it may be – we still need to feel it.
I think that I can now understand the saying “time heal all wounds”, I still don’t agree with it, but I understand it. Time is not necessarily healing – we have to first feel every single painful emotion, then actively work on finding some type of closure, and then eventually, after what may seem like an eternity, we feel better. Although, I don’t believe that hurt could ever go away, I mean, an appropriate trigger could probably bring back all the hurt, but you know, at least we’d know what to expect!
I don’t like to say that hurt makes us stronger, mainly because I had to be plenty strong to deal with the magnitude of everything I felt once I started feeling again, instead I believe it makes us better. I know that actually allowing myself to experience hurt made me better. Better in so many ways, especially being able to express love, I know that my kids are extremely appreciative of this difference, even if they are not able to articulate it. Mostly, now I finally feel like me again!
