The Power of Hurt

Sonia Choquette says in her Oracle Cards (Card no 19 – Survival):
“Your Healer Guides […] want you to recognize that the psychic attacks you’ve suffered through the unconscious, negative behaviour of others have left you injured. You’ve been betrayed and energetically wounded […] Stop blaming yourself for what others have done to you”.
“All human beings make grave, and sometimes terrible, mistakes. It is not your fault that you have been violated; it is a lesson to learn from. Nor is it weak to acknowledge that you have been hurt. Denial may serve you in the midst of crisis, but it only handicaps you if you stay mired in it”.

I was paralyzed by the concept that when others hurt you, you blame yourself. I said this to myself out loud and I felt a huge lump of emotion travelling up from my solar plexus. This must have some truth to it, I thought, because something has shifted within myself.

This information came to me after I had spoken to a very good friend of mine about the fact that I had intended to release the remaining contracts related to a specific spiritual work, in what the Kryon books call sweet spot. A sweet spot is the place where you are supposed to be, in the here and now, carrying out spiritual work that is in your pre-birth contract, which may not be pleasant or fun, yet it is necessary for you to release previous karmic ties, shift emotional blockages, heal yourself and others… in other words, carry out spiritual growth, empower yourself and fulfil your destiny.

My role was that of a wall, containing the energy of certain people in order to give time to others to grow, strengthen themselves, come into their power, balance and ground themselves. In one word, grow up spiritually. And I realised that time was up so I wanted to now move on to my next job, which would involve shifting my whole game where instead of working with individual clients, I would target larger audiences in my writing and public speak activities.

Suddenly I realised that, in the process of fulfilling my latest sweet spot role, I had been hurt and that I need to release that hurt in order to move forward. Reaching this bigger game in my life would mean that I would have to be able to cope with public appraisal and criticism without losing my centre. This would require that I would not be vulnerable to other people’s judgements and opinions and that I would keep detached from their views. In other words, that I would not give away the power to get hurt.

But how is it that when others hurt us, knowingly or unknowingly, we hold on to that hurt, mainly because we take blame for it? How can we not only be attacked by others, in deed, thought or word, but also by ourselves? Where is the link? What emotional patterns does this involve? Why do we need to forgive ourselves and pour compassion on ourselves when others hurt us?

Lots of questions and very few answers.
The idea didn’t make sense to me. Mentally. Yet, I know that spiritually this is the way it goes. And because the whole issue is so involved and the connotations so subtle, we get stuck not knowing how to untangle all these ramifications.

So I decided to have a go. I meditated on this issue. And here are my thoughts:

There is this person who, let’s say, calls me arrogant.
I look into the comment and the situation in which she thinks I was arrogant and there was no intention in me to be arrogant in that specific situation. Therefore, I must assume that the arrogance belonged to the person herself and that I was merely a mirror to bring up this quality in her at this point.
However, even though I didn’t agree with that judgement for that particular action, there was a point of hurt which shouldn’t be there if I hadn’t been arrogant at all. Therefore I must assume that this person’s judgement resonates somewhere within me. In another words, she is being a teacher for me.

It is known that people adopt attitudes opposite of what they really feel. In this particular case, I will assume that this individual lacks self-esteem and arrogance is a way to protect and defend that vulnerable inner child that doesn’t feel its worth. In my case, if there is a hook to which her judgment stuck to, then, there must be also lack of self-esteem at some level, even if it is not very pronounced since I do things that show courage on a regular basis. For instance, have joined Toastmasters in order to break through my fear of public speaking.

So when I heard that someone called me arrogant without what I believe enough grounding, I felt hurt. Why did I feel hurt? Because at some level, I have taken the judgement, which hit me in a point of lack of self-worth or self-esteem. And because I felt that it is an unfair judgement, I felt victimised since I wasn’t able to defend myself or contest the judgement (the person in particular is not ready to listen to what I have to say).
Because I feel like a victim, I blame myself for being powerless to shift from this undesired position. But if I feel guilty, why do I? I haven’t done anything wrong; I could easily dismiss this hurtful comment and get on with my life.

The links to these questions and these feelings are subtle and involved. My main focus here is to find out why when we get hurt we feel guilty and blame ourselves! The perpetrator should feel guilty, not us! Yet, we carry this hurt with us for a very long time until we can go into it, re-vive it and release it in order to transmute the energy trapped in it to shift ourselves to a level where hurt doesn’t live. That’s to say, laugh at other peoples judgments and criticisms because we have an inner guidance system that tells us what is right or wrong, without having to take on what other people think. Because, as the saying goes, what other people think about me is none of my business! It is merely their opinion and it doesn’t make me so!

The fact is that we always have the choice: to stay stuck in the hurt, or to move on with our lives.

If we choose to be a victim (we were a victim at the moment when we were hurt but we can choose not to be that victim for the rest of our lives!) then we are choosing to live on the energy that we can extract from others by invoking in them feelings of pity. This is obviously very costly energy because it requires our manipulation and if we want to secure this energy regularly, we are not able to move forward. This is, of course, not a desirable state of affairs if the goal is to be free and use that energy invested in manipulating others to expand and experience more of what life has to offer. And this is because we lock ourselves in a vicious circle as we need to continuously revisit the hurt in order to extract that, so called, pity-energy on a regular basis…
Until we eventually drain those unfortunate enough who, either are part of our circle of relationships or, simply, get caught in the reversed role of the victim, or that of the saviour. The saviour’s psyche goes as follows: I need to be needed so I will try to save this poor person, who is powerless to come out of this hole. I feel sorry for him/her because s/he was hurt so here, have all my energy, and then I can fulfil my need to be needed.
Needless to mention what this co-dependent and unhealthy relationship does to both parties... and since it is not part of the focus of this essay, I will move on.

When your circle of friends and family are drained of their energy (and finally they have learnt to hold their boundaries in our presence and keep their emotional distance) then, we will have to find fresh energy in others. This means that we will have to continuously tell people how and when we were hurt, and how hurt we were!

The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, explains this very well in its 4 Energy Control Dramas. One of them is the one we are depicting here: The Victim, and he explains it as follows:
“Poor Me’s(victims) don’t ever feel they have enough power to confront the world in an active way, so they elicit sympathy, pulling energy toward them. The Poor Me makes sure that the silence does not go unnoticed […] Always pessimistic, Poor Me’s pull attention to themselves by worried facial expressions, sighing, trembling, crying, staring into the distance, answering questions slowly, and retelling poignant dramas and crisis.

Poor Me’s initially seduce by their vulnerability and need for help. However, they are not really interested in solutions because then they would lose their source of energy […] They might also exhibit over-accomodating behaviour which eventually leads them into feeling taken advantage of and reinforces their Poor Me method of gaining energy.

With a Poor Me, out of the blue, we begin to feel guilty for no reason; He will throw us out of balance and win our energy by creating a feeling of guilt or doubt on our part. By buying into it, he feels the boost of energy and feels more secure.

To the Poor Me, the world is a place where people can’t be counted on to meet one’s needs for nurturing and well-being, and it is too scary a place to risk pursuing these needs directly or assertively […] Unfortunately, the same kind of abusive people the Poor Me fears are exactly the ones that they allow into their lives. And the events that befall them are often traumatic”.

Finally, the last issue related to hurt is punishment.

We believe that we are hurt because we deserve it. We believe that, at some level, we must have done something wrong in order to deserve this. And we keep on looking until we find something in ourselves (a behaviour, a belief, an action…) that justifies that we indeed deserve this punishment.

Because we live in a society that largely believes in a punishing God, someone who will judge our actions and bless or punish us accordingly, a lot of the responsibility within our actions is delegated to this God. We then allow Him/Her to decide for us which one of our actions, thoughts or beliefs are right or wrong. But when the Human race shifts into believing in a God who is unconditionally loving, regardless of what we say or do, then we will believe that everything in life is an experience, with a lesson to be learnt. Once learnt, we shift to a higher level of awareness and understanding and we move from a place of having to struggle through life to a place of creating the life of our dreams, making joy a priority and expressing ourselves fully by creating our abundance from our natural gifts.

I don’t say that letting go of hurt is easy. I don’t say that we can always do it by ourselves, so we may need help. But I do say: what kind of life do you choose? What is the price you are willing to pay? How are you going to get back the time gone spent in ways that don’t mirror your highest potential?

And my answer is: I will struggle through until all the hurt I ever experienced and I may be holding on to will be released from my psyche because I no longer choose pain as a way of life.