Are you good at diagnosing your love
related hurts? When you get hurt (small, medium or large) in a love
relationship situation are you good at figuring out what to do about
it? When you have a pain seemingly coming from something going wrong in
your love circumstances do you quickly and accurately know what to do
to stop it from getting worse and to make it better? Did your family
teach or model for you how to successfully deal with the many emotional
hurts that can occur in all types of love relationships? Are you good
at learning from love related hurt and using it to make love
relationship improvements? If your answer is mostly “no” to these
questions, take heart, all this can be learned.
Good “hurt” diagnosis means figuring out three,
basic, big things. First, what ‘harmful’ event is occurring, or is in
danger of occurring? Second, what is to be done about both the hurt and
the possible harm it points to? Remember, hurt is the enemy of harm. And third, what can we learn from it? This means asking ourselves
questions like What’s wrong, What can be done to make it right or to
make it better, What can be learned to prevent what’s wrong from
happening again, and What can be learned to advance and sustain
improvement?. Also it may mean asking ourselves what useless,
fruitless, self destructive, wasteful, idiotic, unhelpful, wrongheaded,
prejudicial understandings do we have that we need to get out of the way
before we can diagnose our hurt accurately? Many a person messes up
their ability to diagnose and improve their hurtful condition by seeking
to blame someone (maybe themselves), or they spend a lot of time on
useless defending of mistakes, or they just dodge the whole thing
because it’s hard to figure out accurately. Then too, lots of people
only work on what went wrong and never get around to working on what can
be done to make it better. Good diagnosis means arriving at a good
treatment plan or improvement strategy. Nevertheless, if you want to
diminish hurtful and harmful happenings in your love relationships, or
want them to be eliminated, the useful diagnosis of what your hurt can
tell you is vitally important.
When working with love related hurt I like to ask
people what they think the guidance message is that’s inherent in their
hurt. Usually at first this question is confusing but then with work an
understanding of hurt’s natural guidance message starts to emerge.
Some of these guidance messages are easy to understand and others are
quite complicated. The hurt called ‘loneliness’ is likely to be telling
you to go find someone good and loving to be with. ‘Love related
anxiety’ is usually attempting to guide you to search and discover what
love-destructive thing may be on the way to happening. Of course, once
identified you’ll probably have to do something about it. Frequently
this involves doing more work about creating love relationship safety.
Love hurt from ‘betrayal’ in a love relationship usually carries the
message to be more careful about investing one’s trust. Hurt in
betrayal also is usually about not giving one’s power away to others so
that their actions can damage you or be used against you.
When you don’t learn from hurt in a love
relationship situation, hurt likely will act like a good friend and come
on stronger and more often until you get its guidance message. I like
to suggest that almost all forms of suffering which have to do with love
relationships contain a common basic message. They all usually are, in
essence, saying “learn to do love better”. Much like the message of
hurting your hand on a hot stove, the hurtful message is to learn to
cook more carefully. It does not work well to quit cooking or give up
eating because you got burned touching the stove. Don’t give up on
love, just learn to do it better. Like it is dysfunctional to give up
driving a car because you got hurt in an auto accident, so it is
dysfunctional to give up on love because you have been in a love wreck.
Learn to drive the car and the love relationship better or you may have
another wreck.
Unfortunately love hurt is one of those areas in
which lots of people don’t know how to arrive at an accurate diagnosis
of what’s going wrong and what to do about it. Therefore, they don’t
get the helpful message inherent in their hurt. The basic diagnostic
message that says “learn to do love better” may not be one of your
culture’s or your family’s teaching. Consequently that message may be
rather strange and working with it may be unfamiliar to you. In the
Western world culture, and others, too many people have been programmed
to believe that love is all automatic and magic, and that we are but
helpless fools waiting for our love fate to overtake us. I never trust training in helplessness.
All hurt tries to tell you to diagnose what’s wrong and do something
about it so harm is avoided. Hurt related to love is no exception.
Sometimes the diagnosis tells us to temporarily endure the hurt so as to
avoid greater harm. Occasionally the diagnosis yells “Escape as fast
as you can because you’re about to be destroyed”. Often the diagnosis
is telling us just to change some of the ways we go about love and learn
to do it more fully and better.
Another destructive training sometimes occurs which
damages the love dynamics of that special love relationship called
parenting. It usually goes something like this, “What was good enough
for my parents is good enough for our children”. Usually this type of
statement means that the parents who think this are resistant to
learning the better, more well researched and discovered, improved ways
of doing parenting. I sometimes like to ask people to name some areas
of life in which there have not been improvements over and above the way
their parents or grandparents knew to do things. I don’t get many good
answers. Let me suggest ‘love and parenting’ are not exceptions. The
knowledge exists on how to do both far better than once was commonly
practiced. However, in some cases truly ancient knowledge, that somehow
went out of style, and the most recent developments correspond
beautifully. One of the newer and yet ancient understandings is “learn
from your hurt, that’s what it’s there for”. Another one is “it’s
insanity to expect new and better results from repeating old actions
that have failed time and time again”. So, unless you’re hurt is
overwhelming I want to suggest you work to understand every part of your
hurt’s guidance message. That is likely to be the best way to
eliminate or reduce the hurt and not repeat it. If the hurt is
overwhelming get some help from a good love-knowledgeable counselor –
you don’t have to suffer interminably.
Feeling
hurt is a natural life system and all life systems can malfunction.
There can be too much hurt just as there can be too little hurt. Hurt
can be both subconsciously and consciously exacerbated or denied.
Frequently doing either can be detrimental. Hurt can go on too long and
hurt can interfere with other life systems designed to assist us.
However, most often if you work with your hurt you will learn and be
guided to that which is healthier and happier. Deny or over sedate your
hurt and it may get worse so that its guidance message gets through to
you. Another thing to be cautious about concerning hurt has to do with
what you were previously taught to do about it. Blaming others, or
blaming the stars, the fates, etc., just submitting to it, toughing it
through without learning, using it for manipulating others as in ‘guilt
tripping’, and playing the victim for sympathy, or getting to be the
virtuous martyr and a host of other misuses are to be identified and
eliminated. Lots of people have learned to use their hurt as an excuse
for not being ‘response able’
and then get drunk, or do drugs or destructively act out. For some
their love hurt is an excuse for doing violence to others, seeking to
‘get even’ via vengeance, retribution, etc. Such anti-love actions
usually are self defeating and may represent no real love being there in the first place.
There are a few special cases of desired and enjoyed
love hurt. Pain can accentuate pleasure when both are conditioned to
occur together, and when the pleasure exceeds the pain. When a person
has felt almost nothing strong or intense for a long time pain can help
some people feel much more vitally alive, and for that they are glad.
Case in point: Steve felt he was stuck in a dull, boring job and a
marriage that wasn’t any better, neither from which he saw an immediate
good way to escape. He became entangled in a complicated, difficult,
painful affair. He actually was grateful for it because it made him
feel excited and intensely alive as nothing had for a long time. This
is an example of a ‘good’ coupled with a ‘bad’. I am not saying that
his approach was all that healthful but it was desired and enjoyed more
than bland living. Certain kinds of physical pain and sexual pleasure
occurring simultaneously, especially when there is intense, emotional,
love-filled intimacy can greatly add to sexual pleasure for some people
whose neurological physiology is built for that. Some people have been
conditioned to believe their pain signifies great love occurring or
other similar positive things. In these cases it still is best to
diagnostically think about the presence or likelihood of harm. The
enjoyment of getting permanently damaged is to be avoided no matter how
pleasurable it might be to someone.
Let me now challenge you to think about when you
have had hurt in a love relationship. Any love related hurt you have
experienced will suffice. It may have been with a parent, or sibling,
or friend, or lover, or a spouse. Can you identify what the guidance
message was in that hurt? Practicing the skill of identifying hurt’s
guidance messages using old hurts can be quite useful in learning to do
love hurt diagnosis well. If the old hurt still hurts it could mean you
have more guidance messages yet to identify. If the old hurt no longer
hurts it could mean you have gotten over that, strengthened yourself,
and learned a lot, so be proud of your growth in diagnosing and
following the guidance messages from that hurt. Did the love
relationship hurt that you just thought about lead you to break up or go
away from someone who would have been destructive or inadequate for
you? If so, be thankful for that hurt. If similar hurt started today
would you diagnosis its guidance message sooner and act upon it
quicker? If you get your feelings hurt in a love relationship today
are you quicker to diagnose what you are doing poorly, or wrong, and
make improvements in your own behavior. Are you then quick to figure
out what you want different from what you are getting – and ask for it?
Remember, it is important to diagnose your own contribution to your
hurt as well as another person’s, and don’t forget to diagnose what
circumstances contribute to the hurt.
By reading this you are studying love hurts and how
to diagnose them, how to avoid them, how to fix them, how to learn from
them and, thereby, do better at love. So then, the question is “are you
going to keep studying”? If you are having trouble diagnosing your
love hurts, remember, it is quite smart, appropriate, efficient and
usually highly useful to get help from a love-oriented and
love-knowledgeable therapist when dealing with the pain involved in love
relationship difficulties.
As always – Go and Grow with Love
As always – Go and Grow with Love
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