Why Do We Hurt The Ones We Love?

Have you ever wondered why we hurt the ones we love most? What makes us say and do things that we know we’re going to regret later? Is it in our nature to act like this? Is there anything we can do to stop it? If you’ve asked yourself any of these questions, here are a few things to consider. 

We often attack out of frustration, guilt, fear, despair, humiliation, and the list could go on. Sometimes we feel people don’t deserve us, and quite often we feel we don’t deserve them. I don’t know which is worst but they both can lead to violent reactions directed at the people who have caused them. 

Our deep inner desire is to be loved and admired, to impress and make others thing we are the best. The ones we love have seen us as we are, not as we want to be. They know what we are like in our worst moments. They have seen us without our masks, with all the faults and weaknesses we are trying so hard to hide. This can have two effects: 

1. We feel safe because we don’t need to pretend anymore. That makes us say and do whatever comes to our mind at the moment. 

2. We feel frustrated and angry with them because they have deprived us of our illusions of being the best. 

We feel frustrated enough to want to attack and safe enough to dare to. If a stranger causes us the same frustration, we often bottle it, because we can’t afford to strike back. 

Another reason for hurting the ones close to us has to do with control. When we love someone, we feel we have the right to control that person, to decide what’s good and what’s bad for them. And people do the same with us. However, nobody likes to be controlled and any attempt to do so enables our defence mechanisms and makes us react like a threatened animal. 

Humans are selfish by nature. Any wound or frustration increases this selfishness and makes it ten times worse because it makes us focus even more on our inner universe. This is one of the things that makes a relationship bitter-sweet. A relationship makes us strong and vulnerable at the same time. When everything is ok, this vulnerability is not an inconvenient. We can delight in it and turn it into a source of immense pleasure. When things don’t go the way we planned, it turns into a source of frustration and makes us feel exposed. That’s when our selfishness comes out and we attack like a wounded animal. 

Lack of communication is another factor that makes us abuse our loved ones. So often, we don’t know what to say, so we say the wrong things. Or we don’t know how to say it and we use the wrong words. Learning to communicate is a ‘must’ in any relationship. As human beings, we need to express ourselves and be understood. We also need to understand. It is this failure to understand and the thought that we are not understood that often makes us become abusive. 

With all these in mind, we can now analyse our deep motivations every time such a situation occurs. Knowing what it’s all about is the first step in solving any problem. Understanding these reasons and the way our mind works can help us fight and overcome the issue.