Our emotions are the fabric from which we weave the tapestry of our humanity. Of these, one experience holds noteworthiness for being both widespread and individual: feeling hurt.
Be it from a thoughtless comment, an outright insult, or just due to a communication breakdown — emotional wounds can have long-lasting reverberations on our experiences and relationships.
Remembering those occasions when my feelings have been hurt has helped me to see more clearly what is going on at all this human-level stuff.
There is one particular memory that has never left me from my early teenage years. Desperate to fit in and have friends at my new school, I took a deep breath and sat down with students during lunch. When I got close, one said sneeringly: ‘Ah well if it isn’t decided to join us for once.” ‘I think …’ the speaker paused for effect, and looked around the group with a smile before continuing ‘…the answer must be yes?’ The men laughed. Although the two words are as innocuous as could be, they penetrated my slowly emerging new self. This made me feel the coldness on my face, even though I was certainly blushing.
The rest of the day remained rather foggy since rejection and self-doubt were still floating in her head. Looking back at this episode, I can see that the boy’s comment was not meant to cut deep. Maybe it was his funny bone and he tried to make a joke, or it may have been his mere nervousness.
Whatever the intent was not particularly honorable, its effect upon me was rather profound. This realization underscores a crucial lesson: we can’t dictate the behavior of other people, and we cannot determine what they will say to us or how they will behave toward us, but we can choose how we will react to certain situations.
Another example happened at the workplace. Largely to emphasize the time I spent on my endeavor, I shared my work with the team after weeks of work. I once received criticism from a senior person in that company when he told me that the stuff I did was amateurish on a group level.
First, it was made public, which made it worse. In a way, I felt devalued and worried about whether I could do anything properly.
Yet this episode proved to be a starting point in development. Unlike dwelling on the animosity I faced, I looked for directions, polished my output, and came back with better work. The initial pain turned into motivation, which made me raise the bar.
These experiences show that feelings may be hurt, but this does not mean that there is no value in them. They make the learners reflect, which helps growth as well as the acquisition of emotional skills.
Further, they highlight a feature that is lacking in most of our communication — empathy. Accepting the fact that words and gestures are important so that a careless word may hurt a person, I am very careful in what and how I say it.
But it is equally important to know when you have offended others. In one memorable ugly episode, I said to a friend, you know without thinking that you are being sarcastic, why would you wear such a dress? Even though she said it before in a joking manner I saw her smile drop slightly. At some other point, she said that my words hurt to remind her of some aspects that she never wanted people to know about.
This confrontation was humbling. It has always enlightened me that humor does not mean that one has to offend the other person. Apologize and mean it — I paid attention to my language of choice, making sure it was built rather than torn down.
Therefore, it can be stated that misunderstanding and having feelings offended is a common feature of people’s communication. As weird as the first feeling is, it becomes a good lesson and one can learn about other people, about himself or herself, and about how to stand up for oneself.
Thus, thinking about such moments helps prevent the wrong evaluation of certain aspects of interpersonal interactions and contributes to the world of people’s relations in the best possible manner.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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