4. This crazy thing called hurt

“Hurt” in this context, is an episode of childhood pain (physical and or emotional) significant enough to evoke your protective survival reflex. The reflex role is to protect the person from any repeat of the original hurt. The reflex is crude and has actions limited to shielding or moving away to prevent any future similar hurts. For a hurtful experience to alter your future behavior in a self protective way enough to detrimentally affect you, it had to be traumatic enough to feel any variation of rejected, abandoned, scared, powerless, out of control, alone, confused, sad, unwanted, unloved or unaccepted. These types of significant hurts that trigger a survival reflex are called factory or core hurts. A core hurt always as you can imagine involves a protective or survival reflex.

Core hurts represent a point in time when a child suffers without the proper love or understanding needed to process it. In other words, no one was there to “kiss the boo-boo or kiss it all better.” Ask yourself: if every time after experiencing a hurt, you also had received love and were told that everything would be okay; would the hurt have hurt so much? Would you have moved to an open more loving state faster?

It’s important to know that everyone experiences hurt and everyone has a core hurt. If you have lived you have been hurt and most likely the hurt was associated to someone that was supposed to love or protect you. For instance even if a child was hurt by a stranger, not only would the memory of the actual episode of hurt and the corresponding protections be there, but also the hurt of being rejected, abandoned, alone. The child would have not felt protected, safe or valued by the home and family. 

From person to person you really cannot compare hurts, whatever you’re greatest hurts is, it’s your greatest hurt. You hurt is yours, and your friend’s is your friends. It is true that our individual core hurts occurred in very different ways, but how we initially react to the event is the same. No matter what may have caused these feelings of powerlessness, rejection, abandonement, aloneness, out of control, fear and unworthiness, they all resulted in a protective survival reflex being activated. They also all resulted in the childhood version of unworthy or unlovable.

We all protected from hurt using our survival reflex to; stand still, attack or run away and hide. If left unresolved these protective reflexes become compounded with additional walls, fears and triggers. They can steal away time, freedom, creativity opportunities, health and our capacity to trust, experience optimal joy and to love. The first step is always the awakening that you are not your hurt, that you are not your mind and that the hurt and the corresponding survival reflex that leads your life is a reflex that can be changed.