Letting Go Of Past Hurts

Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.

I'm Dr.

Robert Puff.

Living our lives can be such a beautiful experience.

Meeting new friends,

Having wonderful experiences,

Learning things,

Growing.

But at the same time,

There is pain.

And sometimes that pain can seem overwhelming because when we go through life,

It's pretty much inevitable that sometimes we're going to get hurt by others.

And when we feel that hurt,

We have to ask ourselves,

What do we do?

Someone else has hurt me.

So what do I do?

What is my responsibility now that I have been hurt?

And I believe it's two things that we need to do in order to have our lives go well when we've been hurt.

One is to heal from that hurt.

The second thing is to make sure we don't pass it on.

As a clinical psychologist working for so many years now with thousands of people,

One of the things that I've learned is we do hurt each other.

Sometimes intentionally,

Sometimes non-intentionally.

But going through life,

Interacting with others,

Family member,

Friends,

Lovers,

Or even strangers,

We definitely have the capacity to hurt each other.

Sometimes these hurts are minor.

Sometimes these hurts are horrific.

But our job,

Which I want to talk about today,

Is to heal from these hurts and not pass it on.

These hurts can come in so many different forms.

We can be at school and the kids can tease us.

We can have parents that weren't there for us or when we came home beat us.

We can be in love with someone and they leave us.

We can meet a stranger and they hurt us.

And in order to be well and have a beautiful life,

What we need to do is heal from these pains,

These hurts,

And make sure we don't pass it on to people after us.

But what we tend to do is so many different things.

We may numb the pain through addictions.

We may blame others and focus on that.

We may blame ourselves and give our attention to what we did wrong.

We may try to rectify it and say,

Well,

If I did it differently,

Maybe they wouldn't have done it to me.

Or if I try again to win my parents' approval and do this,

Perhaps then they'll finally stop hurting me.

But I would argue that then what we're doing is we're not healing from the pain.

And our goal is to heal,

Not to always understand everything,

To have all the answers or the myriad of other things we do instead of healing.

Our job is just to heal,

To let our hearts heal and move on so that we don't pass on that pain to others.

Well,

What do we do when we have a physical cut?

Well,

The first thing we do is we wash it out,

We cleanse it,

We make sure we got rid of all the bad bacteria,

And then we let it heal with time.

I remember when I was in university,

I was asked to be a counselor at a summer camp for a couple of weeks.

And before the kids arrived,

I was given a tour of the campus.

And I noticed there was a low-hanging branch that was about at eye level.

And I thought,

Wow,

If someone runs into this,

They could get really injured.

Well,

Sure enough,

On the last day,

We were playing capture the flag with the kids.

It's a game where you run very fast and try to capture the other person's flag.

Well,

I was running very fast,

And the next thing I knew,

I was lying flat on my back.

That very branch that I was concerned about,

I actually hit.

Thank goodness,

It missed my eye,

But it definitely hit my head.

And it was bleedy.

It was a huge bump.

And what did I do?

I didn't stand up and yell at the branch.

I didn't call myself stupid for hitting the branch.

I just went to the nurse.

She washed it out.

She cleansed it.

And then we put a bandaid on it.

And with time,

It healed.

So when someone hurts us,

How do we heal?

And I think we have a variety of options,

Which I want to discuss.

The first one is tears of sadness.

I think sometimes when we get hurt by another person,

We just need to have a really good cry.

I think that can be helpful.

I think that can be incredibly healing.

When I fell in love for the first time,

I really thought,

As I'm sure many people do,

That I would get to spend my life with this person.

But after being with her for a while,

I began to notice that she changed.

She started not being as kind and was picking fights with me.

I couldn't really figure it out.

So I remember sitting down with her one time and saying,

Is something going on?

Because your behavior has really changed recently.

And then out of nowhere,

She admitted that she had gotten together with someone else.

Now,

I know as humans,

We can have a variety of reactions to that type of hurt.

But at the time,

I just started really crying hard,

Very hard,

Bawling.

But you know what happened to us?

It actually felt really good to let it out.

And it just did.

It felt so good to let those emotions out because I was so sad and hurt by what she shared with me.

But it felt good to release that pain.

And of course,

There was a lot of healing I had to do going forward.

But that was the start of it.

I just let myself be sad.

And those tears helped my heart to begin to heal.

Remember how I shared the story about my cut and how I had it washed out by the nurse?

It's like our tears wash out our hurt,

And they let them heal.

I think letting ourselves be sad and just feel our emotions without any commentary,

Without any hearing whether it's right or wrong,

Just letting those tears flow can be very cathartic and can be very healing.

It's a beautiful way to heal our hearts.

Now,

Another thing we can do is allow our anger to heal.

But with one big qualifier,

We can never take our anger out on other people or ourselves.

Period.

My first book was all about this,

Anger Work,

How to express your anger and still be kind.

So here's what I did.

When I was in graduate school,

They recommended that you get into therapy in order to be a good therapist,

Understand yourself.

Well,

When I got into therapy,

I realized there was some hurt in my background that I needed to heal from.

Well,

Interestingly,

At the same time,

I decided to go learn karate and get my black belt.

So for the entire time that I was in therapy,

I was actually doing karate at the same time.

And I did a lot of bag work where you punch the bag over and over and over again.

And that,

For me,

Allowed me to express my anger about how I'd been hurt as a child from my upbringing and let it out that way.

I didn't hurt anyone.

And it felt great to hit the bag over and over again.

I remember every time I went and worked out,

It was like so cathartic.

I didn't always need to work out anger issues.

But when I did,

When something came up in therapy,

It was so helpful.

Now,

There are a lot of ways to express our anger in ways when we've been hurt.

Lots of them.

We may like journaling.

We may like talking to a friend.

We may like screaming into a pillow.

We may like doing artwork.

We may like going to work out.

There's so many different things we can do.

Finding our voice with our anger is what we need to do.

What works best for us.

A punching bag may not work for you at all,

But it worked for me.

So it's just finding what works best for us.

Now,

The third thing that we can turn to,

Which I've really developed later in my career,

Is realizing how much our thoughts affect us.

And that the way we see things will definitely affect the way we are hurt.

A lot of times in life now,

When someone does apparently seem to be hurting me,

It actually doesn't hurt me much anymore.

Because I realize that I have to create a story to make that hurt really bad.

If I don't create a story,

And I implement the things I've learned here on the Happiness Podcast,

Like non-attachment,

Realizing that things are impermanent,

That things change,

There's a lot less hurt.

And that's a lot of what I teach here on the Happiness Podcast.

How really,

The hurts in our life don't have to be that hurtful.

And many times,

Just by seeing them differently,

And not creating a story,

Not beating ourselves up,

Not blaming others,

Just focusing in on having a good life right now,

That a lot of the hurts in our life just dissipate.

They go away.

And we get better.

We can heal from anything.

But,

We do need to heal.

And a lot of times,

It's looking at what happened,

Maybe crying,

Maybe being angry,

But maybe just seeing it differently and saying,

You know,

They were having a bad day,

They were having a bad week,

Maybe they were having a bad life.

I'm not going to let what they did to me hurt me anymore.

I'm going to live my life well and find beauty and joy in this moment right now.

I'm going to let go of what they did and focus on having a beautiful life.

When we're able to let go of our expectations and just flow with life,

Then when things happen,

There's less good and bad things happening.

It's just things happening.

And we realize that,

Oh,

This is just something that happened.

How do I adjust to it?

A lot of times when people hurt us,

It has nothing really to do with us.

It's because they're having problems.

When our parent says something cruel to us,

We look at them and realize that,

Wow,

This is your issue.

Not sure why you said that,

But that isn't about me.

That's about you.

And so,

The hurt that we might have felt in the past can become a lot softer because we realize when someone hurts us,

Particularly when it's true,

It's far more about things going on with them than it is what they said to us.

Or sometimes we realize that when we're hurt,

That it was just a mistake.

The person didn't mean to do that.

And because of now we have this insight,

This understanding,

Then we can let it go much more quickly.

The first two things I described,

Sadness and anger,

Are fairly clear.

As long as we're careful with our sadness,

Not to let it turn into depression,

And with our anger,

We never take that on another person or ourselves.

Those two are pretty clear and straightforward.

Now the third one I'm describing now is as far as how we see things,

How we interpret things,

Not owning things,

This is a bit more complex.

And that's why I've created the Happiness Podcast because mostly I teach these things here.

Now there are 330 episodes,

So there's a lot we can learn.

But it is good to learn these skills because they are,

In a sense,

Harder.

But when we implement them,

It really makes it so much more difficult to be hurt by others.

We may still be,

But if we are,

It just won't last very long because we have things in place now that help us,

To help us to heal,

And to help us to move forward.

Now I do want to conclude with the second part I mentioned at the beginning,

Which was we also need to be careful not to pass it on.

And what I meant by that is when people hurt other people,

It's almost always because they've been hurt,

Particularly when that hurt towards us is intentional.

It's because something has happened or is going on in that person's life that makes them hurt others.

I mean that's just how humans are wired.

We don't all do this,

But there are people out there that when they're hurting,

They want to hurt others.

It's like their response.

Or another way to look at it is just conditioning.

Well,

That's what my parents did to me,

So that's what I'm going to do to you.

They just pass on the baton of hurt.

And I think our job,

And that's a focus,

Our job is to make sure we don't keep passing that hurt on.

And we do that by making sure we're letting go of the hurt.

For example,

Let's say our father's worked really hard to provide a good upbringing for us,

But because they worked so hard,

They were never home.

They missed all our events,

All our activities,

And there are so many times we wish they were there and they weren't.

Well,

Now we're a parent.

Perhaps we're a father or a mother,

And we do the same thing.

And we realize that we're doing the same thing because we were hurt,

And that's what they did to us.

We're just doing the same thing.

So if we face that hurt and realize,

I need to let this go and heal from this,

Then we can make sure that we are at our kids' events and we're there for people that we love.

We don't have to pass that hurt on as long as we make sure we heal it and make sure we're aware of it.

And if it's just a habit,

We work towards changing it.

We can change anything.

It just takes work.

It takes courage.

But if we work on it,

Then we'll find that our lives can truly be a beautiful adventure and we can heal from any hurt that life throws at us.

Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast.

Until next time,

Accept what is,

Love what is.