One of my favorite things to do in my work is to take a core human emotion or experience and teach a “101” workshop about it. Inner Critic 101. Fear 101. Difficult Conversations 101. I’m a passionate believer that we all need a 101 education on many of the everyday emotional and psychological matters of our lives.
I still can’t believe that in school I was taught to balance a checkbook, how to stop drop and roll in a fire….how to conjugate verbs or do an algebraic equation, but I was never taught about emotions, communication, mental health or cognition. I’m so glad that’s changing now.
When I teach one of those 101 workshops, I like to start with the basics. In Fear 101, for example, we start with: What is fear? How can we define it? What’s the psychology of fear, and the biology of it? And then; how does fear shape our behavior in ways we do and don’t want to hold on to? What can we do to shift out of fear when it has an unhelpful grip on us?
I find a Fear 101 education to be particularly important, because when we are actually feeling fear, it’s very hard to think clearly about it. In a sense, we have to do our thinking and learning about fear outside of that moment, so we have a shot of bringing that knowledge to bear when we are in the consuming, state-altering experience of it.
We need the same kind of 101 education about the emotional experience of feeling hurt. When we’re feeling hurt, it’s unlikely that we are going to naturally think about what’s happening inside of us with clear language or reflective awareness. We’re more likely to be unconsciously driven by that hurt – often to actions that aren’t healing or constructive.
So today, in that spirit, I want to explore a fundamental question about hurt: What’s the definition of feeling hurt?
The Webster’s dictionary doesn’t get us very far. It defines hurt feelings simply as “unhappiness or sadness caused by someone’s feelings or actions.” But “unhappiness” and “sadness” don’t capture our full experience of being hurt, do they? I might feel really sad or unhappy that, for example, our dear friends are moving out of town, but I’m not (necessarily) feeling hurt about it.
I love some of the beautiful definitions for feeling hurt shared by women in our course community: “It’s when I feel devalued.” “When the care I expected to be in a relationship is suddenly no longer present.” “It’s a wounding to my heart.”
You can take a moment to add your own definition now. How would you define feeling hurt?
How have the experts who study hurt feelings defined it? Well, in a number of different ways. As you read about these, see what each one illuminates for you about your past experiences of hurt. Maybe one will spark an aha moment for you, helping you understand more what you have been feeling.
Relational Devaluation
Mark Leary, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, was one of the earliest researchers to define hurt in the academic literature. He proposed that hurt is the feeling that occurs when we perceive a “relational devaluation” – when someone’s actions make us feel like they value the relationship with us less than we’d hoped or expected (and less than we ourselves value the relationship with that other person). In other words, he argues, if you lie to me, or criticize me harshly, or exclude me, what really hurts is that I interpret that act as demonstrating that you don’t value the relationship with me as much as I want you to.
Other scholars have argued this doesn’t fully speak to all our experiences of hurt. I agree. (I think of one member of my family of origin who I’ve felt tremendously hurt by. I have never had any question as to whether she values the relationship. In fact, I’ve often felt trapped by how much she values it! But I do feel like she lacks the emotional skills to turn that into caring behaviors.)
“Relational devaluation” might speak to some of our experiences of hurt, but it doesn’t encompass all of them.
Relational Transgression
Years later, other theorists argued that we feel hurt when a “relational transgression” occurs. The research on this explores an interesting idea: that we each hold a kind of ruleset or code – a way things are supposed to be in a relationship – and we feel hurt when those rules or code are broken. For example, let’s say I hold the concept that true friends should have a reciprocal relationship. Then I feel hurt when something happens that conflicts with that idea about what a friendship is – maybe I’m always inviting my friend places but she never invites me. Or maybe someone holds the conviction that married partners should have deep trust in one another, so it hurts when their spouse asks suspicious questions about them working late.
It doesn’t seem to me that the violation of our codes or rulesets is our cause of the hurt. It seems more like our hurt feelings happen instinctively, somatically, and later we might reference a code or idea about how things should be to help explain the hurt and justify our hurt feelings.
The Social Pain Theory
Evolutionary psychologists look at emotional hurt with a different primary question: what’s the evolutionary reason for emotional hurt? How does it further our species’ survival? They argue that rejection and isolation of individual humans is not good for survival (since we need to be in groups and communities to survive). Hurt is the “social pain” that motivates us to do things that repair social bonds, or cause us to conform to the group. The resulting group cohesion and togetherness is advantageous to our species’ survival. Interesting hypothesis, but does it speak to all our experiences of hurt? What about when our emotional hurt has to do with being mistreated in close relationships but never excluded or ostracized?
A Threat to Attachment Bonds
I really enjoy scholar Dr. Judith Feeney’s additions to the conversation. She brings an attachment lens to the topic of hurt, finding that our sense of hurt often involves some kind of threat to the attachment bond. From an attachment theory lens, we find a sense of safety and comfort in the world through close, positive relationships with others. She writes that when something happens that we find hurtful, it threatens that safety / attachment bond in one of two ways: 1) damages our view of ourselves as worthy of love or 2) damages our core beliefs about the availability and trustworthiness of others. This is one reason, she posits, why hurt feelings can be so intense: they put our very sense of safety and security at risk.
She also finds that in her research “the sense of personal injury” is a defining aspect of hurt. I find this to be a very useful, important idea. In all my conversations about hurt with members of our course and reader community, hurt is defined by this sense of being…well, hurt – in the sense of wounding, injury.
Indeed, the root of the word for the English word “hurt” is the Old French “hurter” meaning, “to strike.” Going further back, the Germanic roots include terms for “to knock against” to “run at, collide with” as well as the word for ram, as in the animal. Picture that image of a horned animal coming at you and causing an injury with their horn. There’s a powerful resonance with what emotional hurt feels like – the forcefulness, the sense of something puncturing, the sense of a painful collision.
Not Being Seen, Heard or Known
The other thing I hear again and again in our community when I ask people about their experiences of hurt is this: their past hurts had to do with being misunderstood, not heard for what they were really saying or seen for who they really are. Our hurt shows us, in a pointed way, how deeply we want to be seen, heard and known.
That covers many of the major definitions out there in the academic literature. Which resonates with you, if any? How would you define hurt?
I’m working on my own definition. I think it would have something to do with first articulating the human needs to be seen, held as inherently good, respected, and met with care. Though life doesn’t always give us that, that’s what we all really want. And hurt is what we feel in the absence of any of those in our interactions with fellow humans.
To read – or look back on – previous posts in this series on Feeling Hurt, check out this post on the reasons for feeling hurt, and this post on how hurt has been overlooked as a core emotion in the psychology discourse and emotional taxonomies we use.
May we all understand our own hurt better, and others’ too. And may we heal.
Top Photo Credit: Mitch Mitchell
