  
The More They Hurt You the More They Hook You
Why is that? Why is
it that the more they hurt you, the deeper in goes the hook?
It’s a demoralizing dilemma to be in. A lot of you
wrote about it this week. One person sent this message: “I feel like a fool. I should hate him [her
husband] for all of the sneaking around with ___ [the other woman], but all I want is to lie next to him and have him put
his arms around me. I keep begging him to stay, not to leave me. I’ve become pathetic. I don’t blame
him for not loving me”
Another woman was beginning to lose interest in her boyfriend,
that is, until he became a no show on Friday night. The next day, she still hadn’t heard from him and his phone
was turned off. She went into a panic that could only be quashed if he called.
Eventually he did call, told her he’d call her again that
evening, but didn’t follow through. She went back into panic. Now she imagines that she is madly in love
with him, that she doesn’t care about what a louse he’s been, she wants him and only him.
A man writes that he suspects his wife of having affairs.
She flirts outrageously with other men right in front of him, avoids spending time with him, and doesn’t like having
sex (with him), and seems to only care about her own needs. “I hate to grovel for her attention,” he explains,
“and if I do try to talk to her about our relationship, she becomes angry and accusatory.”
Yes, it’s demoralizing to be in the “emotional beggar”
role. But it doesn’t mean you’re a weak person. It just means you’re human. It could happen
to almost anyone, given certain conditions. And it takes tremendous strength and insight to get out of it.
Another young man says his girlfriend has cheated on him more
times than he can count, and she always comes back, swearing she’ll never do it again. She’s hurt him so
many times, he’s tried to break up with her, and has dated many nice women in between, but the only one he obsesses
about, the only one he wants is her. He’s hooked. He’s hooked by the pain she has caused.
I’ve already written about this– that when pain
is introduced when you’re forming an attachment, it strengthens the attachment. I mentioned that when the researcher
accidentally stepped on the toe of the duck, the duck imprinted him stronger than the other ducks. I also mentioned
that fraternities inflict pain in their “hazing” to make the new “pledges” more loyal and bonded to
the fraternity.
Here’s a little more explanation. The Zagarnic effect
shows that the more problematic a situation is, the more enduring its impact upon your motivation. The study gave problem-solving
tests to two groups. The control group had an easy-to-solve problem; the other group was given a problem that couldn’t
be solved within the time-limit. Researchers went back to the two groups many years later. The ones who couldn’t
solve the problem still remembered what it was about, but the control group had forgotten all about it.
When someone causes you to feel pain, the mammalian part of
the brain (it is unconscious) creates an impression of that person so that it can warn you (with stress signals) to proceed
with extreme caution during your next contact with him. This extra arousal from your autonomic nervous system gets confused
with “being excited.” It arouses your “fight or flight” response, which gears you up for “competitive
mode,” and the challenge holds your interest.
Also, someone who arouses those old familiar insecurity feelings
reminds your mammalian brain of old feelings you had as a child when you were trying to gain your parent’s attention
or acceptance, and this creates a kind of special arousal that hooks you in – and you find yourself “groveling.”
Regardless of the reason, if you find yourself in this position, first know that you are not alone. The best among
us have probably been in this position. The key is to learn take back control of your life.
You are not your mammalian brain – it’s just a powerful
part of your biological being. The antidote is to take 100% responsibility for your emotional needs, stop looking to
your partner to take away the pain that he or she caused in the first place. It’s your job to set your life right.
Just don’t underestimate the strength it takes.
And don’t judge anyone who is caught up in this. This is all about being human and learning not to be ruled by
your addictive emotions – by your primitive brain.
source site: click here
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Two Kinds Of Hurt
by Bob Makransky
There are two kinds of hurt: self-pitying hurt and sad
hurt. Self-pitying hurt is the kind of hurt we feel on purpose, so that we’ll have a good excuse to wallow in self-pity.
Whenever we are self-righteously indignant at someone else’s behavior, we are indulging in self-pitying hurt. We seek
self-pitying hurt when we expect or demand something from another person which that person is not offering freely. Whenever
we believe that other people (e.g. our parents, spouse, or children) owe us anything; whenever we try to bribe, wheedle,
or coerce other people; to try to make them feel guilty if they don’t come across for us; to impose our own desires
on them beyond what they are comfortable with; then what we are actually seeking from them is their rejection, which we can
conveniently blame on them.
Whenever we make our happiness depend on something which someone else does or doesn’t
do, we are just asking that person to hurt us. This kind of hurt is easily avoided by being respectful of other people’s
space: their limits, their right to have feelings of their own, including the right to reject us, if they so desire,
without our resenting, denying it, or taking it as a personal affront.
Where self-pitying hurt is the natural consequence
of possessive love, sad hurt is the doorway to true love. Sad hurt is the hurt which other people make us feel in spite of
our having reached out to them joyously and in good faith. Sad hurt is puzzling hurt (as opposed to self-righteous hurt).
Where self-pitying hurt can easily be avoided by listening to and respecting other people’s feelings, sad hurt is unavoidable
– it’s part and parcel of the human condition. Sad hurt is the hurt which other people lay on us purposely –
the product of their self-hatred which they project onto us as scapegoats. Sad hurt is the hurt we feel when other people
are just using us as an excuse to pity themselves.
This kind of hurt seems very unjust and unfair; and it is unjust
and unfair. Although it is a meager consolation, this kind of “unmerited” hurt is indeed the result of karma that
we ourselves set into motion in other lifetimes and realities. If we feel that it is unjust that we should have to suffer
now for sins committed in other lifetimes, that’s too bad; but it’s life, and there’s no use complaining
about it. Complaining is what turns it into self-pitying hurt.
When other people try purposely to hurt us, it hurts.
There’s no use pretending that it doesn’t hurt, or getting angry at them in return. Those responses (apathy or
anger) cover our feelings of sad hurt – keep us from feeling the hurt directly by substituting thought forms of self-pity
for the direct perception of pain. These are our protections (closing up or striking back) when other people deliberately
try to hurt us, and they are effective blocks against the feeling of sad hurt. However, they also block out the feeling of
true love.
If we’re going to be open to other people’s love, we have to be open to their hurt as well.
Vulnerability is not a door that can be opened and closed selectively, to let some feelings through and not others. To protect
ourselves from feeling hurt is to prevent ourselves from feeling love.
When the crowd taunted and crucified Jesus,
he felt deeply, deeply hurt. He felt exactly the same way we would feel if there was a crowd of people taunting us and pouring
their self-hatred upon us, and we had done nothing to deserve it. Jesus was not such an exalted being that he no longer had
a capacity to feel hurt. On the contrary, he was an exalted being precisely because he let himself feel the hurt directly,
instead of blocking his pain with self-pity (apathy or anger).
No matter how enlightened we may become, we never get
to a place where hurt no longer hurts. There’s no way that hurt ever does anything except feel BAD. But if someone hurts
us and we let ourselves feel the hurt directly, then that’s that; that’s the way the cookie crumbles. We feel
bad for a little while, and then the feeling passes and we go on to something else.
But if we are afraid to feel hurt
directly; if we reject the feeling of hurt by substituting apathy or anger for it, by trying to dominate or control relationships,
by rolling over and playing the victim right off the top, or by avoiding intimacy altogether; then we are in fact grabbing
onto our hurt, hugging it to our bosoms, and making it the centerpiece of all our relationships. And all there can ever be
is hurt, because we leave no room for love to get in anywhere – we’ve got every chink stuffed.
Apathy and
anger aren’t really painkillers, they’re just pain deferrers. All they do is postpone the pain. The only way to
really get through pain, to get over it and past it, is by feeling it directly. Of course, this is the last thing which people
who are in pain want to hear: “Haven’t I suffered enough?” they ask. “And it’s not even my fault!”
But the truth is that the amount of pain which people feel (or repress into apathy or anger) is the precise amount of pain
which they must yet feel to disentangle themselves from it and put the pain behind them.
This is because pain is not
something which is external (imposed from without), but rather arises from within ourselves. The external situation which
causes pain is but a symbol for something going on inside us on an emotional level. To consider our pain as something detached
from ourselves is to refuse responsibility for our pain. To blame someone else for our pain, to try to make someone else take
responsibility for feeling our pain, is futile. Only by feeling our pain directly, looking within ourselves for the source
of our pain, are we taking responsibility for it, and thereby putting ourselves in a position to move beyond it. We do this
by finding a way to heal our own wounds, instead of expecting or demanding other people to heal them for us. Other people
can’t heal us; they’re in too much pain themselves to have any extra love to spare. We have to be willing to take
complete responsibility for our own healing.
Go back in your mind’s eye to every scene in your life when you
were hurt by other people. You do this like a normal daydream or fantasy, but instead of trying to capture a feeling of glory,
vindication, self-righteousness, etc. (as is done in normal daydreaming), you try to capture the feeling of hurt that you
felt at that time. Watch the scene of that person who is you being rejected and needing love, and give love to that person.
Talk to the you in the visualization, call to him or her: “There, there, cheer up! You may have been rejected, but you’re
still a worthwhile person. You’ll go on living and breathing, and in time you’ll find true love. After all, I
love you. I really do!”
Say this using your own words and sentiments, and mean what you say. Give yourself all
the sympathy and compassion that you were denied at that time. Let yourself feel sad for that person who is you. And when
you let yourself feel sad for yourself, you’ll also find yourself feeling sad for the people who hurt you.
Sad
hurt implies forgiveness – the sadness is as much for those who hurt us as it is for ourselves. Sadness, not anger,
is the true feeling we share with the people who hurt us. Anger separates us from them, whereas sadness unites us to them
– we are one with them in sadness.
This visualization is not so different from what we do when we indulge ourselves
in angry fantasies of the people who have hurt us – telling them off, or delighting when they feel remorse for what
they’ve done to us. But instead of using the visualization to stoke our self-pity, we use it to heal ourselves by feeling
good about who we are.
To be able to love others and to freely receive their love in return, we have to be ready to
be rejected and hurt by them. We have to be willing to face this directly, instead of preparing ourselves in advance, bracing
ourselves, taking out insurance in advance against hurt. We have to be able to forgive people for the bad things they do to
us rather than get into a tizzy about it – forgive them because they don’t know what they’re doing.
Of
course, this is a lot easier said than done, but the key to it is being willing to feel hurt: not angry and vindictive, not
blithely pretending we’re not hurt, not bitterly wallowing in self-pity over past hurt, not setting up ground rules
and strictures in relationships to guard against the possibility of future hurt; but just plain old feel hurt. If we can truly
open ourselves up to hurt, then we’ll automatically open ourselves up to love.
(excerpted from Magical
Living. Copyright © 2001 by Bob Makransky. All rights reserved.)
Author's Bio
Bob Makransky is a systems analyst, programmer, and professional astrologer. For the past 30
years he has lived on a farm in highland Guatemala where he is a Mayan priest and is head of the local blueberry growers association.
His website is: http://www.dearbrutus.com. To subscribe to Bob’s free monthly astro-magical e-zine for intelligent, thoughtful people seeking something
deeper than the usual New Age fare, send an e-mail to: click here
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