“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.”

Marcus Aurelius

Everyone’s been hurt by someone else. We all have wounds. Some deep, some shallow, some transient, some persistent — but all deeply personal and inescapably painful. Life’s journey bruises us along the way.

When we’re hurt, especially by those we love, it reaches to the most delicate depths of our hearts. Even those who appear strong in every aspect of their lives are defenseless against the broken heart.

The person you trusted turns out to be a liar.

The person who said he loves you proves otherwise in his actions.

The friend you thought would always be there abandons you in your time of need.

What do we do about this? How do we respond? How do we live?

First and foremost: do not let it turn you against yourself.

When we’re hurt, we’re tempted to think less of ourselves, to believe we deserved it, to take the venom as truth. The wounded heart seeks a reason for its pain, and oftentimes it blames itself. I’ve seen this time and time again in patients who have suffered from abusive relationships or upbringings. They are hurt — and then they hurt themselves, even years after the offending person is gone.

John O’Donohue (January 1956 — January 2008), Irish poet and philosopher, captured this phenomenon:

“Tragically, it does seem possible for a person to utterly destroy their sense of inner beauty. Sometimes this is the result of being badly hurt. How ironical it is, when someone inflicts hurt on us and then departs, that we continue inflicting the same hurt on ourselves, over and over.”

At some unconscious level we risk becoming slaves to a pattern of inner destructiveness. For some, it leads to depression, self-harm, even death. For many, it leads to an anemic life without color, where the person you see in the mirror is your merciless judge rather than your unconditional friend.

But there is hope. There must be hope. And it starts with realizing what’s going on. Awareness, however difficult to find, begets any sort of intentional change.

“It is a slow and painful task to break free from the wounded and wounding circle of one’s own anxiety. As always in the world of the mind, recognition is a huge transformative force.” — John O’Donohue

When we seek to change ourselves for the better, when we embark towards a few path in life, we almost always hit resistance. A desire to flee back into the familiar, the easy, the expected. Daring to change can feel like a vast emptiness at first, because the unknown is a void before it reveals its true potential. The same applies to getting out of our own wounding cycles. We can become complacent even in suffering.

Yet these inflection points are the most important moments in our lives. In these times we must take courage and embrace the risk of change, because if we don’t, if we turn back, we might never have the opportunity again.

“Stand still and do not waver from your emptiness; for at this time you can turn away, never to turn back again.” — Meister Eckhart

In wounding ourselves because someone else hurt us, we give that person power over us, even long after they are gone. Why do that? Why give that person the satisfaction of living rent-free in your head?

Instead, we can realize that we had the power all along. To decide how we react. To choose how we see ourselves. And to strive towards the light of the good things that we are and the better things we can become.

You can always rediscover your inner beauty, but you must first not lose faith that it was there all along.

It is there.