Hurt: The Feeling We Avoid Most

Adapted from a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Edited from the original recording for readability.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed in this conversation originates with Dr. Chip Dodd in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling uses this framework in its work with permission and gratitude.

The Eight Feelings, and Why Hurt Is One of Them

Of all the feelings we're given, hurt may be the one we spend the most energy avoiding. Nearly every child who has learned to walk has experienced it physically, so we have plenty of experience being hurt without much understanding of what it actually is.

Dodd's work centers on the eight feelings named in *The Voice of the Heart*: anger, sadness, hurt, loneliness, fear, healthy shame, glad, and guilt. People look at that list and say there are seven negative ones and only one good one. But what Dodd has been teaching for years is that these are eight gifts — eight feelings given to us so we can live fully in a place that is really rough, even tragic.

Once we face the reality and truth of life, we admit that if we're going to live it, it's going to hurt. And if we try not to live it, it's going to hurt anyway. Life is going to have pain in it. So if feelings are gifts that help us live fully in a tragic place, then hurt is something we need to be sensitive to and able to recognize, so that whatever gift is in it, we can get it.

Hurt Tells Us We Need Healing

Hurt is the feeling that tells us we're in need of healing. It says we've received a pain, experienced a wound, gotten a cut. In the emotional world, that usually means words have come toward us that cut or harmed. The old saying — sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me — is one of the great cliché lies. It isn't true. Words stick longer than the events that come and go, longer even than a smack in the head. *I hate you. I wish you hadn't been born. What are you doing here? Nobody asked you to come in the room. Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. What makes you think I care?* Those kinds of words stick, and they stick deep.

The pain is indicative of the need; the pain points to the need. So hurt is healed through confession of need, and then by going to people who know what hurt is. When we have a cut or a broken leg, we go to the person who knows what healing is. The doctor resets the bone, puts a cast on it, and when the cast comes off there's rehabilitation to deal with the atrophy that set in while it healed, so we can get back up and get back in the game of living.

Going to People Who Know What Hurt Is

The difficulty is that we often have to go to people we would once have written off as weak. If we've believed that sticks and stones break bones but words never hurt, if we've told ourselves we shouldn't be bothered by what people say, that we should get over the wounds and rejections we've experienced, then when we are hurt we won't trust — because we look down on the very people who are sensitive to hurt and know what to do with it.

We need to go to people who know what hurt is, because only hurt people can help us heal. They're the ones with expertise in being human, who know how to heal themselves. People who don't admit they're hurt, hurt people. If I say my leg is cut and it's hurting, and someone answers, "Why would that hurt you? What are you, a baby?" — that's hurt people hurting people. But people who have been healed from hurt can help people. It's the same concept as the wounded healer: if I'm unwilling to have my own hurt, there's no way I can be present with someone who is really hurting.

Hurt and Courage

Alongside healing, there's another word connected to hurt: courage. People commonly define courage as not listening to your fear and showing up anyway, as being brave — but it's worth asking what courage actually is.

Hurt and Courage

On the surface, hurt and courage look like opposites — the way fear and faith can seem like an oxymoron when you put them side by side. But Dodd draws a straight line between them. If I have hurt and I go get help and I get healing, the healing allows me to return to being fully involved. Because I get the healing, I can go back to wherever I came from, return to life on life's terms, and live it more ably, because I'm not having to limp with the wound. My leg is being rehabilitated. There's even a line of thinking that scar tissue is stronger than tissue that has never been wounded.

Courage means to be fully in — to be all in. It's full participation with my heart, doing and living what matters to me. So when hurt is healed, it returns us to the courage we were born with. As odd as it sounds, babies are probably born with the most courage they will ever have, because they are fully participating with their hearts without being able to stop it. They're all in, no matter what. They don't know any difference; they don't even know the wounds of life that teach a person not to be all in. Once we start getting hurt, if we're able to say "that hurts" and have it resolved, have the healing come from it, that lets us return to the courage we were born with. It encourages us to go back and take the risk of getting hurt again.

We think of love as a very courageous thing to do, and it is — but a person is only capable of love to the degree they are also capable of feeling hurt. Dodd points to his own long working partnership as an example: years of driving back and forth between Murfreesboro and Nashville, doing high-tension work together. Things get said, nerves get frayed, wounds get spoken. He has hurt his colleague, and his colleague has hurt him. Anyone who claims a close partner has never hurt them isn't telling the truth. But that hurt, if the two people will say it to each other, keeps a wedge from growing between them. It allows them to stay in partnership as they work toward a common goal or vision. Hurt that is healed lets two people continue in full-hearted participation. Even though we've hurt each other, love gives us room to know that we're going to hurt each other, and that we can talk about it, share it, heal it, and get on with what we're made to do. In their case, both are made to help people see who they're made to be so they can do what they're made to do — done differently, but the same thing. And that only happens through the willingness to say "that hurts," or "this hurts," or even "that's scary." The number of times they've been made stronger through confession beats all the times they've been made stronger through some kind of self-sufficiency. So a willingness to be hurt — not harmed, but hurt — is one of the hallmark expressions of love. It's a statement of courage: I'm willing to be hurt and stay in this relationship. I'm willing to be vulnerable again.

Resentment: The First Step Away From Hurt

At the other end sits resentment. Anyone who has spent fifteen minutes in a twelve-step room has heard someone say, accurately, that resentment is relapse territory. And yet there is something that feels good and empowering about it.

Resentment is not the opposite of hurt. It is the first step we take to avoid having to admit we feel hurt. Once I decide I will not experience this, resentment is the feeling, the experience, the mental state of rejecting hurt. That means resentment is not in and of itself a badness, because it is actually close to hurt — you're still close to home even in resentment. In fact, we tend to find our feelings by first admitting our impaired experiences of feelings. If I can admit I'm resentful, then I'm likely to be able to find that I feel hurt.

But resentment feels powerfully good, because it's empowering. It fuels me with a self-willed, don't-need-anybody defiance against any admission of sensitivity. It is, as it turns out, hatred cast outward: I'm not going to hurt, you're going to hurt, and I will give you nothing of me. At first blush that feels really good. Revenge is sweet — until it goes sour and the consequences arrive.

There's something in the word itself: hurt that turns into resentment is re-sending what I received. I have this feeling, but you're going to pay for it. I'm going to send it to you, and I'm going to multiply it. People who become resentful develop a kind of pride in a revenge-focused attitude — I'm not letting anybody get to me. And that is why hurt people hurt people, because it becomes a decision that includes everyone rather than a decision that includes some people. That attitude is global. So then anyone who wants to love me, I can't see it, because I have a revenge focus and I'm not letting anybody get to me. The tragedy is each step takes me one step farther from my heart: hurt to resentment, resentment to revenge, revenge to what becomes a character defect, a vengeful attitude. Nobody can be close to somebody who's vengeful. Everybody's careful, everybody's scared, so I'm isolated — which makes me more resentful. The supposed solution is the catch-22 of disaster.

Confession and Care

Hurt is universal — the limbic brain can't tell the difference between physical hurt and emotional hurt. Kick a person in the shin and they cry out; double-cross or betray them and they cry out in a different way. So what do we do with something that is going to happen to anyone who loves anyone, probably before the clock strikes twelve?

Dodd says he's amazed at how the limbic system is healed. The first step in the heart being healed is the thing called confession. Confession means to agree with God — to agree that I'm human, to come into the admission. I'm fessing up to being in need. I'm fessing up to my condition. I'm fessing up to the fact that I'm not God, and I hope you are. So hurt starts firstly with admission.

Then what's amazing is that when that admission is made to people who are capable of accepting and receiving the truth of hurt, the limbic world — the heart — is healed through caring. As crazy as it sounds, the simple experience of caring is a healing experience. The medical doctor or the physical therapist who walks a person through returning the muscles to their proper place, so the leg can be used the way it's meant to be used — that competence is wonderful, and it helps a person be competent in daily living. But to know that the competent person also cares is the healing experience that returns a person's heart to how it's made to be. We are literally created to be connected, and the only way we are truly connected is through caring from one person to another. Whether we call it mystery, magic, or just neurological functioning makes no difference. Hurt is healed through the care of other people who know what it's like to be hurt, who can agree with me: yes, that's hurt, and you will make it. Just keep saying it, keep doing it, and I'll keep caring.

Going to someone who cares

What Dodd describes is a rare commodity for many people growing up. The messages that came instead were get tough, get over it, deal with it — just make this go away. Against that backdrop, the alternative he points to is going to someone who cares and making confession, or admission, from a genuinely vulnerable place.

Watch the short teaching. This feeling is also covered in the Navigating Feelings video series — watch the hurt module. Or explore all eight feelings.