Why we hurt the people we love and how to process the guilt after hurting them
How to get out of the cycle of: "Why do I always mess things up? Why do I always disappoint the people around me?"
Hello everyone, in this post, I will explain the reason we hurt the people we love, and how to process the painful emotions that come with feeling that you have wronged someone, become able to forgive and love yourself unconditionally, and use this experience to grow the love you have within.
I recently ended up hurting someone I deeply love and care about (just mercury retrograde things…). I was overcome with immense guilt and intense self hatred. I spent a good while regretting what was said and done, and felt such deep disgust toward myself for hurting someone that I deeply love and care about. I felt very unlovable and terrible for being selfish. It is very difficult to forgive yourself when you make decisions or say things that ultimately end up hurting someone.
There are a few reasons why our reality is created to show us hurting the people around us. The main reason is due to our subconscious, so that we may experience the opposite of hurting others, which is giving love to others.
The first reason is due to suppressed shame and guilt in our subconscious.
We adopt these beliefs of what is right and wrong as we grow up from our parents and our ancestors. We develop guilt in our subconscious when we are young by being born as a burden to our parents. As a child, our parents felt financially and mentally burdened by our existence.
Even if the parent tries very hard to not show it, the parent and child closely share the subconscious, and this feeling is directly conveyed to the child. The child does not receive encouragement or acknowledgement of their emotions and learns to suppress their emotions. The child ends up feeling guilt and believes that their existence is harming their parents.
This guilt is embedded deep within our subconscious, and ends up creating the reality that we experience.
The second reason is because we also were hurt by others.
We don't just get hurt and feel pain, but we also desire to hurt others as well. A child that was repeatedly hurt and abused by their parents not only feels pain, but also a desire to get revenge and hurt their parents back. Even though it is only natural to hurt someone back after being hurt, this feeling of wanting revenge is heavily shunned upon by society.
Society tells us to “be the bigger person” and to “forgive and move on.” Many see it shameful to harbor feelings of resentment like these, while not understanding and being compassionate to why it began to exist in the first place.
The parent also repeatedly prevents the child from "acting out," and this feeling of wanting to hurt others is further suppressed in the child's subconscious and does not disappear.
As a society, we suppress and reject things that are deemed "bad" into our subconscious such as verbally attacking others, hurting others and causing harm. Even though it would have dissolved if it were acknowledged and understood, but because it is negatively judged, it ends up becoming suppressed and shunned.
Although this does establish some order in the external reality, in the subconscious, it creates a greater energy of fear, which ironically results in the creation of more fear in our reality.
The third reason is because we are on Earth to experience duality and relativity. It only becomes possible to know and experience something when you experience the opposite. This means we ultimately chose to experience hurting others so that we can give love to others. We chose to be born as a burden so that we may help others.
On Earth, we experience things in a dualistic nature. We experience certain things in duality so that we can recognize the experience for what it is. For example, we experience separation and loneliness after experiencing a deep connection. It is not possible to recognize that what you are experiencing is connection when you are connected all the time. When you are separated, you become able to realize what connection actually is.
We experience hurting others because we were hurt. Through hurting others, we feel guilt and shame for causing them pain. A person who deeply repents and feels the pain and regret of hurting someone else becomes able to dissolve the veil of separation and awaken from the slumber of the ego, and see that the person they hurt is the same as them, and that they are inherently connected.
The fourth reason is because our soul is creating our reality so that we can love ourselves unconditionally, through experiencing the fear of abandonment. The reason why many people hold back from fighting or hurting the feelings of someone around them is due to them not wanting to feel the pain of rejection and abandonment. When you hurt someone, the person you hurt is going to leave you. Inevitably, when you end up hurting someone, you have no choice but to feel the pain of abandonment, self hatred, shame, and guilt.
Shame and guilt is what a negative emotion is before it is transformed into its positive counterpart, which is love. Only the person who hurt others is able to feel guilt, and becomes able to understand that the person they hurt is the same as them.
However, it can be easy to get caught up in guilt while you identify yourself in the position of the perpetrator, and believe that you deserve to be punished and condemned. This also occurs because there is also a part of you that identifies as the victim of abandonment. The victim and perpetrator are two sides of the same coin, and simultaneously exist in your subconscious.
The part of yourself that hates yourself believes that hurting others is "bad" because it leads to conflict, and conflict leads to abandonment. It believes that avoiding hurting others is going to prevent conflict, but during certain periods of our lives, conflict is inevitable and cannot be avoided, especially when it comes to standing up for ourselves and respecting ourselves. When you are constantly being hurt by everything around you, at a certain point, we snap because we are unable to keep suppressing the feeling of being hurt and the feeling of wanting to hurt back anymore.
When you identify as your ego, you end up believing that you are not worthy of love because you have flaws or negative qualities about yourself. Understand that these beliefs are simply a belief of the ego, and were taught to you by your parents. See that you were attaching to these beliefs because you were afraid of being abandoned and ending up alone. The beliefs that your ego attaches to are not the truth.
When you tell yourself that you can’t make any mistakes and that you can’t hurt anyone’s feelings, it is coming from a place of fear. This is coming from the desire to wanting to avoid the feeling of rejection and the pain of abandonment.
It is important to understand and see ourselves impartially with compassion, that as a soul having an experience in a human body, we are bound to make mistakes and mess up. We are going to experience difficult emotions and turmoil that results in us making choices that we regret. It’s okay to make mistakes and mess up. We can always choose differently what we do in the future, and as cliché as it sounds, we can choose to grow from our experiences.
If you believe that you must also suffer due to your guilt, it is important to know that your present suffering is not going to change what has already happened. Punishing yourself might make you feel like you are repenting and are “feeling guilty”, but this is actually an avoidance of feeling the guilt and it is counteractive. This prevents you from healing and growing from this experience, which is why we are ultimately experiencing this guilt in the first place.
When you become able to fully feel the pain of hurting someone, you see that they feel pain the same as ourselves, and we become able to unconditionally love and accept them as they are. The reason why we experience the pain after hurting others is because we are to experience what it is like to unconditionally love others. We see that hurting others is the same as hurting ourselves.
So, how can you move on from the guilt and pain of having wronged someone?
It is to observe whatever emotion comes up, and give it unconditional awareness as the observer. Don’t fight the guilt or any emotion as it arises, and allow it to fully exist in your body and let it flow through you. Feel the self hatred, and observe it as it is occurring. Let yourself say whatever you want to say.
It is to see that these things ultimately had to happen so that you could purify and love the suppressed shadows in your subconscious. Accept your ego as it is, and accept the truth that your reality was created due to the suppressed emotions in your subconscious.
When you release and purify guilt, it turns into love. This love then becomes reflected in your reality. You become able to give and share love to those around you, which is the opposite of giving hurt and pain to others. This means that the person who experiences the pain and guilt of hurting others is the one that becomes able to unconditionally love and be genuinely grateful for those around them.
The feeling of wanting to punish yourself is also a feeling that will dissolve with an impartial awareness and loving gaze.
Tell yourself that it is enough to have felt the guilt and felt genuinely sorry for hurting others, and that regardless of the mistakes you make, you will be here with yourself through all the stages of growth. You will not abandon yourself and leave yourself even though you made these mistakes. You will encourage your growth, and foster positive change through unconditional love of yourself. Give yourself the compassion, love, and understanding a kind, unconditionally loving parent would have.
You cannot hate yourself into changing for the better. You can only love yourself and encourage yourself in order for you to grow into the next highest version of yourself.
Face the pain of abandonment, guilt, and shame head on and feel it fully without resisting it. If you would like to, give a sincere apology to the person that you hurt.
Cry out the tears of regret for having hurt someone you love, and feel their pain within you. Feel how painful it must have hurt to be on the receiving end, and feel how painful it was for you to cause that hurt.
Send gratitude to the person and the situation for allowing it to release and purify the guilt and shame you had within, and for helping you identify the reasons why you thought you were unlovable and unworthy. Try to deeply tap into the feeling of gratitude as it is a powerful tool for transmuting pain and suffering into love.
If you are not able to feel guilt after hurting someone, it can also mean that you have deeply suppressed this guilt and become numb to it, or you still feel resentment from being hurt. When you are able to purify and release the anger of being hurt, you will be able to feel the guilt of having hurt others.
We all have parts of ourselves that we do not want to accept and that we refuse to believe aren’t truly parts of ourselves. We refuse to accept and love these shadows. However, further rejecting and suppressing our shadows will not lead to true peace and freedom, as doing so will create our reality so that we have to face them over and over again.
All of this happened so that we can experience unconditional love of ourselves and to experience giving love to others.
True self love isn’t only loving ourselves when we are positive and kind, but also lovingly holding space for the parts of ourselves that we believe to be unlovable and unworthy. In these moments when we hurt the people we love and we are forced to face the parts of ourselves that we can’t accept, it is an opportunity for us to learn to love and accept them unconditionally. It is to see our existence impartially without any value judgments.
Through the experience of hurting others, we become able to transmute this guilt into love. When we purify our subconscious and become able to love ourselves unconditionally, we grow the love within ourselves. We become able to share the love we have with others, and helping others also grow the love within them as well. Through this experience, we become the beacon to illuminate the path for others through love.
Don’t pin yourself down to the ground for making a mistake - the journey isn’t going to be perfectly linear and it’s okay to mess up. It’s okay if you want to rest on the ground for a bit too, but dust yourself off and try again eventually when you are ready. You deserve to.
Peace, love, and light <3