Latest / Pathological Positivity / The Unhealed Hear Wounds, Not Words – Episode #709
Transcript
- This is Live On Purpose Radio episode 709. The unhealed hear wounds, not words. Now is the only time to create and live the life you love. I'm doctor Paul Jenkins, the positivity psychologist. My job is to connect you to powerful positive psychology principles that immediately upgrade your relationships, business, and mental health. Are you ready? Let's jump in. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Live On Purpose Radio. This is doctor Paul, the shrink who expands your life with another episode of Live on Purpose Radio. Today, there's a common phrase that we get to revisit. Hurt people hurt people. Did you hear that? The first hurt is an adjective. The second one is a verb. Hurt people hurt people. Why do some comments just roll right off our backs while others cut deeply? Today, we'll get into the psychology behind that. So first, we'll talk about how we never really hear reality directly. We'll talk about how our words become filters and how healing changes what we hear. Are you with me? Let's jump in. First of all, we don't hear reality directly. We don't hear what people say. We hear what we think they mean. And there's a problem because the number one error that we make as humans is that we believe what we think. So when we think someone means something, we know that we're right about that. Communication is always filtered. In the communication model that I teach when I'm doing leadership trainings, we talk about how every communication has to be encoded, usually in language, sometimes in text, sometimes in other ways through nonverbal communication, facial expressions, tone of voice, all of that becomes the encoding of a message. But that same message has to be decoded by the receiver or the recipient of the message. And so there can be errors on either end. Two people can hear exactly the same words and have completely different reactions. So remember that the stimulus is neutral. In other words, what's being said, completely neutral. And I'm not saying that the person has zero intent, but whatever it is, we don't even know. Even if they tell us, someone can tell us what their intent is, and we're still going to believe whatever it is that we already believe about their intent. The stimulus is neutral. The evaluation of that stimulus creates the emotional experience that we have. So what hurts us is often not what is said, but what we made it mean in our mind. And usually, we know that we're right about that. So feedback might be interpreted as criticism. Silence might be interpreted as rejection. A question could be interpreted as judgment. And so our wounds... Let's talk about emotional wounds for a moment because that's what becomes the filter that we run everything through. Our brain's main job is to keep us safe and, secondarily, to prove us right. To keep us safe, our brain is constantly monitoring for danger or risk. And when we've been wounded, we have ample evidence that something is a risk or a danger to us. So that becomes almost an automatic filter for new information coming in, whether it's actually dangerous or risky or not. The unhealed hear wounds, not words. Emotional wounds create sensitivity. So if we've experienced any level of rejection, abandonment, betrayal, shame, guilt, inadequacy, those are the wounds that now become the filters that we run all of the new information through. When these wounds are unhealed, we expect them to be touched. You know how there's there's a sensitivity if you've got a wound on your hand or your arm. You become very sensitive to that and any touch will exacerbate the pain, will will fire it off. So we become very vigilant, and we start to watch for evidence that confirms our belief. Hurt people hurt people because when we are wounded, we naturally go into our protective fight or flight mode. And fight, I mean, that's pretty obvious how that's going to hurt other people that we interact with. Someone comes home from a long day at work, and they're very tired and upset, and they already feel like they're unappreciated. And even the slightest provocation can tip them over and end up yelling at the spouse or kicking the dog. It actually makes things worse. Hurt people hurt people. So often people hurt others because they've first interpreted an interaction through their own unresolved pain, through their wound. People don't react to what happened. They react to what their wounds told them happened, and it's a natural protective response. This makes healing really essential. And my invitation to you as you're listening in today to Live On Purpose Radio, how can you take personal responsibility for your own healing? And let's just get off of the addiction to having someone or something else change in order for us to heal. I still remember one of my early clients. I was a brand new psychologist, and I'm meeting with this client. She's, I guess, 32, 33 years old. She has a little eight year old daughter, has never been in a permanent stable relationship, but this daughter came from an earlier relationship when she was just young. And she had become very, very guarded, very protected, including putting on a lot a lot of weight. It was almost like she built that up as an insulation to protect her from other people or relationships or expectations or whatever it is. And we got to a point in my work with her where we were talking about forgiveness as a healing choice, and she almost came unglued. She did. She was right next to just firing me on the spot as she shared with me that the person who had abused her in her past or stepfather had abused her in every way you can imagine. And I won't trouble you with the nasty details here, but you've got an imagination. Yes. She experienced all of that for an extended period of time. And as she was considering this thing I was suggesting, the forgiveness... Healing forgiveness, she said, he never even acknowledged that he did anything wrong. There was never any apology, never any attempt to reconcile this or make it okay. Not okay. Right? Now the part I didn't tell you is that this abuser, her stepfather, had died ten years earlier in her early twenties. This guy had passed away. He was no longer even around. How long is she willing to wait for him to change this? See, her healing cannot be dependent on the person who injured her. And the abuse was totally legitimate. I'm not arguing that, oh, she wasn't abused. Yes, she was. It was real. It caused real injury physically as well as emotionally. So we're not arguing about the validity here of the wound. The wound is real. What we're shifting toward is a personal responsibility for healing. We cannot wait for the abuser, the evil person who has injured us to make this alright. That's an impossible scenario if we're waiting for the past to change. And, you guys, I really suck at changing the past. So I invite you in this present, in the now, to take personal responsibility for your own healing. Healing changes what you hear. This is an empowering part of our conversation today. We cannot control what others say. We cannot control what others do. We don't control the other humans. Their intentions, what they want to have happen, that's all their business. What other people think of me is none of my business. So we can take personal responsibility for our own healing. The way we choose now to evaluate our circumstances, the way we manage our own emotional filters, that is within our control. And as healing occurs, we become less reactive, less defensive, more curious, more compassionate. Instead of assuming the worst, you know, that they're trying to hurt me, we can shift our brain into metacognition, think about our thinking, and ask what else might this mean. Healing is not about waiting for someone else to apologize, especially if they're dead and gone. That sounds like a a futile endeavor. Healing is all about reclaiming our own ability to use that positivity model, and I keep referring to the positivity model in almost every episode. If you don't have a copy of that model, I'll put a full color PDF copy of that model right into your inbox. Just go to liveonpurposeradio.com/themodel, all one word. That's free. I want you to have that in your possession so that you can refer back to it. When I say evaluation, that's part of the model and that's where everything starts. That's what determines our emotional energy. Our emotional energy or feelings is what determines how we show up. And then that creates our results. That's where we can claim our own healing. The healthier we become, the more clearly we can hear. I invite you as we wrap up today to consider where in my life am I hearing wounds instead of words? What healing work would allow me to hear more clearly, to love more deeply, to live more peacefully. We have a lot of work to do. You know, I I wanna share one other quick thought with you before I turn you loose today. And it has to do with a new idea that I hadn't really thought of before that we are responsible for bringing more positives into our life, and we are responsible for reducing the negatives. And I used to think that was part of the same scale. Right? Increase positives, reduce negatives. No. Actually, those are measured separately, and we can be doing all the great work of introducing more positives into our life if we're not also reducing the negatives. The negatives will take over and consume the positives. If you think about your own experience, you'll see that this is true. The negatives can overshadow and overwhelm the positives, and that's because we're used to believing them, and we hang on to them. I read a book by Greg McKeown called Essentialism, and I I believe it was in that book where he was talking about cleaning out a closet. And we have what's called ownership bias. Meaning, if we already own something, we'll assign a higher level of value to that thing than if we didn't own it already. So when you're cleaning your closet, you you take out an item. And you ask yourself, okay. If I didn't already own this, how much would I pay to obtain it? And if the answer is zero, toss it or donate it or whatever. Right? You don't need it in your space. The ownership bias is particularly strong with our thoughts. And if you have any negative thoughts about yourself, you might consider cleaning out your mental closet. And as you grab each thought, ask yourself, if I didn't already own this thought, how much would I be willing to pay to obtain it? And this level of metacognition can be a game changer as we start to take more responsibility for our own thoughts and not just increasing the positives. We got you on that. We're providing you with daily, weekly, monthly positives over on the Positives Life platform. You get to have a reduction in the negative if you start to clean it out that way. If you didn't already own it, how much would you pay to obtain it? And if that thought doesn't serve you well, maybe it's time to toss it. Alright. Did you get what you came for today? We've got you. You've got this. We've got you. Let's go apply what we've learned today and live on purpose. Did you get what you came for? Give yourself the gift of taking real action on what you realized today. Please share this episode with someone you know would value it, and leave us a rating too. It's time now to live on purpose.