Words May Hurt You, But Why?

Why do words hurt us? It’s often because we’ve been trained to internalize other people’s negative messages.

When others hurt us, they often blame us for our own behavior. That’s when our survival instinct takes over and makes a terrible, but reversible mistake. In an effort to protect ourselves, we listen for clues from the abuser’s blame messages on how to keep safe. So, we turn a useful question like, “How could I prevent future assaults,” into a self-abusing question like, “What did I do wrong to cause that?”

The solution to all of this internalization is to realize the truth. The truth is other people’s behavior toward you says more about them than it does about you. That is not to say that you should live a life free of self-examination. What it means is that someone else’s negative viewpoint of you usually results from their own tendency to see things in the negative. The abuse comes from the abuser.

The action step is to place the responsibility for the abuse in the abuser’s hands, and place the responsibility for protecting yourself in your own hands. If you’re dealing with minor negativity from a person, you may just need to remind yourself that the person needs help and that “words can never harm you.” However, if there is any threat to physical or emotional health, you may need to consider a range of protective measures, up to and including law enforcement.

So, although it’s good to examine your own behavior throughout life, don’t think you’ve done something wrong just because someone else has told you you’ve done something wrong. Use your own criterion, not the utterances of other people to evaluate your own behavior—and to evaluate theirs.