Where Does It Hurt?

Women will do almost anything to keep from feeling powerless, including hurting others so we don’t have to feel hurt ourselves. We develop a hard exterior over the top of the wounded place. If anyone hurts us in any way, they deserve to be punished. I call this “hard hurt”. The woman who has hard hurt reacts like an animal, letting a fear of pain lead her behavior. She will bite if you try to help her. Hard hurt pushes people away and, on some occasions, even seeks to hurt in return for help. A woman who wants to heal must move through the hard hurt to the pain underneath: the tender hurt of the soul. Tender hurt can be soothed, calmed, healed, and dealt with.

I propose using the interview process. When your son or daughter comes running into the room, crying that “I’m in pain” cry, you immediately look for blood. If you don’t see any, you can start the interview process. Where does it hurt? Try to breathe; can I see it? what happened? The answers to these questions are important because they tell you what your next move should be.

The interview process is critical because the source of our anger is often hidden or obscured. A surface issue may be causing your immediate anger, but when you have a major blowup or there is rage, something else is bringing fuel to the fire on the surface. You have to be a rough interviewer. Sometimes it may take a counselor or a friend to interview you to try to get to the source.

The interview process is the only thing that moves me from hard hurt (Stay away from me) to tender hurt (I’m afraid). Sometimes I have to feel around a bit inside to discover the wound. “What is really hurting me right now?” Without allowing myself to find the real hurt, I am quite capable of biting whoever is closest, whether or not the person actually caused the pain. Anguish can ask us do things we wouldn’t do under less stressful situations.

Sometimes we can’t even find the tender hurt underneath. The hard exterior has covered it for so long that we can’t get in touch with the original hurt. Keep searching. Keep interviewing. Keep pressing until you begin to find it. It’s so important for your healing.

If a leg bone is set properly after a break, it will heal well. Your body, designed by God, is always healing itself. New bone and marrow cells grow, and with roper care the broken leg will be as good as new. It’s a miraculous thing. But if the bone is not set properly and is just left alone to repair itself, or if it is set too quickly, the miracle of healing can become a disaster. Growth becomes your enemy as it seeks to heal and reproduce new cells on a broken place, causing more pain and sometimes even deformity.

Some of us are limping around on wounds that are decades old. I was. We may not ever think of them as wounds anymore because they don’t really even hurt, but they are not healed. Healing at a later stage like this is a hard treatment. The bone must be re-broken and then set right to heal correctly. Proper healing can be the difference between limping and dancing. It also makes the difference between anger and joy.