I Don’t Want to Become What Hurt Me

“For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” — Matthew 12:34

Sometimes I distance myself from people.

Not because I’m antisocial.

Not because I don’t enjoy talking, sharing, laughing, or feeling connected to others. And certainly not because I believe I don’t need anyone.

Sometimes I distance myself because I have learned that people can hurt us deeply.

Some wounds leave no visible scars.

No one notices them when we walk down the street.

They don’t appear on an X-ray, and they don’t require a bandage, yet they can change the way we relate to the world.

After certain experiences, we learn to observe more carefully, to trust more slowly, to remain silent when we once would have spoken, and sometimes simply to keep our distance.

For a long time, I thought stepping away was only a way of protecting myself.

Now I believe it can also be an opportunity to ask myself what is happening inside of me.

Because there is something that concerns me even more than having been hurt: Slowly becoming what hurt me.

When Pain Speaks Too

It is easy to look back and remember the words someone said to us, the promises they broke, a betrayal, a humiliation, or that moment when we desperately needed understanding and received exactly the opposite.

But there is a much more uncomfortable part of healing:

Looking at ourselves.

I know that people have hurt me.

Deeply.

But I also have to acknowledge that I have probably hurt others too. Maybe I responded out of anger. Maybe I said things I should not have said. Maybe I reacted from a wound that was still open.

Acknowledging that does not excuse those who hurt me.

Nor does it mean condemning myself for my own mistakes.

It means taking responsibility.

There is an enormous difference between saying:

“I did this because I was hurting.”

and saying:

“Because I was hurting, I had the right to do it.”

The first can help us understand ourselves.

The second can become an excuse.

And I do not want to use my wounds as permission to wound someone else.

What Is My Heart Full Of?

There are words spoken by Jesus Christ that continually make me reflect:

“For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
— Matthew 12:34

Such a short sentence, and yet such a difficult one.

Because then the question is no longer simply: What did they do to me?

It becomes: What am I allowing what happened to leave inside of me?

Resentment.

Fear.

Distrust.

Anger.

The need to prove something.

The need always to be right.

Or perhaps, after a great deal of inner work:

Compassion.

Wisdom.

Discernment.

Boundaries.

Forgiveness.

Peace.

I don’t believe anyone can go through painful experiences and come out exactly the same.

Something changes.

The question is what we allow to change.

It Is Easy to Talk About Love When No One Touches Our Wounds

We can all be kind when things are going well.

It is easy to talk about patience when no one is testing ours. To talk about forgiveness when no one has betrayed us. To talk about love when we feel loved.

But sometimes all it takes is for someone to touch a deep wound for us to discover things within ourselves that we thought were no longer there.

A word.

An accusation.

A rejection.

And suddenly something we believed we had overcome comes rushing back.

That is when I understand more deeply what it means when Scripture says, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”

Because our words sometimes reveal hidden rooms within us that still need to be put in order.

That doesn’t mean that every word spoken in anger defines who we are forever.

We are human.

We make mistakes.

We can lose our patience, react badly, and later recognize what we have done.

For me, preserving my humanity does not mean being perfect.

It means still being able to recognize when I have failed.

Being able to say:

I was wrong.

What I said was wrong.

I understand that I hurt you.

I’m sorry.

I will try to do better.

There is something profoundly human in those words.

Forgiveness Does Not Mean Permission

I have learned something else as well.

Having a good heart does not mean giving everyone unlimited access to it.

We can forgive and still establish boundaries.

We can love someone and understand that we need distance.

We can sincerely wish someone well and still decide that we no longer want to share our lives with them.

We can stop hating without reopening the door.

For a long time, many of us have been taught that being a good person means enduring, tolerating, remaining silent, and forgiving again and again.

I no longer believe that.

Kindness without boundaries can become the abandonment of ourselves.

A boundary is not always a punishment.

Sometimes a boundary simply says:

“I don’t hate you, but I will no longer allow you to continue hurting me.”

And perhaps that, too, is a form of peace.

I Still Have My Humanity

After certain experiences, we could become cold.

We could decide that no one deserves our trust.

We could begin treating others exactly as someone once treated us.

But I don’t want to live that way.

I have known enough pain to know that I do not want to deliberately create it in someone else.

I have not gone through life without making mistakes. No one has. There are decisions I would make differently today and words I wish I had expressed differently.

But I can still look within.

I can still repent.

I can still learn.

I can still feel compassion.

I can still love.

I can still stop before responding and ask myself:

“Is what I am about to say coming from my heart… or is it coming from my wound?”

Because they are not always the same thing.

And perhaps part of healing is learning to recognize the difference.

I Don’t Want to Give Them That Power

There is something profoundly unfair about allowing the people who hurt us to determine the person we eventually become.

If someone was cruel to me and that cruelty turns me into a cruel person, then that experience still has power over me.

If someone destroyed my trust and I decide never to trust anyone again, that person continues to influence relationships with people they have never even met.

If someone filled one chapter of my life with bitterness and I continue feeding that bitterness for years, I am still carrying something that person may have left behind long ago.

I don’t want to give anyone that much power.

My story explains some of my scars.

But my scars do not have the right to write the rest of my story.

What Do I Want to Abound Within Me?

Perhaps we cannot completely prevent pain from entering our hearts.

We are human.

We love, we trust, we hope—and because of that, we are vulnerable.

But we can decide what we continue to feed afterward.

We can feed a wound every day until it becomes resentment.

Or we can look at it, acknowledge it, care for it, and allow it, with time, to become wisdom.

I don’t want to deny what was done to me.

I don’t want to pretend certain things didn’t hurt.

And I don’t want to create a perfect version of myself in which I have never hurt anyone either.

I want something much more honest: To acknowledge my story without becoming its prisoner.

I want to be able to look at my mistakes without making excuses for them, and to look at the wounds others caused me without allowing those wounds to define my heart.

Because if it is true that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, then I want to pay very close attention to what I am filling mine with.

And when life touches one of my wounds again—because it probably will—I hope there will be more love than resentment within me, more wisdom than anger, and more humanity than the desire to return hurt for hurt.

I don’t want to become what hurt me.

I want to become someone who, despite having been hurt, still chose to heal. 💙