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Hurt By Someone You Love? 8 Ways To Heal

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hurt by someone you love, how to heal after being hurt by someone

In this article, I want to talk about how to heal when you’ve been hurt by someone you love.

When you idolize love, there’s an inclination towards romanticizing it in a singular way. Love is wonderful. It colors our world brightly and nurtures good feelings within us when we are around those we love.

But something so magnetic and powerful also has the ability to hurt.

Unrequited love, lost love, and betrayed love can rattle your entire world. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional or unintentional that you were hurt by someone you love.

What matters is how it affects you and what you can do to heal.

I strongly believe that forgiveness is a core tenet of healing. At times, it’s hard to forgive. But the alternative is far more difficult to live with.

I’ve seen people in my own life who harbored pain and resentment for decades. It never made them a better person, nor did it make them a happier person. An unwillingness to forgive corroded their loving nature and warm spirit.

This is not a healthy way to live life, and I’d rather have a realistic picture of love that has room for forgiveness than to destroy my soul with hatred or resentment from being hurt.

I’ve been through my fair share of pain and suffering caused by people I loved, from romantic partners to family members, and I’ve found ways to heal and forgive them.

I’m a much better person when I am focused on healing and forgiving than when I’m ruminating on how I’ve been hurt.

The world deserves a version of you that isn’t bogged down by pain and suffering from old wounds.

Most importantly, you deserve to be that person.

8 Ways To Recover After Being Hurt 

how to heal after being hurt by someone you love, hurt by someone you love

1. Allow yourself to grieve

Ever since I’ve read the book, the body keeps the score, and my battle with chronic illnesses finally made sense.

I don’t think anyone taught me how to deal with painful emotions. My parents were avoidant and stuffed away their traumatic experiences until they spilled out of them at unexpected times.

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I would do the same, but I’d also ruminate and seek out an easy escape.

I’m not someone who dabbled with drugs or alcohol, but I found an escape in people, in media, and in food.

This approach of avoidance and escapism helps you to cope temporarily, but all those painful emotions accumulate within you. Emotions are energy. It doesn’t disappear; it has to be felt and let go of. What I’ve learned since reading that book and spending a lot of time in therapy is that grief comes in waves.

Sometimes, you feel grief as intolerable sadness or anger. Other times, grief is felt as apathy or hopelessness.

You have epiphanies during these hard moments of processing grief; you allow the emotions to run through you even if it brings you to tears, and you begin to feel better.

But, in a few days or weeks, you may find yourself going through another cycle of grief over what happened or what could have been.

Healing isn’t linear.

So, when we speak of allowing yourself to grieve, this means that you have to surrender to the non-linear pattern of grief.

It expresses itself with different reactions and emotions as well.

Allow it to happen without escaping it or expressing it unhealthily.

Find a support system, allow yourself to feel the emotions in whatever way they exhibit themselves, and don’t act on or escape them.

That’s the trick to healing after being hurt by someone you love.

Related article: How to accept rejection

2. Try to understand the person who hurt you

This is going to challenge you unlike anything you can imagine.

The idea of trying to understand why someone you love would hurt you sounds ludacris.

But this activity isn’t about making excuses or justifying bad behavior.

My personal experience taught me that solace can be found by humanizing someone who has hurt me.

In other words, understanding why someone can make a mistake or do a bad thing frees you from self-blame.

The sentiment that hurt people hurt people is one that continues to show up in my daily exploration or observation of relationships.

Sometimes, pain doesn’t even make sense.

An individual could have no reason to be unhappy as an adult, yet they can battle with the scars from their childhood traumas, lack of emotional maturity, insecurities, or purpose in life.

Seeing this person as a human being with flaws can help you find closure and answers that they may not be willing or capable of providing to you.

Since you’re focused on trying to heal after being hurt by someone you love, you may need to give yourself closure through this process.

3. Forgive them

At the very beginning of this article, I focused on the importance of forgiveness because I believe it to be the most effective way to heal after being hurt.

Forgiveness isn’t just about absolving or excusing someone who did something bad.

It’s about liberating yourself from the past.

Making the choice to let go of the past, to not harbor resentment, and to free yourself from being a victim is what it means to forgive.

Many of us who remain stagnant in life often chain ourselves to the wrongdoings of the past.

I hate to say this, but it’s easy to remain a victim your entire life, especially when you have good reason to.

But being a victim doesn’t change your life for the better.

It only perpetuates a feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness.

If you want to live a life of abundance, you have to choose to grow from pain rather than wallow in it.

You can start to free yourself from a victim narrative when you forgive the perpetrator.

Letting them off the hook doesn’t mean that you can’t enforce consequences. It certainly doesn’t mean that things have to remain the same.

But you can let go of what was done to you and focus on moving forward in your life, with or without them.

Something that I’ve witnessed in my own relationships is the healing power of forgiveness. I’ve seen people who were so resistant to accountability and vulnerability break down and show genuine remorse when they were handed an olive branch in the form of forgiveness.

You’re not just giving yourself a chance to heal; you’re giving someone else a chance to grow and be better through forgiveness.

That’s powerful!

So, when you’re overwhelmed with feelings of pain and suffering because you were hurt by someone you love, remember that you have power, and it comes in the form of forgiveness.

Related article: My thoughts on healing a broken heart

4. Don’t rush yourself to heal

If I told you to try your best not to imagine a purple elephant, chances are that you will imagine a purple elephant.

There’s something in our brain called the Reticular Activating System. It brings certain thoughts or feelings to the forefront of our consciousness.

The more you try to focus on not feeling hurt, the more you’ll think about how hurt you feel.

It’s such a weird thing, right?

When we talk about surrendering to life, it often means accepting the timeline on which we will experience certain things.

For example, if you’re going through a divorce, this period of your life is going to hurt. Trying to pretend like it doesn’t or pushing yourself to feel like everything is okay when it isn’t will only prolong your suffering.

Don’t place a time constraint on yourself for something you can only influence but not control.

5. Don’t worsen your suffering

I struggle with OCD and intrusive thoughts.

It’s not something that I’ve always dealt with, but with a condition like Hashimotos, I often experience bouts of OCD and anxiety or depression, depending on the health of my thyroid.

But, at the same time, certain practices or habits only worsen these conditions.

I may think about certain traumatic events on a daily basis, but to sit on my bed, ruminate over what could have been or what happened, talk about it endlessly, fantasize about it, and berate myself over it is a form of self-sabotage.

You’ve already been hurt by someone you love, right?

Why are you repeatedly hurting yourself over what already happened with these unhealthy habits?

Talk about rubbing salt on a wound.

You’ve been through something painful; it hurt you. Let it end there. You don’t have to dig at the wound every single day.

At a certain point, there’s no benefit in the consistent exploration of why it happened, how it happened, and what you could have done to prevent it.

Leave all of that alone.

6. Use your pain to do something good

I’m very excited to share this with you because it made a huge difference to me.

I’ve made some mistakes in my life, and I’ve also been hurt by people I loved dearly.

At one point, it felt like pain was my default state of being.

Certain things happened that I struggled to accept, and I didn’t know how to pick myself up after being smashed into the ground.

Months, if not more, passed this way until it dawned on me that I was going to experience pain for a long time.

The rocky ride wasn’t about to stop just because I was uncomfortable or weak.

But the game changer for me was when I used that pain to achieve something.

It was such a motivating force that I was able to work on this site and share valuable ideas with people. I’ve consulted with and helped so many people who were dealing with heartbreak and loss.

I started writing a book, I took care of my family, I started a new business, I set out to walk 3 million steps in a year, and so on and so forth.

The more I used pain as a force of energy to do good, the more I accomplished.

It was as if the very pain I felt helped me heal.

Here’s the lesson from this story: How you respond to suffering and pain will determine the course of your life.

I’d rather do good things for myself even while sad than sit around and be sad while I wash away precious days or weeks of my life.

I’d rather pray to God or be of service to my community than indulge in vices over my sadness.

If you can make better decisions when you’re hurt, you’ll become an unshakable person who accomplishes meaningful feats!

7. Reach out for support

Any child who has watched their parents’ marriage fall apart until they separated, whether temporarily or permanently, understands the mess that spills onto them.

You feel betrayed because the idea of a happy family is stolen from you by the very people who have a responsibility towards you.

It’s a hurtful experience for a child, regardless of age.

There’s also no telling how long the difficulty will last.

What you learn from this experience is that it can mess you up, and all you’re looking for is someone to help you.

That child within all of us needs support.

If you have friends or family that can support you, seek them out. If you don’t, seek out a professional. If you can’t afford that, find a community that needs help and be of service to them because you can heal through healing.

It will really make a difference in your life to allow someone, anyone, to support you in some way.

Most importantly, be the hero your inner child needs.

Show up for yourself and be supportive by assuring with affirmation and kind words.

8. Give meaning to your pain

As I write this article, it’s surprising to me how slow of a learner I am because it took me forever to figure out why painful experiences and memories linger in my mind for so long.

Pain of any kind is more unbearable without meaning.

If you really want to manage pain and actually use it as a force for movement or momentum, you have to assign some kind of empowering meaning to it.

Some people use pain as a means of furthering a victim mentality.

This allows them to remain trapped in their pain with an excuse for why they didn’t adapt, overcome, and grow.

Other people use pain as a means of learning.

If you could assign a lesson to all of your suffering, you’d never remain in pain hopelessly and endlessly.

Final Thoughts

I want to commend you for being brave enough and strong enough to seek out ways to heal after being hurt.

It’s not easy, but you’re here.

That matters.

It’s proof that you have a fighting spirit.

Regardless of how difficult it can be, I just want you to focus on getting through one more day. I promise you that when you look back on your life a year or two from now, you’re going to be blown away by how much you’ve grown.

Don’t deprive yourself of experiencing the pride of being a fighter.

You’ll thank yourself for being courageous.

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