If someone hurts you, can you accept it as a gift?
We’ve all been hurt. Deeply, unexpectedly, by those we love or trust. The instinctive reaction is to retract—to protect, to numb, to blame. But what if these experiences are not just random failures of human kindness? What if being hurt can be a gift—a doorway to healing the very parts of ourselves we’ve long ignored?
At first glance, this sounds counterintuitive. Pain is painful. Rejection hurts. Betrayal bruises. To reject someone who hurts us seems normal. Yet, in The Politics of Experience (1967), R. D. Laing writes that “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.”
It’s not the person who hurt us we reject; it’s these fragmented aspects of our own self. If we observe the emotional mechanics behind suffering, we glimpse another possibility: the pain points us to something unresolved inside—a wound waiting to be mended, lurking in the depths of our unconscious.
Pain as feedback, not punishment
Life continually gives us feedback—experiences that show us where something inside us is unhealed. Just as a GPS reroutes when a driver misses a turn, emotional pain indicates where we’re inauthentic. Being hurt by another person isn’t simply an unpleasant interaction; it’s an emotional indicator that something in us needs attention.
When someone hurts us, it’s because we have unresolved parts of ourselves—a ‘false self’ constructed out of coping mechanisms designed to protect us from pain. These parts react defensively, lashing out or withdrawing, precisely because they’re stuck in old survival patterns often dating from childhood.
Hurtful behaviour from others acts like a mirror, reflecting a fragmented aspect of ourselves we haven’t yet integrated. In this sense, the pain is the gift: it reveals the location of a wound we might otherwise never have noticed.
From reaction to recognition
Understandably, most of us instinctively seek to escape pain—through avoidance, blame, distraction, or anaesthesia. Society is structured around this avoidance: we numb pain with consumption, entertainment, substances, and escapism rather than sit with it. The more we avoid it, the more we reinforce the false self—the protective shell that keeps us from feeling our deepest truths.
What if we didn’t run?
What if we acknowledged the pain, allowed it to be felt, rather than immediately pushed away? That act of recognition is the beginning of reparenting. This isn’t about blame. It’s about self-responsibility: owning our internal landscape so we can transform it.
Some time ago, a friend posted on Facebook that they’d been hurt. They were asking advice on whether they should confront the person who hurt them or simply cut ties. Both are destructive. The third option—accepting hurt as a gift—wasn’t even recognised.
When we do, we can continue in relationship with whoever hurt us. Not unchanged, not ignoring the flashpoint, not dismissing the hurt. Instead, our relationship deepens when we recognise the gift of pain and the reparenting invitation it offers.
Reparenting
Reparenting means meeting our unmet emotional needs with compassion rather than criticism. It means acknowledging the parts of us that felt abandoned, shamed, unseen, unloved.
When someone wounds us and we react with hurt, it reveals an old child-self inside us that felt unsafe or unloved. Recognising this child’s reaction—and responding with care rather than judgement—initiates healing.
Instead of asking, “Why did they hurt me?” we ask, “What part of me are they showing me?” This reframes the experience from attack to insight. It reveals patterns, locations of pain, old beliefs that keep us from wholeness. And in doing so, we begin to dismantle the false self that once protected us but now constrains us.
The gift of healing
In essence, accepting hurt as a gift doesn’t devalue the pain—it transforms its meaning. It teaches us that the pain isn’t just happening to us, but for us—as an invitation to deeper self-awareness and emotional maturity.
This journey isn’t easy. It asks us to stare into the darkest parts of ourselves and offer them love rather than avoidance. Through this process we rediscover our capacity for emotional honesty, resilience, and connection—not just with others, but with our own wounded yet beautiful selves.
The next time someone hurts you—before numbing out, before blame, before rejection—consider this: they’ve pointed you toward a place inside longing to be recognized, reparented, and ultimately healed. It’s a gift. The choice to accept or decline is yours. Accept, and healing beckons; decline and the wound festers, waiting to be triggered again in the future.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash