The Price of Healing: When Our Growth Hurts Others

You know that saying, "Hurt people hurt people"? I realized recently, after a conversation with a friend who was navigating the aftermath of a one-sided divorce while still working with and around their ex, that sometimes it's also true that healing people hurt people. 

Sometimes people you love are going to get hurt along the way as we become, or rediscover, ourselves. That's often one of the real, tangible and painful costs of making decisions in favor of our own growth. 

Healing often, maybe always, involves making some tough decisions. People around us are not only going to dislike some of those decisions, they're going to be actually hurt by them.

That doesn’t make us, or them, an enemy.

It doesn’t make it weird when they can be friendly one day, and lash out the next.

Sometimes our “I need to do this” decisions hurt people, sometimes people we’ve loved for a long time, sometimes ones we still do. That part sucks. And …we still need to make those decisions. A life in avoidance of hurting people is a life lived in the margins. Life hurts. Remember — ultimately, no one survives their time here.

What matters is that we’re kind along the way - both to them, and to ourselves. (And that doesn’t mean we — or they — have to be nice all the time). We can take our space; we can set clear boundaries, or limits to what we will and won’t let someone else say or do to us. We can give the people we’ve hurt the space they might need to heal. We can accept, own and acknowledge that we’ve done damage, or hurt someone.

And on both sides, if we can receive the wisdom of what hurts us, we find growth.