How Hurt People Hurt People

Here’s something we don’t want to hear. We all offend from the victim position. What do I mean by this? Here’s an example.

Let’s call them Mark and Lena.

It’s a Tuesday night. He walks into the kitchen, sees last night’s dishes still in the sink, and lets out a long sigh.

She hears it.

“What?” she snaps.

“Nothing. I just thought you were going to handle those.”

“I worked a ten-hour day.”

“I cooked dinner two nights in a row.”

“Oh, here we go. Keeping score. Just like your mother.”

“Don’t bring my mother into this.”

“Why not? You bring up my spending every other day.”

“Because you can’t go a week without buying something we don’t need.”

“And you can’t go a week without criticizing me.”

By the time they sit down in my office, neither one can remember how the fight had started. Only that the other one had gone too far.

Each blow feels justified. Because each blow comes after another. She lashes because he sighed. He cuts deeper because she lashed. She goes lower because he cut.

Both of them could see exactly how they had been hurt by the other.

Neither of them could see how they were hurting the other.

The moment we feel hurt, we hand ourselves a permission slip.

A permission slip to slam the door. To bring up the affair from five years ago. To call them lazy, selfish, cold. To say the one thing we know will cut the deepest.

Because they hurt us first.

This is the trap I’ve watched swallow couples for nearly three decades. The wounded one becomes the wounding one. The victim becomes the villain.

And neither person can see it, because both are too busy nursing their own injury.

It doesn’t only happen in marriages. It happens between parents and children every single day.

A teenager misses curfew by an hour.

The parent, scared and angry, snaps, “You’re grounded for two weeks.”

The teenager rolls their eyes. “That’s ridiculous. I was barely late.”

The parent doubles down. “Make it three.”

The teenager slams the door and won’t speak for days.

So the parent takes the phone.

So the teenager sneaks out.

So the parent takes the car.

So the teenager stops coming home at all.

What started as a missed curfew has become a war.

The parent feels justified. The rule was broken.

The teenager feels justified. The punishment was unfair.

Both are wounded. Both are wounding. Neither is willing to put down their weapon first.

This is how families splinter. How friendships die. How communities turn on each other. How entire nations end up at war.

We are all the victim in our own story. And every victim feels justified to offend.

But in any heated fight between two people who love each other, both are usually wounded and wounding. At the very same time.

There’s an old saying:

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

You are the one being poisoned. Always.

And this reminds me of the story of Dr. Edith Eger, an Auschwitz survivor. Both of her parents were murdered in the gas chambers. For decades, she carried a rage at Hitler so heavy it shaped every room she walked into.

Then she wrote this in her memoir, The Choice:

“As long as I was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief. To forgive is to grieve for what happened, for what didn’t happen, and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and as it is.”

Forgiveness is not for the other person.

It is not forgetting. It is not saying what they did was okay. It is not letting them off the hook.

Forgiveness is the moment you stop wearing the chains of your offender. The moment you take back the freedom they stole. The moment you choose peace over retaliation, even when retaliation feels delicious.

Here’s how you stop offending from the victim seat:

Catch the word “justified.” The second you think, “they deserve this,” pause. Justified hurt is still hurt. The receipt you’re holding does not erase the damage you’re about to do.

Hold both truths at once. You can be wounded and wounding. Both can be true. Mature love stops trying to pick one.

Stop keeping score. Your relationship is not a courtroom. Every “but you did it first” is another brick in the wall growing between you.

Grieve what you didn’t get. Name that loss. How it felt. The impact it had on you. Express it. Don’t act out on it.

Choose freedom over retaliation. Every time you repair instead of retaliate, you are breaking a chain that may have run in your family for generations. That is not weakness. That is the strongest thing a human can do.