Have you bought into this?

‘No one can hurt you, unless you believe it!’

Did you ever have to listen to this phrase as a response to your plight? Maybe you told someone close to you or even a coach about a situation, where you were bullied.

I happened to witness such a conversation not long ago. Because it showed up on my social media threat. To put it kindly I wasn’t happy about what I saw.

Here was a person voicing their hurt feelings and they are being told it’s their problem. Saying if they were happy within themselves, they wouldn’t be faced by any meanness from the outside directed at them.

Really? Are you kidding me?

Unfortunately the often spiritual believe, that we are responsible for EVERYTHING, which happens to us, is widely spread.

Of course, in most cases people giving such advice mean well. They think they maybe are helping the other person to not take things so personally. At the same time though, these kind of narratives are dismissing someone else’s reality as well as individual experience. Basically it’s a form of a gaslight and potentially very damaging.

This is especially true for people, who deal with a lot of trauma due to emotional abuse for example. Such a person already has the tendency to blame themselves for almost everything, happening to them. Telling an emotional abuse survivor, that they can’t be hurt unless they believe it, drills their internalised  shame only deeper if anything. The perpetrator on the other hand is never held accountable in this scenario.

At the end of the day, nobody has the right to tell another person how they should be feeling, saying for instance something like:

‘You are too sensitive!’

Of course this is just another way to right out dismiss someone else’s upset, moving on as if nothing had happened.

Honestly, if a friend or colleague says something nasty to me and I tell them how I feel, I want them to take me seriously and if appropriate make amends.

I might say something like this:

"Listen, I really felt hurt by what you said to me the other day. It didn't feel good to me. I really felt put down by you."

If the other person does have some empathy and they just messed up like we all do, they will act appropriately. Even if they might get defensive at first, they eventually will circle back, wanting to sort things out.

They might say something like this:

"Listen, I'm really sorry. I got somehow triggered into my own stuff. I would love to hear from you why you felt hurt. Let's work this out.”

The matter of the fact is, we need to learn to listen to our gut, finding out whether someone is trustworthy or not. Especially when sharing our emotions authentically.

A rule of thumb for sure is, if someone can’t hold space for our feelings and experience, they are basically not really good for our well being.

This applies to life coaches as well of course. If they hit you with the narrative ‘you only can get hurt, if you believe it’, they might just not be the right person for you to work with.

Let’s face it!

The truth is, in this world there are people who hurt other people. Some do it intentionally, most of us by accident. Either way, if someone hurts us, we have the right to feel bad about it. Because exactly that very emotion is giving us a hint about what to do next, depending on the situation.

We might step back and not have contact with that someone, who inflicted the hurt on us or we might try holding them accountable, so that they won’t be able to bully the next best person, who happens to come along.

To conclude, there’s no being too sensitive!

Gaslighting other people isn’t okay. So, let’s not do it to one another.

And now I am curious. What about you?

Have you ever been told, that you were too sensitive or that you only can feel hurt, if you believe it? What did that do to you? Did you buy into that narrative?

I would love to hear about your experiences in the comment section.