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“Our hurts return at different ages and stages.”
Part of an occasional series about phrases that this therapist finds himself repeating, often.
As a clinician in private practice, a phrase that I hear myself repeating often is “Our hurts return at different ages and stages”. This phrase generally arises in working with the parents of a child or maybe even a young adult when some early difficult event in their life seems to have returned.
We feel like we have circled all the way around to the exact same spot again.
You may feel defeated or may say, “But I thought we had beat this” or “I thought I was done with talking about this.”
But here we are … sometimes dealing with the same problematic behavior. Sometimes we are treading through the trauma again, although there is something different this time around.
We feel like we are in the same place, yet it is different, all at the same time.
Our hurts do change us. Much in the same way that a physical injury means that we have to adjust; we find a new way of moving through the world and often a change in how we view the world. The world won’t be the same again. And there…
