Why Do We Do Needlessly Unkind and Hurtful Things to Each Other?

I took a nap late yesterday afternoon and woke up with this thought on my mind, “Why are we needlessly unkind to each other? Why do we needlessly hurt each other?” Some many actions we take are completely unnecessary. There is no need for them. It is as if we get it fixed in our mind that we must do something when in actuality we do not need to do anything at all.

Here are some reasons we may act that way. They are garnered from the literature on the subject, as well as my own experiences as a mental health counselor and a social case worker. As followers of Jesus who desire to model our lives on his character, his teaching, and example, they are things that we will want to know as we seek to follow Jesus in loving other people.

Doing something unkind and hurtful to someone else may also be the way that we learned to express anger. We all have what psychologists call “anger triggers.” They are particular situations that upset us. They occur when someone hits what is a sensitive area in our life. Someone may say or do something that causes emotional pain. We experience sadness and hurt. Our minds and bodies may respond with anger in place of the sadness or hurt, providing us with some relief from the emotional pain. This may happen so quickly that we do not recognize why we are angry. Whatever they said or did struck a nerve.

Anger is called a secondary emotion because we escalate it over what other feelings we may have been experiencing. One of the things that we learn in psychotherapy is to get in touch what we felt before we became angry. Was it sadness? Hurt? Recognizing what we initially felt in the first step in working through the emotional pain that led to the anger.

Anger is not the only secondary emotion. A secondary emotion is one that we experience in place of another emotion that is difficult for us to feel or express. For example, we can experience anxiety as a secondary emotion for anger, disappointment, embarrassment, fear, hurt, jealousy, and sadness

Our feelings are like the layers of an onion. Peel back anger and you may find anxiety beneath. Peel back anxiety you may find fear or some other feeling. Anxiety can turn to frustration and frustration to anger.

We may have difficulty in expressing our anger. We may have learned that any direction expression of anger evoked a negative response from one or both of our parents. Consequently, we learned to express our anger in indirect ways. This may have included being unkind and hurtful in a variety of ways to whoever triggered our anger. We may have hidden a playmate’s toys. Breaking them would have been a direct expression of anger. We may have tattled on them to the teacher or their parents and got them in trouble. We may have refused to play with a playmate when we were angry with them, giving them the cold shoulder.

The parental prohibition that we received against getting angry may be so strong that we do not realize that we are angry. Before we can get in touch with the feelings that may underlie our anger, we may have to get in touch with our anger first.

If we are in the habit of escalating anxiety over anger, our body language will betray our anxiety and our anger. We will act ill at ease around the person at whom we are angry. We may avoid eye contact, turn our body sideways to them, or turn our back on them. We may avoid them altogether.

Anxiety can be stressful because we keep ourselves in a state of fight or flight. We caught between the desire to attack physically the person at whom we are angry and the desire to run away from them. We can relieve this stress by verbally expressing our anger toward them in a safe setting in the presence of a psychotherapist or using what is called the “empty chair” technique. We place two chairs facing each other and sit in one chair and imagine the person with whom we are angry is sitting in the other chair. We then verbalize our anger toward them.

We may bottle up our anger to the point that when we do get angry, our anger is disproportionate to whatever triggered it.

On the other hand, we may have learned to manipulate others with our explosive temper outbursts, intimidating them with the threat of such an outburst if we did not get our way. Our unkind and hurtful treatment of them is intended to keep them under our thumb. We are saying to them, “This is what I can do to you. You had better tow the line.”

Men and women will use their anger to control their spouse or partner, physically and emotionally abusing the spouse or partner. My mother was a victim of domestic violence.

Domestic violence is not confined to the male population. Women engage in domestic violence as well as men. Nor is it confined to heterosexual relationships. Adult children also physically and emotionally abuse ageing parents or relatives.

In some cases, a hormonal imbalance, a neurological problem, or uncontrolled blood sugar levels can lead to someone having anger problems, which result in unkind and hurtful actions.

The influence of friends may be a factor behind why we do unnecessarily unkind and hurtful things. It is a good thing to keep an open mind about how our friends may play a role in our doing unkind and hurtful things and not be defensive about the role that they may play.

It may be that our friends think that we ought to do something, and we are a people-pleaser, so we go along with them to please them. They, however, do not have to suffer the consequences of any action we take. It is easy for them to urge us to take a course of action, which is not a wise one and which will have repercussions for us.

They may have ulterior motives. They may have hidden reasons for encouraging us to do unkind and hurtful things.

Friends may urge someone to do something unkind and hurtful to someone else to act out for them their negative feelings toward that person, a person that they may not know but for one reason or another they do like. The individual in question represents a particular type of person in their mind’s eyes. They have essentially stereotyped that individual, rather than taken the trouble to become acquainted with them. They are engaging in a form of bullying in which they use us to do their bullying for them. They themselves may not have received acceptance in their own lives and the individual in question to them represents the people who have not shown them acceptance.

They may offer their help in doing unkind and hurtful things to this person.

Older people like myself are vulnerable to being treated this way. We are blamed for all kinds of things in which we took no part. We become the victims of stereotyping and prejudice because of our age, our gender, our faith, and other factors.

Our friends may see our relationship with that individual as a threat to their own relationship with us. They may urge us to do unkind and hurtful things to that individual in order to damage our relationship with the individual and to cement our relationship to them.

We need to be honest with ourselves about our friends’ motives for encouraging us to take a particular action. Are they really doing it for our good? Or does what they are urging us to do serve a purpose of their own? We may not want to admit that possibility but our unwillingness to recognize that it is a possibility does not rule it out as a possibility. We simply do not want to recognize it.

As noted in an earlier post people who adopt a particular world view will seek to rationalize and validate that world view by persuading others to adopt their world view. The thinking is that our world view cannot be wrong if a large number of people adopt it. The fact that a large number of people adopt a particular world view is no assurance that it is right. It may simply mean that a large number of people are making the same mistake in thinking.

If someone fires one of our anger triggers and we are in a bad mood, our friends may see our anger with this individual as an opportunity to nudge us in the direction of seeing the world as they do. People who have a particular world view are always on the lookout for people whom they can persuade to see the world, other people, and themselves as they do. They also engage in transactions with other people that reinforce that world view.

For example, people who believe that the world is full of untrustworthy people will gravitate to untrustworthy people. They leave their car windows open and their car key in the ignition. They set up situations which prove to their satisfaction that people cannot be trusted.

Our personal world view and our childhood experiences affect how we relate to other people. Our childhood experiences helped to shape our personal world view. These experiences played a significant role in how we have come to see the world, other people, and our selves.

Let us not kid ourselves. These experiences have an effect on all of us. We may have reacted to them differently, but they do influence us today.

As we seek to love God and to love others; to emulate Jesus’ character and to follow his teaching and example; to avoid doing harm, to do good, and to grow in our love of God and our love of others, we will want to avoid doing needlessly unkind and hurtful things to others, to our fellow human beings, to our brothers and sisters in Christ. We will want to remember that the people who do unkind and hurtful things to us, may have themselves have experienced emotional pain and suffering. Those who may be egging them on may have also experienced such pain and suffering. Jesus forgave those who crucified him. He is our exemplar.

The love that we show to others should not only give expression to warmth and acceptance but also understanding and healing. We live in a world where there is much unkindness and hurtfulness. Jesus came among us not just as a Teacher and a Savior but also as a Healer. He came not only to heal our broken relationship with God, but also our broken relationships with each other.