You Can’t Hurt Me, I Already Have

“You can’t hurt me, I already have.” Sound crazy? Maybe... but it’s what we do. Let’s say you find yourself vulnerable to some situation or person. And it doesn’t go well. You get rejected. Or you fail in some way despite your best efforts. Well, that’s sad. Typically, you might try a new tactic, or else remove yourself from the situation or person. But what if neither works? What if you’re stuck with it and it happens over and over again? So, actually, you start to anticipate the shock. More often then you might think, this can result in you creating the failure or rejection yourself—in you carrying it around with you, and deploying it before people or situations actually get the chance to deliver it to you.

So that’s it. “You can’t hurt me ’cause I’ve already done it to myself. Nyah nyah!” It’s related to what Martin Seligman (the father of positive pyschology) calls “learned helplessness.” And in Constellation Work, when it happens early on in life, it’s called “interrupted movement.” But why do we do it? And how can we stop?

One way to look at why we do it is this. It’s like there’s an added hurt, an additional humiliation that happens when the blow is delivered from the outside world. When we do it to ourselves in advance, at least we show ourselves as aware and knowledgeable about what’s coming. We’re not fooled, so to speak. Not being fooled is sort of the best showing we can make in the situation. “Yeah, well, at least I’m not a greenhorn to boot...”

But it’s different, of course, when this happens to us as young children. Usually this involves parents who are unable to meet our child self’s normal and natural needs. Since this is when we are building our earliest and deepest expectations about how life works, “interrupted reaching out movements” (Constellation Work’s name for this) at this point tend to generalize and affect many kinds of situations. In effect, we get into a “certain things never work for me” kind of rut. Often, we are not that aware of being in that rut.

Even though we are, in a kind of unconscious bitterness, ourselves shutting out good things life is actually offering us—we don’t see our own agency in it. Rather, we say that life outside of us is just built a certain way that is hurtful to us. Why does “it” have to be that way?—we ask. When in fact, it’s not “it” but “we ourselves” that are “that way”—namely, closed off and creating the hurt in advance of what might be innocent or even favorable facts. And so not even seeing the facts.

In Core Energy Coaching, we use various techniques to help with this when it stems from our adult life. It’s about turning these internal “gremlins” (yet another word for this kind of thing) into allies. After all, they were created to defend us at some point, to stop various kinds of hurt. They were needed and performed their task well. It’s just that now the original situation is gone. The fortress has become a prison. So we reframe and repurpose those reactions, turning “gremlins” into allies.

Constellation work comes into play when the “fortress” was built very early on, in childhood, when it tends to affect more things and remain more hidden from consciousness. Here we actually re-image the core dynamic that created the “I’ll hurt myself first” reaction. On the level of the family soul, we shift the parent-child bond in a more positive direction. Once this “blockage” is removed, then things either clear up on their own, or else become far more responsive to coaching or other modalities. It’s surprising how many different kinds of problems have their roots in the “I’ll hurt myself first” dynamic. They range from diseases to relationship failures, from addictions to problems with abundance. The good news is—better understandings and new techniques make clearing these patterns easier.