Hurt usually won’t kill you, but harm always nearly does

“There is a big difference between hurt and harm. We all hurt sometimes in facing hard truths, but it makes us grow. It can be the source of huge growth. That is not harmful. Harm is when you damage someone. Facing reality is usually not a damaging experience, even though it can hurt.” — Dr Henry Cloud

We are all hurt in life.

It’s inevitable.

But being hurt doesn’t usually harm us. What harms is something more obvious than simply hard circumstances, which would test and may hurt anyone. Perhaps we know directly those hurts we’ve encountered, grew through and ultimately overcame.

But harm is contentious, and it is malicious.

We can differentiate between hurt and harm by what causes each. 

Hurts are life-made, not man-made

The circumstances of life can be overcome. Though many of them are very brutal and will hurt us, we have the capacity to overcome these, because there is the agency of healing through Almighty God.

But the main reason challenging circumstances and events can be overcome is there’s nothing personal in not having the talent to follow a dream, or in suffering disease or loss, however unfair they might seem. There’s no intrinsic or extrinsic inhibitor. This is not to say that life-made crises are easy—they are crushing!

Things that hurt are not man-made, they’re life-made, however hard these hurts are to cope with. We might shake our fist at God, because no human being can rightly be blamed. We may resent situations we find ourselves in. But these can be overcome.

If we are hurt, we can always ask ourselves, was this a life-made hurt or a man-made hurt? If it is life-made, we can know that the hurt is more easily healed, however vast and incalculable the problem or crisis seems. But if it is man-made, we may find it is not that simple, and we may also find that the hurt can so easily become a harm.

Harms are man-made, and always preventable

If we’re hurt by a human source, we not only have a crisis on our hands situationally, but we have potentially one of the most serious situations on our hands that we’ll ever face. Many more complexities come about when human elements conspire.

When a life-made situation strikes us, it is typical at least at times to look for someone or something to blame. It’s part of grief. If there is a tangible cause for our grief, however, it will usually be some-one rather than some-thing. When a circumstance of grief is caused by a human (or humans) and it therefore becomes a situation of grief our pain is redoubled not simply by loss but also by some sense of betrayal.

Harm inevitably occurs in betrayal, transcending mere hurt, when the person we feel betrayed by refuses to own their wrong, refuses to apologise, and refuses to acknowledge our hurt.

If a person who hurt us very seriously came later and saw the damage they did, and understood the hurt they did by demonstrating empathy, and they sought our forgiveness, there would be much less, and possibly little or nil, harm done. If in apologising they truly understood what they’d done wrong and were prepared to make it right in some way and prove to us that they would not do it again, we would usually find such a situation forgivable.

But harm occurs when people bring grief into our lives, not simply by the initial hurts they may cause, but in the way they fail to care about the impact caused.

In the simplest terms, harm is done when initial hurts are no longer the sole issue.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash