“Oh yeah, they call you chickenlegs. Because your body looks like a chicken—you know, super skinny legs and a big stomach on top.”

I was fourteen years old when a boy at school said this to me, while we were standing on the quad between classes.

I was already immersed in diet culture, trying to change my body, knowing it did not fit the mold of how girls at my school were supposed to look (skinny).

I was also a dancer, finding sanctuary and art and joy in my teacher’s dance studio most afternoons. My legs were strong and muscular. They were the one part of my body I felt comfortable with, even proud of.

In that dizzying moment, I suddenly felt wrong to be proud of them. Now, it seemed, my body was a problematic emergency.

It would have been wonderful if my younger self knew that these boys’ inappropriate judgements of others’ bodies were their problem. It would have been wonderful if that younger self had known the Unhooking from Praise and Criticism tools. But she didn’t.

She felt panic and fear and shame, but underneath all of that—harder to sense, harder to name—at the core of what she felt was hurt. Sting, pain, gut punch—hurt. The hurt of, I am not welcome, or okay, or cherished here.

I am sure you have had your own chickenlegs kind of moment.

Hurt doesn’t evaporate on its own. Research has found that quite often, hurt feelings endure, sometimes at a searing intensity, for years or decades. I can still feel my heart rate go up when I write these words thirty plus later.

That was an early hurt. Today, I sometimes feel hurt when I read a cutting comment online about something I wrote, or when a loved one says something that seems like an implied dig or criticism.

More and more, I started noticing that people brought to coaching conversations situations in which the core of the issue was an experience of being hurt. (Here, for our context, I’m speaking not about trauma, but about other important hurts.)

The hurt of feeling betrayed or abandoned by a colleague or collaborator.
The hurt of feeling criticized by a loved one.
The hurt of feeling or being excluded.
The hurt of a professional or personal rejection.

The list goes on.

I was intrigued by how frequently the kernel of what people were grappling with had to do with hurt. But something else struck me as even more interesting: the hurt was stealth.

People often weren’t aware, at first, that they were feeling hurt. They never led with, “Hey Tara, can we talk about x situation? I’m feeling really hurt about it.” Nor did they say, “I’m feeling so hurt by my good friend.”

Instead, they’d say, “I want to talk about this friend who ghosted me,” or “I have this incredibly difficult boss.” In other words, they’d share their narrative about the external situation. If they did speak to their feelings about the situation, they named emotions like anger, shock, frustration, indignation, sadness, grief, guilt, shame, sometimes fear.

But they rarely said I’m hurt.

Yet quite often, their whole physical being seemed to communicate a sense of woundedness. As we coached about the situation more, we would often uncover hurt at the core.

That got me thinking. I’ve been reading widely in the worlds of psychology and personal growth for 30 years now. I’ve read plenty on anger. Plenty on fear and anxiety. The same on shame and grief. But I can’t say the same about hurt.

It turns out, I haven’t just been missing a section of the bookshelf. In 2001, psychology professors Mark Leary and Carrie Springer published an academic chapter entitled, “Hurt feelings: The neglected emotion”. As they put it,

“Psychologists have shown considerable interest in the negative experiences and emotions that undermine the quality of human life. In particular, researchers and clinicians alike have devoted a great deal of attention to emotional reactions such as depression, anxiety, anger, loneliness, and shame, and the size and breadth of the extant literature dealing with dysphoria and dysfunction are staggering. After more than 100 years of work on such topics, one might imagine that behavioral researchers would have, by now, plumbed the depths of human unhappiness and despair. Curiously, however, one common and painful experience has virtually escaped scholarly attention—the emotional experience that people colloquially call hurt feelings.” [1]

Additional research on hurt has been done in the last twenty five years, but there’s still an enormous gap; the number of scholarly articles on anger and sadness dramatically exceeds those on hurt, for example.

One reason for this is that when late 20th century psychology scholars sought to codify the core negative human emotions, their lists did not include hurt. They all name fear, anger and sadness as the primary three; some models also add shame, disgust, contempt or despair. Yet none include hurt in that taxonomy of basic, core negative human emotions.

And you know those cute posters that teach kids (and adults) about feelings? Most of them don’t list hurt as one of the options – even those that find space for emotions like awe, proud, and bored.

This might sound shocking, but for many years there was a debate in the academic community about whether hurt was a distinct emotion, rather than just a component of emotions deemed more worthy of study—like anger, fear, guilt, and sadness. Pathbreaking researchers had to take a bold stand: that hurt was indeed a distinct feeling. [2] That was relatively recently, in the early 2000’s.

Why has hurt been so neglected in research and inner-work conversations? There are a number of potential reasons, but one is this: it’s very hard for us human beings to sit with and face hurt; it’s an incredibly vulnerable emotion. In some sense, the capacity to be hurt is the very essence of our vulnerability. We definitely avoid looking at it and talking about it in our own lives. Is it possible that collectively, we’ve avoided looking at the subject of hurt, not only in our own hearts but in the professional discourse as well?

Think of all the tremendous potential that might come from bringing hurt back into the conversation, as its own focal point. It overwhelms me a little to consider. Think of how we might be able to heal what actually needs to be healed in ourselves. Think of the more tender conversations we might be able to have with each other. Think of how we could get to the underlayer of what’s really going on in a situation, rather than dancing on the surface of anger or blame. Think of how we could have a more heartfelt discourse with each other in the collective realm, to get out of the trance of our reactions to our hurt, and to talk about the hurt itself.

Of course, that is no easy matter. But it’s a possibility worth pursuing, which is why I’m writing and thinking about hurt a lot these days.

The matter is deeply intertwined with our Playing Big. I can’t tell you how many women I see who get stopped in their tracks because of unhealed hurt from unjust or harsh feedback, or from fallings out or painful endings with team members or collaborators. So many of you have given me the honor of hearing your stories about that. But the topic of hurt is also relevant beyond our Playing Big. It’s integral to the health of our relationships and our hearts.

I’ll be sharing more about what we can do with our hurt feelings—and giving us a kind of Hurt 101—an education we all need and generally don’t receive. For today, I hope you’ll chew on this with me: how, and why, has hurt been so overlooked in our personal growth and psychology lexicon? When was the last time you were aware of your own hurt, in such a way that you could (or did) name, “That hurt.” And do a check-in to notice: what is your current toolkit for responding to the everyday kinds of hurts that come your way?

With love,

Tara

[1] Leary, M. R., & Springer, C. A. (2001). Hurt feelings: The neglected emotion. In R. M. Kowalski (Ed.), Behaving badly: Aversive behaviors in interpersonal relationships (pp. 151–175). American Psychological Association.
[2] Lemay, E. P., Jr., Overall, N. C., & Clark, M. S. (2012). Experiences and interpersonal consequences of hurt feelings and anger. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(6), 989–1017.

Top Photo credit: Zyanya Citlalli