I Was So Afraid of Hurting Others That I Forgot I Could Be Hurt

The impossible price I paid trying to be a good person.

The Unmasked Journal | Jessica Choate, RN

I've experienced so much hurt in my life that somewhere along the way, I made a silent promise to myself.

I will never make another person feel the way I've felt.

I never spoke those words out loud. I don't even remember consciously making that decision.

But looking back, I can see how much of my life was built around it.

I knew what it felt like to be abandoned.

To be misunderstood.

To feel unwanted, unseen, or unimportant.

To have your heart broken by someone you trusted to hold it gently.

And because I knew those feelings so intimately, I couldn't bear the thought of being responsible for making someone else feel them.

So I became careful.

Careful with my words.

Careful with my decisions.

Careful with other people's feelings.

Careful not to disappoint, upset, inconvenience, or hurt anyone.

I tried so desperately to be kind.

To be good.

To do the right thing.

To never mess up.

And somewhere in all that carefulness, I stopped being careful with myself.

I Became the Pincushion

That's the realization that has been sitting so heavily on my heart.

I was so afraid of causing another person pain that I became willing to absorb almost any amount of it myself.

If someone was upset, I took responsibility for making it better.

If someone misunderstood me, I exhausted myself trying to explain.

If someone treated me poorly, I searched for the wound underneath their behavior.

If someone hurt me, I wondered what I could have done differently to prevent it.

And if standing up for myself meant potentially hurting someone else's feelings?

I often said nothing.

I swallowed it.

I rationalized it.

I found another explanation for why they behaved the way they did.

I told myself they were hurting, too.

And they probably were.

But I used that understanding to convince myself that my pain was somehow less important.

I became a pincushion.

A place where other people's anger, disappointment, frustration, and unhealed wounds could land.

And I called it love.

I called it compassion.

I called it being understanding.

But I was so busy making sure nobody else got hurt that I never stopped to ask who was protecting me.

The answer, far too often, was nobody.

Not even myself.

When Being Good Becomes a Survival Strategy

I've been sitting with the question of why.

Why was it so difficult for me to disappoint someone?

Why did the possibility of hurting another person's feelings feel more unbearable than the certainty of hurting my own?

Why could I recognize someone else's needs so easily, yet dismiss mine without a second thought?

And I keep returning to the same realization.

Somewhere along the way, I had confused being a good person with being a person who never caused discomfort.

I believed kindness meant understanding.

Understanding meant forgiveness.

Forgiveness meant making room.

And making room meant moving myself out of the way.

I had created an impossible definition of goodness.

One where I was never allowed to make a mistake.

Never allowed to disappoint.

Never allowed to choose something that another person might not like.

Never allowed to be the reason someone felt rejected.

But how can a human being possibly live that way?

How can we make choices, establish boundaries, tell the truth, or honor our needs without occasionally disappointing someone?

We can't.

I was holding myself to a standard that required my disappearance.

And then blaming myself when I couldn't meet it.

The Good Girl and Her Shadow

Through a Jungian lens, I've begun to recognize something about the identity I worked so hard to maintain.

Jung called the face we present to the world the persona.

And I had become deeply identified with being the good one.

The understanding one.

The forgiving one.

The one who could handle it.

The one who saw the good in everyone.

The one who didn't give up on people.

But every identity has a shadow.

And what happens to the parts of us that don't fit the person we've decided we must be?

What happens to the angry woman?

The disappointed woman?

The woman who wants more?

The woman who has needs that inconvenience other people?

The woman who wants to say, "This isn't fair."

Or, "I don't want this anymore."

Or simply, "No."

For a long time, I didn't know how to make room for her.

Because I was afraid she might hurt someone.

So I pushed her down.

I silenced her.

I questioned her.

I called her selfish when she asked for something.

I called her ungrateful when she wasn't satisfied.

I called her unreasonable when she wanted reciprocity.

And I called her broken when she could no longer carry the weight.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether she was ever the problem.

Maybe the part of me I kept trying to silence was the very part of me that knew I deserved protection.

Maybe my anger wasn't evidence that I was unkind.

Maybe my resentment wasn't proof that I was unloving.

Maybe my exhaustion wasn't a failure of my capacity.

Maybe they were signals that something inside me had been asking for attention for a very long time.

And I had been too afraid of hurting anyone else to listen.

Understanding Someone's Pain Doesn't Mean I Have to Carry It

This is where my compassion has been both a gift and a place of enormous struggle.

I can look at someone who has caused pain and see the wounded human being beneath their behavior.

I can recognize the frightened child.

The unmet needs.

The survival patterns.

The generations of pain that came before them.

And I still believe that kind of understanding is beautiful.

I don't want to lose it.

But I'm learning something I wish I had understood years ago.

Someone's pain can explain their behavior without making that behavior acceptable.

I can understand why someone struggles to love without deciding I must accept a love that hurts me.

I can recognize their trauma without volunteering to become the place where it is expressed.

I can forgive someone without offering them unlimited access to my life.

And I can have compassion for the person who hurt me while still having compassion for the woman who was hurt.

That last part has been the hardest.

Because I was always able to find a reason to give someone else grace.

But when it came to myself?

I demanded perfection.

The Difference Between Hurting Someone and Disappointing Them

Perhaps one of the greatest realizations I'm carrying into this new chapter is that I had been treating someone else's discomfort as evidence of my wrongdoing.

If I said no and they were upset, I felt guilty.

If I expressed a need and they felt inadequate, I felt guilty.

If I spoke about something that hurt me and they became defensive, I felt guilty.

If I chose something for myself that someone else didn't agree with, I questioned whether I was being selfish.

Their emotional reaction became the measure of whether my decision was right.

But I'm beginning to understand that someone can be hurt by a decision without that decision being an act of harm.

Leaving a relationship can hurt someone.

Setting a boundary can disappoint someone.

Telling the truth can make someone uncomfortable.

Refusing to carry another adult's responsibilities can make them angry.

None of those reactions automatically means the decision was wrong.

Of course, I am still responsible for how I treat people.

I want to be thoughtful.

I want to be honest.

I want to be accountable when I make mistakes.

But I cannot take responsibility for making sure another human being never experiences pain.

That was never a promise I could keep.

And the person who paid the price for trying was me.

I Have Grieved Everyone Except Myself

This realization has brought a different kind of grief.

I have grieved the pain of others.

I have grieved the wounded people I couldn't save.

I have grieved relationships, losses, broken promises, and the lives I imagined building.

I've spent so much time wondering why people became who they became.

Trying to understand their choices.

Looking for the humanity beneath their mistakes.

And lately, I've found myself wondering something different.

What about me?

What about the woman who was hurting while she was trying to make everyone else feel better?

What about the woman who needed comfort but kept becoming the comforter?

What about the woman who was afraid to speak because she didn't want to create another conflict?

What about the woman who kept extending understanding while quietly running out of the capacity to understand herself?

Who was grieving for her?

Who was protecting her?

Who was telling her that she mattered, too?

I think I'm finally beginning to.

And there is something both heartbreaking and beautiful about that.

Because I'm not just grieving what other people did.

I'm grieving all the moments I believed I had to abandon myself to remain worthy of love.

That grief deserves tenderness, not more blame.

I Am No Longer Willing to Be the Sacrifice

I'm not writing this because I've suddenly mastered boundaries.

I haven't.

I'm not writing it because I no longer struggle with guilt.

I do.

And I'm certainly not writing it because I have stopped caring about other people's feelings.

I haven't, and I hope I never do.

I'm writing this because something inside me is changing.

I no longer want goodness to mean self-sacrifice.

I no longer want kindness to require silence.

I no longer want empathy to become an excuse for accepting harm.

I want to learn how to love people without losing myself in the process.

How to be compassionate without becoming responsible for everyone else's healing.

How to be accountable without automatically assuming everything is my fault.

How to recognize that my needs matter just as much as the needs of the people I love.

And how to tolerate the discomfort of disappointing someone without immediately trying to make myself smaller to fix it.

Because the truth is, I never wanted to hurt anyone.

I still don't.

But I am finally beginning to understand that I am someone, too.

I am one of the people my kindness is supposed to protect.

And maybe that is what I've been missing all along.

Not more empathy.

Not more patience.

Not another lesson in how to understand the wounded parts of everyone around me.

But the willingness to extend some of that same understanding to myself.

To the woman who has survived so much and still wants to love.

To the woman who made an impossible promise because she knew how devastating pain could be.

To the woman who spent years trying to become a safe place for everyone else.

I want to tell her something now.

You can stop.

You don't have to absorb everyone's pain to prove that you understand it.

You don't have to be perfect to be good.

You don't have to make yourself hurt so someone else can remain comfortable.

And you don't have to disappear to deserve love.

I am still learning.

Still grieving.

Still catching myself apologizing for things that don't require an apology.

Still feeling that familiar pull to explain, repair, rescue, and make everything okay.

But now, when I feel it, I'm trying to remember something.

I deserve the same tenderness I have spent my life giving away.

I have spent enough of my life trying to make sure I never become the reason someone else hurts.

Now I am learning that I don't have to become the reason I hurt, either.

---

A Reflection for the Woman Who Recognizes Herself Here

If any part of this feels familiar, I want to leave you with a question.

When did you begin believing that protecting someone else's feelings was more important than protecting your own?

You don't need to have the answer today.

Just notice what comes up.

And the next time you find yourself swallowing your truth because you're afraid of disappointing someone, perhaps ask yourself:

Am I choosing kindness, or am I choosing to abandon myself because I'm afraid of their reaction?

There is a difference.

And learning that difference may be one of the most loving things you ever do for yourself.

With love,

Jessica Choate, RN

The Mystic Midwife | Founder of Plant Medicine Healing

When you spiral, come here first.