When somebody hurts us, a part of the heart closes towards them. It is not chosen and there is no moment where the available options are considered and this one is selected. It happens the way a hand pulls back from heat, entirely before any thinking is involved, and by the time it is noticed it has already happened and cannot be undone.
The hurt is not shown and the person is not told. There is no argument and no scene, and to anybody watching from outside, nothing at all has occurred. But an invisible barrier is now in place, and however close this person is, and however hard anybody tries afterwards, that part will not open again.
It does get tried, and that is worth being honest about. It gets forced, out of love, out of duty, because the relationship matters and the offence was small and did not deserve this. And what is felt when it is forced is not warmth returning. It is a deep unhappiness, a complete absence of peace, as though a person is walking around inside a lie of their own construction that everybody can see except the one being lied to.
Forgiving is not the difficulty
Most people assume this is about forgiveness. It is not. Forgiveness is easy. Nothing is held against most of the people who have caused hurt. Why they did what they did is understood, it is known that they did not intend it, and they are wished well without any effort at all. That part costs nothing and never did.
What cannot be done is to give the same person another opportunity to do the same thing. Those are two entirely separate acts, and one word is used for both, which causes a great deal of confusion between people who love each other. Somebody can be released completely and still be unable to stand where they were standing before. The releasing is a movement of the mind and it can be decided on. The standing is a movement of the heart, and the heart is not taking instructions from anybody.
And if the same person hurts again, the closing spreads. It goes from one part to more of it, and then to all of it, until nothing at all is felt in their direction. Then, effectively, they stop existing. It is never announced and there is no final conversation. Often they never find out what happened, and would be astonished to learn there had been anything to find out.
What is actually being protected
For a long time this looks like strength. A person who cannot be hurt twice by the same hand is, in some sense, extremely well defended, and it is true that the arrangement works. Whole lives are built on it. No shocks, no ups and downs, no emotional damage of any kind, everything proceeding exactly as planned for years at a time.
But something else goes with it, and it is not seen until much later than it should be. If nothing can reach in to hurt, then nothing can reach in at all. The barrier is not selective and cannot be made selective. Safety was bought by becoming unreachable, and then the person sits inside that safety wondering why nothing is felt and why the years are passing without a single thing touching them.
To feel nothing is not peace. That is worth saying as clearly as possible, because people live inside the confusion for years and will argue with anybody who suggests otherwise. Peace is full. Numbness is empty. From the outside they look identical, and from the inside they are opposites, and only the person inside can tell which one they have.
The thing that frightens most
For many people the thing that frightens them most in this world is not any other person. It is this in themselves. Because of it they have lost people who loved them, who did nothing deliberate, who never knew what had happened or why the warmth went out of a room they were still standing in. And what hurt at the time was not the original thing those people did. It was that they did not know they had done it, and it made no sense that somebody so close could fail to know.
It makes more sense later. They could not know because they were never told, not once, not even indirectly. They were expected to see it without being shown, and when they did not, their not seeing became the second and larger offence. So the closing was never really about the original hurt at all. It was about a test they did not know they were sitting.
Nobody has solved this and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What can change is the noticing, sometimes within a day rather than within a year, and occasionally something can be said before the door goes. Occasionally. And it stops being called strength, which is a smaller change than it sounds and makes more difference than anything else.
