Look Pain in the Eye
We are experts at physical wounds and amateurs at the ones that actually run our lives.
**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
If I could hand my six-year-old self one piece of advice, I know exactly what it would be. Not “work hard.” Not “be kind.” It would be three words. Look pain in the eye.
That sounds strange until you watch what people actually do with pain. So let me run a small experiment on you.
You’re at the counter cutting vegetables. The knife slips and opens your thumb. What happens next is automatic. You drop the knife. You clamp the thumb and apply pressure. You inspect it to see how deep it goes. You clean it, you dress it, or you go let someone stitch it. For the next few days you baby that thumb. And the next time you pick up a knife, you slow down. Maybe you even go learn how to cut properly so it doesn’t happen again.
That is a complete protocol. Stop the bleeding, assess the damage, treat it yourself, protect it while it heals, learn the skill that prevents the next one. Nobody taught you that sequence. Your body runs it without asking.
Now imagine the cut is psychological instead of physical. Same wound, different kind. Watch what most of us do with that one.
Some people drop the knife, run to the nearest person, shove the bleeding thumb in their face and scream ow, ow, OWWW, getting blood everywhere, waiting for someone else to clean and bandage it. That’s blame and complain. Some people just stand there staring at the thumb, whimpering, letting it drip all over the floor, doing nothing. That’s whimper and whine. Some people stick the thumb behind their back and insist they don’t need that thumb, that hand, or the whole arm for that matter. That’s deny and ignore. And some people grab a second knife and start cutting everyone within reach, because if they have to bleed, you do too. That’s attack and avoid.
Four reflexes. Four ways to bleed. None of them close the wound.
Strip the details away and they collapse into two postures. There’s the hurt person who hurts other people. We already have a name for him. The villain. And there’s the hurt person who keeps hurting himself, by hiding the wound, or staring at it, or waiting for a rescue that isn’t coming. That’s the victim. Almost everyone in pain is living in one of those two, and most of us trade back and forth between them without ever noticing the swap.
Before I go any further, something has to be said plainly. Being a victim is not a character flaw, and it is not a stage to be ashamed of. It is a necessary one. Every person who gets wounded has to be a victim for a while. You have to feel the thing, name what was done, grieve it, let it be as bad as it actually was. Pretending you’re past it before you are isn’t strength. It’s the deny-and-ignore reflex again, this time calling itself resilience. And no one, no coach, no partner, no well-meaning friend with a book recommendation, gets to tell a victim that their time is up. That clock belongs to the wounded person and to no one else.
Here’s the tension I won’t pretend away. The victim phase is required, and healing doesn’t begin until it’s set down. Both of those are true at the same time. You can’t skip it, and you can’t live inside it forever and still get well. So the work was never to avoid being a victim. The work is to be one fully, all the way, and then, when it’s yours to decide and nobody else’s call, to release it.
There is a third option, and it waits on the other side of that release. It’s the rarest one, and it’s the entire point of this essay. The hurt person who uses the wound to help other people. The victor. You don’t get there by pretending the cut never happened. You get there by being the one who finally tends it.
I know the first two postures from the inside, because I’ve lived in both. The one that nearly ended me started as victim and curdled into villain, which is a road far more of us walk than will ever say so out loud.
I stuck the thumb behind my back for ten years
I was married to a remarkable woman. Brilliant, magnetic, the kind of person you could feel in a room before you saw her. Her dreams became my dreams. I poured everything I had into helping her build, and for a long time that felt like love, and it was.
But there were small things. There was a laundry hamper in our bedroom piled to the rim with fitness clothing, and in ten years I’m not sure I ever saw it empty. I owned twenty items of clothing and wore about five. She owned a small mountain of Lululemon and Nike. The laundry started as playful teasing, became a request, and when the request didn’t land I quietly decided to stop asking. Not just about laundry. About all of it.
There was a dinner where I was mid-sentence and noticed she’d disappeared into her phone, so I stopped talking and counted in my head. I got to almost five minutes before she looked up and nodded along to a conversation that had ended before she ever heard it.
None of these things were the problem. The laundry wasn’t the problem. The phone wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I had decided, somewhere I wasn’t even aware of, that my needs were not worth the friction of saying them out loud. If she asked what was wrong, my answer was always the same. “Nothing babe, I’m all good.”
I wasn’t all good. I had a hand behind my back, bleeding, and I was telling everyone the arm was fine.
That’s what nobody notices about quiet people in failing relationships. We look so easygoing when the truth is we’re hemorrhaging.
What I did next is the thing I’m least proud of and most instructed by. I had an affair. Two years of it. And I want to be precise about the order of things, because the order is the whole lesson. I didn’t cheat because she wronged me. I cheated because I had spent years refusing to tend my own wound, and an untended wound doesn’t stay quiet. It gets infected.
Bitterness was the first symptom. Some people stay victims their whole lives, the hurt sealed up and pointed inward, and never become anything worse. That isn’t what happened to me. My hurt found a door. It went looking for somewhere to put itself, the way unhealed pain often does, and it went toward the person closest to me. The quiet, easygoing guy who never asked for anything had become, without ever raising his voice, the villain of his own marriage.
Then one evening I pulled in behind my lover’s car at a stoplight, planning to wave. She turned into a gas station and drove past the pumps to an empty corner behind the car wash, where a black Suburban with tinted windows was waiting. She got out of her car and climbed into the back of it. That corner, that trick, the inconspicuous spot far enough from other cars for privacy, was the exact one she and I used. I sat there for fifteen minutes not wanting to believe it, then I parked nearby and watched. I was being betrayed by the person I was betraying my wife with.
A betrayal sandwich. I was the meat in the middle, and I had built every layer of it myself.
Even if someone else cut your finger
The easy version of my story is the one where she’s cold and I’m the wounded romantic. It isn’t true. My wife was generous, supportive, complimentary, caring in a dozen ways I could never count. And even in the parking lot, even being the cheater being cheated on, there’s a question I couldn’t dodge.
Whose job was it to heal what I was feeling?
I don’t like the answer any more than you will. Even when someone else picks up the knife and cuts your finger on purpose, you are still the only one who can clean and close it. The other person can deny it, not notice it, or simply not give a shit. You’ll be waiting for an admission, an apology or some kind of amends your whole life. Your nervous system doesn’t get to outsource the healing to the person who did the cutting. The wound is in your hand. It was always going to be your hand.
This is not the same as saying it’s your fault. Fault is irrelelavent. Fault and responsibility are different animals, and confusing them is why so many people stay stuck. Fault is about the past and who swung the knife. Responsibility is about right now and whose hand is bleeding. You can be zero percent at fault and one hundred percent responsible for the healing. That sentence is unfair. It’s also the only one that has ever set anyone free.
Why the psychological cut feels like it isn’t yours
There’s a reason we treat emotional wounds like they belong to whoever caused them. The brain doesn’t draw as clean a line between physical and social pain as we assume.
When researchers put people through social rejection inside a brain scanner, the regions that lit up overlapped with the ones that register physical pain (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). If rejection and a stubbed toe share circuitry, then betrayal genuinely does hurt in something close to a bodily sense, which is exactly why the instinct is to react like it’s being done to us in real time, the way we’d yank a hand off a hot stove. The reflex makes sense. It still doesn’t heal anything.
And underneath the reflex is something older. Long before I had words for it, I made a quiet decision as a kid that showing a need was a good way to get hurt, so I learned to not have them out loud. In Next Level Human language that’s a MUD, a Misguided Unconscious Decision. A survival strategy I chose before I was old enough to evaluate it, that then calcified into an identity. “I’m the easygoing one. I don’t need much.” It ran my marriage from the basement.
You don’t dismantle something like that by thinking your way out of it. The story and the feeling got wired in together, so they have to be worked together, at the same time. You Rewrite the story you’re telling about the wound. You Rewire the emotional charge your body still holds around it. You Retrain the actual response, the thing you do the next time the knife is in your hand. Not in sequence. All at once. That’s the difference between insight and change.
What looking pain in the eye actually means
Stop telling people “calm your nervous system” and start giving them the protocol they already run on their thumb.
Stop the bleeding. Before anything else, get regulated enough to think. Not to feel fine, just to stop reacting. You can’t dress a wound while you’re flailing.
Inspect it honestly. How deep does this go, and what’s the actual story you’re telling about it? “She didn’t care” or “I never once told her what I needed”? The second one bleeds more, which is usually how you know it’s the real cut.
Clean and dress it yourself. This is the FEEL, DEAL, HEAL move. You feel it fully, you deal with your part regardless of fault, and you let it close. Waiting for the person who hurt you to come fix it is how a thumb gets infected.
Learn the knife skill. The whole point of pain is the lesson on the other side of it. Mine was almost embarrassingly simple. Say the thing. Make the request. Set the boundary. Have the fight you’ve been avoiding for a decade, because the marriage you’re protecting by staying quiet is already dying of the silence.
The hour between dog and wolf
There’s a phrase for that time of evening when the light is failing and you’re looking toward the last of the sun. You can see shapes but not details. The thing that looks like a dog might be a wolf, and you won’t know until it’s close. The French call it the hour between dog and wolf.
I spent a lot of evenings in that light, driving slow rows through parking lots, hoping the shape ahead was a dog and knowing in my gut it was a wolf. For years I thought the pain in that season was something happening to me. It took me a long time to turn around and look at it directly and understand it was something I had been refusing to tend.
The wound was always in my hand. I don’t know if I’d call that comforting. It’s just true, and true is the only place healing has ever started from. But here’s the part that took me longest to believe. The same cut that can turn you into a villain, or keep you a victim, is the exact raw material the victor uses to help someone else. I have watched the people who became healers in my life, and almost every one of them had been cut deepest. The wound didn’t disqualify them. It was their qualification.
So look at it. Whatever it is. Look pain in the eye long enough to see whether it’s a dog or a wolf, and then do the thing you already know how to do. You learned the protocol the first time you ever cut your thumb. You just never believed it counted for the wounds you couldn’t see.
It counts for those most of all. And once you can tend your own, you’ll find you’re suddenly good at tending other people’s too. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the whole arc.
PS: If you’re ready to stop shoving your thumb in other people’s faces and become the kind of person who can actually tend their own wounds, look pain in the eye, and lead from there, explore my Next Level Human coaching program today. Spots are limited… don’t wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/
Reference
Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290–292.