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Hurt feelings can be boiled down to a conflict between how someone is acting and how we want them to act.

We want them to keep their cool, but they lose their temper. We want them to open up to us, but they put up walls. We want them to be loyal, but they betray us.

When we get hurt, it can be tempting to lock our wounded heart away, but that’s a breeding ground for loneliness. At the other extreme, if we send our heart back out into the world without protection, we could get hurt again in a similar way. These are things that happen when we don’t have heart resilience. 

Heart resilience is the ability to bounce back after a heartbreak as quickly as possible, but with added safety measures. It’s kind of like learning how to walk.

At first, a baby falls down a lot, but they also get back up over and over. The reason they’re able to be resilient is because we create safety for them. We don’t send them into an obstacle course after their first couple of steps. We figure out that they fall less if we hold their hand for a while. When they slip on the hardwood, we take their socks off or put them in grippy footwear. When they run into dangerous things, we move those. Once they’re really on the move, we start looking around for other dangers we can protect them from, so they won’t get hurt any more than is necessary. What we don’t do is pick them up after a fall and never let them walk again.

When we protect our heart the same way, we create heart resilience. Each time we get hurt, we learn something about what we don’t want to experience. We learn about our needs and desires. We learn about the kind of people who are good for us. We learn about what we will and will not tolerate, and about the person we want to be in relationships. 

Then, we use that information to make adjustments so our heart knows it won’t be hurt like that again. It doesn’t have to be afraid to get back out there. Little by little, our heart becomes more and more protected but in a way that allows us to still be vulnerable enough to love and be loved deeply. 

We also need to let go of what happened. A toddler doesn’t keep talking about their fall for days, weeks, and months. If they get hurt, they cry. They might feel upset, scared, or frustrated, but they only feel that way until the emotion moves through them. Then, they’re back at it. 

We could learn something from them. As adults, we have a tendency to fixate on our pain. We keep talking about it. We get attached to our narrative about how wrong the other person was or how selfish, mean, or cold they are. It makes perfect sense to have upset feelings about what happened but sometimes we get trapped there. When we have heart resilience, we can feel our emotions without getting stuck, so we can get back to connecting. 

Will we get hurt again? Yes, for sure. We are imperfect beings in relationship with each other. The toddler is still going to fall down too, well into adulthood, but walking will bring with it a lifetime of joy, wonder, and fun.

That’s why it’s so important to do everything we can to protect our heart, so we can keep it open and experience a life of love and connection.

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