It Hurts To Hurt Someone | Maryann Jacobi Gray | TEDxUCLA

[Applause] [Music] Apollo was among the most beautiful and virtuous of all the gods he was an amazing athlete he had the gift of prophecy he was a poet and a musician one of his favorite lovers was immortal a handsome prince named hyacinth one day they were playing in the fields and Apollo's discus veered off course and hit hyacinth in the head Apollo ran to him and tried to save him but he couldn't and hyacinth died in his arms well if a powerful God like Apollo was unable to prevent a tragic accident mere mortals like us have even less of a chance it's a sad fact of the human condition that despite the best of intentions sooner or later were likely to make a mistake and someone will be hurt physically or emotionally for the past 12 years I've been studying what happens when we unintentionally hurt each other as a social psychologist I'm interested in how these accidents disrupt our lives and our relationships now most of the time the damage that we caused is minor and if we feel any guilt that's just a good healthy signal to fix whatever it is we messed up but sometimes the damage we caused a severe sometimes it can't be fixed it hurts to hurt someone when we wound another person without meaning to whether those wounds are emotional or physical we feel wounded as well psychologists and clergy use the term moral injury to describe the gist stress that we feel when our behavior fails to live up to our moral standards and because most of us do fall short on occasion most of us are familiar with that churning combination of guilt and shame and self condemnation with a big hefty dose of defensiveness thrown in the worst part of moral injury though is the loneliness human beings have an innate need to feel accepted and valued and when we unintentionally hurt someone that comfortable sense of belonging that we mostly just take for granted slips and instead we feel cut off from other people and separate this lonely alienation at worst can be nearly immobilizing and it gets in the way of making peace with the person we hurt the wider community and ourselves forty-two years ago I was a graduate student living in the small town of Oxford Ohio on a beautiful spring day not long after the school's lit out for summer I was driving down a country road a few miles outside of town when an eight year old boy named Brian darted into the street I tried to swerve but I hit him and he died before he reached the hospital I spent most of that afternoon sitting alone locked in the back of a police car while the officers investigated after several hours of that a woman came out of one of the neighboring houses convinced the police to open the car door and she handed me a glass of cold water and then a few minutes after that I watched as she came out of her house a second time and again approached the officers and this time they let me get out of the car and follow her back to her house an old farmhouse where she sat with me at her kitchen table because she didn't want me to have to wait alone anymore as you could well imagine Brian's death devastated his family and it traumatized the community his classmates teachers and other families in the area and his death had a profound effect on my life since that afternoon not a day has gone by when I've not thought about Brian and his family I thought about them on the day I defended my doctoral dissertation and on the day my father died I thought about them as I drove over here this morning I live with the memory of that small broken body and I live with the memory of his mother screams and I'll always wonder if there's something I could have done differently to avoid hitting him now when I began this talk you probably thought you were going to hear a social scientist describing her research but now you know my research is based on my own experience and it's deeply personal so take a few seconds check in with yourself ask yourself how you're feeling and how you're feeling about me knowing what I've done there might be sadness compassion maybe a bit of anxiety there might be boredom or even resentment that I'm voicing my story on you whatever your reaction it's likely that your attitude or feelings toward me changed as a result of hearing my story and it's that almost inevitable shift even when it's driven more by empathy than judgment that contributes to the disconnection that people like me people I sometimes call unintentional perpetrators experience suddenly our relationships just feel different well fortunately very few of us will accidentally kill someone but almost all are really virtually all of us will unintentionally hurt someone in some way at some time most commonly hurting their feelings and this too could result in moral injury a good example comes from a personal essay by the writer comedian and actress Amy Poehler who described her experience when a Saturday Night Live skit appeared to mock people with disabilities that in itself was bad enough but a few days after the show aired Amy discovered she had made fun of a real person a young woman who struggled for inclusion had inspired a TV movie at the time and that young woman had seen the skit well amy told herself that the situation was unfortunate but she hadn't intended to hurt anyone's feelings and in her words she pretended it went away she wrote I was afraid to put my hand on my heart and here the tiny voice whispering inside me saying that I had screwed up Amy's situation and mine are vastly different but we both fell short of important moral standards we held for ourselves and we both got caught up in that toxic storm of guilt and shame and disconnection alienation and defensiveness and like so many other people with moral injury we both tried to ignore what was going on inside and soldier on so it took Amy five years before she was able to reach out and apologize and even though I thought about Brian all the time I kept what happened a secret from the world for about twenty years because that's how long it took me to understand that I couldn't really fully share my caring and my abilities until I had also shared my story so whether you're a celebrity like Amy God like Apollo or a middle-aged academic how do people who've unintentionally hurt someone resolved moral injury when I began looking into this question some years back I came up empty and to this day there's a remarkable lack of resources for those of us who become unintentional perpetrators recently this has started to change and my own work points to three conditions for regaining a sense of belonging and connection the first of these is accountability owning the damage that we've done I was not legally culpable for Brian's death but I was responsible and I had to acknowledge that before I could decide what to do about it the second condition is compassion which we received from others and also can give to ourselves compassion means recognizing the people who hurt someone unintentionally are themselves in pain and that pain is evidence of their humanity and caring and the third condition is community we're social creatures we need peer support but even more important than peer support is giving back to community making reparations making amends or doing our best to make the world a better place these three conditions of accountability compassion and community are quite straightforward but putting them into practice can be quite challenging and that's because of the way unintentionally hurting someone disrupts our relationships and not just with the person we hurt but with our Friendship Circle family community because we lose a measure of trust that we're accepted for who we are when we hurt somebody we tend to withdraw or pull away from other people we don't want to make them uncomfortable we might not feel deserving of support we might feel hopeless about the prospects of finding support and we might be concerned about some form of retaliation the separation goes always the injured party the person that we heard needs to prioritize his or her own healing they need to do whatever is best for them to recover from their emotional or physical injury and other people those who witness what took place or hear about it later or read about it they too might pull away as you might have experienced just a few minutes ago when I told you about Brian these situations are emotionally stirring so people are upset they may be unclear on exactly what happened or why it happened they're not sure what to say or do and they might feel angry with the perpetrator even knowing they didn't set out to do harm in addition these situations force us to confront the fact that we have far less control over ourselves our world and our fate than most of us want to believe that's a frightening realization so frightening that it can be easier to look away but I've learned that when we turn away from people who unintentionally hurt someone we're only compounding the toll that mistakes an accidents take and that diminishes all of us it doesn't have to be that way what if we choose to support people who unintentionally hurt someone that doesn't mean we have to forgive them it doesn't mean we have to deny our own feelings but what if we simply acknowledge that they're hurting or reminded them that they're still part of the community a few days after my accident I received a letter from a girl about my own age we had never met but she told me she grew up across the street from Brian and in fact I had waited in her house with her mother the girl wrote she was sorry for everything that happened and she invited me to go roller skating with her one night at the local community center I couldn't bring myself to join her but I've never forgotten that small act of kindness and now when I look back on that letter I see it met all three of the conditions for redressing moral injury forthright acknowledgement of the damage done an expression of caring concern and an invitation to participate in community so I think that girl and her mother intuitively understood how much I needed to feel accepted despite what I had done so the next time you see me or somebody else has unintentionally hurt someone I wonder what would happen if instead of assuming they need their space you reached for a moment of connection what might occur if you just ask them how they're doing or told them you've been thinking of them you might feel uncomfortable or ambivalent but one thing I've learned is that the smallest act of connection can make a very big difference for a long time and if you are feeling badly because you hurt someone without meaning to well what if you reached out as well we are all connected even though it doesn't always feel that way remember Apollo and hyacinth Apollo blamed himself for inflicting a fatal injury on his lover so we held the dying hyacinth in his arms and from his blood he created a beautiful flower that we enjoy even today like Apollo we have the choice to create something beautiful from our mistakes even our tragic mistakes but Apollo was of God and he could do that all by himself we're only human and we need each other thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 36,723

Rating: 4.95679 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Cognitive science, Depression, Mental health, Recovery, Self-help, Time

Id: Xb-JneauRzs

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2019