Core Hurts
“Core Hurts” are childhood emotional wounds that each of us experienced while growing up. These emotional wounds were inflicted upon us (often unwittingly, but sometimes intentionally) by our parents, our siblings and other caretakers. When we engage in adult-love relationships or marriage, these core hurts can easily be activated by our spouse/partners, primarily because our spouse/partners often mirror many of the characteristics and behavioral tendencies of our parents and caretakers. When a core hurt is activated, the response usually starts with a feeling of hurt, but can rapidly escalate into frustration, disappointment, or anger. The escalation to frustration, disappointment or anger can happen so quickly and reflexively (literally in seconds), that we often do not even recognize that we are feeling hurt at all.
The reason frustration, disappointment or anger surfaces is because the pain of the core hurt is so exquisite, that we reflexively turn to one of these reactive emotions as a means of masking the pain.
Core hurts generally occur in one of four ways:
- When part of your “core construct” gets assaulted or disregarded;
- When you feel abandoned;
- When you feel engulfed; or
- When your survival is threatened
Core Construct
Your “core-construct” consists of your values and expectations, your sense of fairness (including right and wrong), your sense of power and control, your sense of competency and adequacy, your sense of self (self-esteem) and your sense of “the ways things ought to be”.
In effect your “core-construct” is who you are and the way in which you perceive and engage the world around you. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is, for the most part, indifferent to your “self-construct”. Therefore, it is not uncommon to have parts of your self-construct assaulted or disregarded on a daily basis. For example, if a waiter treats you rudely, a friend fails to deliver on a promise, a co-worker gossips about you, or your boss makes you feel incompetent, you experience an invalidation of, or disregard for some part of your “core-construct”. While these daily assaults from others can be hurtful indeed, they are even more so when the perpetrator is your own spouse/partner. This is because we expect that our spouse/partner should always love us and never hurt us, much like we expected our parents and other caregivers to do.
One of the most common ways in which a person feels that his or her core construct is being assaulted is when the person perceives that their adequacy or competency is being questioned or impugned. This is particularly true for those who grew up in a highly critical, judgmental, and shame-based environment where the expression of needs or insecurities was discouraged, ridiculed or generally squelched. Those who were raised under these conditions fear exposure of their inner-shame, human frailty, vulnerability, or perceived inadequacies. Later in life as these individuals enter into love relationships and marriage, their fear of exposure can be activated by interactions with their spouse/partner where it is expressed or implied that they are somehow inadequate. Because they have a life-long sensitivity to issues relating to adequacy, such interactions often leave them feeling shameful, devalued, powerless, guilty or even unlovable.
Abandonment
Each of us has an innate fear of abandonment owing to the fact that when we were born into the world, we spent the first months of life believing that we were “merged” with our mothers. Gradually, as we developed, and were encouraged to individuate, we each experienced a form of abandonment, as our perceived “merger” with mother slowly gave way to the realization that we were individual beings, separate from our mothers. On a very deep core level, this period of infantile abandonment signified the “loss of other”, and is forever imprinted on our psyches. For many of us, however, this initial brush with abandonment was only the beginning, because on into childhood, many of us experienced a variety of ongoing abandonment’s…everything from the illness, or death of one of our parents or caretakers, to parents divorcing, or even parents who were just not there for us due to their careers, their own emotional issues, faulty parenting, or due to drug or alcohol dependency, etc.
Much later in life as we become young adults and enter into love relationships and marriage, these archaic abandonment fears are still with us, and can easily be activated when our significant other behaves in a way that is reminiscent of our early childhood experience. Behaviors exhibited by our spouse/partners which trigger feelings of abandonment can include rejection, distancing, being emotionally unavailable, as well as separation due to military deployment, or prolonged work-related travel. When these occur, we suffer separation anxiety and emotional wounding much like the early emotional wounds we suffered as children.
Engulfment
In early childhood on through our adolescent and teen years, many of us experienced engulfment. Engulfment is somewhat opposite of abandonment. Parents who engulf their children are overly meddlesome in the child’s life, continually frustrating and thwarting the child’s natural and healthy inclination to separate and individuate. Often one or both of the parents encourages the child to mirror them, and can become very intrusive into all aspects of the child’s existence, from infancy through the teen years. Individuals who experienced this type of upbringing are imprinted with a “loss of self”.
Much later in life as these children become young adults and enter into love relationships and marriage, these archaic engulfment fears are still there lurking beneath the surface. Not surprisingly, if you have engulfment issues, and your significant other behaves in what is perceived as a controlling or intrusive way, these old engulfment fears are activated, and your childhood wounds are re-opened.
Survival
Each of us is hard-wired to avoid pain, suffering, and death. If your spouse/partner inflicts pain and suffering on you, or in the extreme, threatens your very existence, then hurtful feelings will be triggered. This, in turn, may activate a “flight or fight” response, which is designed to protect you from pain and possible extinction.
So it behooves both you and your spouse/partner to understand not only your own core construct and primal fears, but each other’s as well. Once you each have a thorough grasp of the other’s core construct and primal fears, you will each be more sensitive about not activating the other’s core hurts, and be more empathetic when you inadvertently do so.