A nobleman walks around with an invisible arrow buried in his chest. He sees a couple of boys practising archery. The nobleman gets angry and yells at them and then breaks down in tears in front of the startled boys.
''Once upon a time, there was a man who thought he was hurt every time someone put him in contact with an old wound.''
The notion of feeling hurt
‘You hurt me,’ I used to say about the feeling of sadness that filled me whenever someone said or did anything that caused me emotional pain. My statement conferred guilt on the other person over something they had unwittingly triggered, unaware of my invisible vulnerabilities. At the time, I did not know that my wounds had been inflicted during childhood, at a time when I was unable to defend myself emotionally. And that the person who, in my perception, was hurting me then and there, in my adult life, was in fact unwittingly putting me in contact with an old wound, rather than inflicting a new one. Sometimes I would say something that put others in contact with their old wounds. It is important to understand that as adults, we are only responsible for renewing that contact with a pre-existing wound, not for creating the wound in the first place.