You Hurt My Feelings

Christian Working Woman Transcript

Monday, January 22, 2007 - You Hurt My Feelings

I’m addressing a "touchy topic". I’m calling it "You Hurt My Feelings," and I want to discuss how much time and energy we can waste on hurt feelings. Often it is self-inflicted pain. Here are some examples of how our feelings can so easily be hurt:

• You walk into a room and one really well-dressed woman seems to look at you in a disapproving way. "Oh, brother," you think, "she doesn’t like the way I look." You become very self-conscious and your feelings are hurt.
• A good friend makes a comment that you interpret to be critical. Instead of talking with her about it, you retreat with hurt feelings and allow it to damage your relationship.
• You send an email to a business associate, asking for information, and a week later you still have not received a reply. You have always felt that this person doesn’t like you, and this just confirms it further. Your feelings are hurt.
• Your boss asks you to make some corrections to a report. She gives you some specific criticism and suggestions for improvement. You take it personally and consider it an insult to your intelligence– and your feelings are hurt.
• Your husband comes home from work and has very little to say. Your questions seem to irritate him rather than draw him into a conversation. You interpret it to mean that he doesn’t like to talk with you and you wonder if he still loves you. He has hurt your feelings.
• You learn that a friend at church had some other friends over for dinner and you were not invited. Your feelings are hurt.

Do any of these sound familiar? These are some everyday examples of self-inflicted pain that we can so easily heap upon ourselves when we allow our feelings to be hurt.

This is more a female problem than a male problem, because women were created with more sensitive natures, and we feel things more deeply than most men do. Men are able to isolate their feelings and put them on hold, and that’s why they aren’t nearly as prone to take things as personally as we are.

God gave us these nurture natures for good reasons, but like everything good that God created, sin has polluted and damaged it, and if it is not controlled, that sensitive nature can become our Achilles heel, our fatal flaw, and a source of continual self-inflicted pain as we allow our feelings to be hurt far too easily.