OUCH.
Actually, it starts pretty unspectacularly.
Ouch.
Something happened.
A sentence, maybe.
A look.
A tone of voice.
A movement.
Something hits us.
For a moment, there is simply a sensation.
Pain. Anger. Shock. Disappointment.
That would probably be complicated enough already.
But our mind is pretty fast.
YOU HURT ME.
Suddenly, there is no longer just what we feel.
There is also someone who did it.
Maybe that is even true.
Maybe something was careless, hurtful or completely out of line.
But between
“That hurts.”
and
“You hurt me.”
something has still happened.
A sensation has turned into a story about its cause.
That is not automatically wrong.
It is just already more than the sensation itself.
IT’S YOUR FAULT.
And sometimes it goes one step further.
Now we do not just know what happened.
We also know who is responsible.
Maybe even why.
“You wanted to hurt me.”
“You don’t care how I feel.”
“You always do this.”
A single moment suddenly acquires a past.
Sometimes a future as well.
“This is how it will always be with you.”
Our mind is remarkably good at building a pretty complete story from very little information.
Sometimes it is right.
Sometimes partly.
And sometimes it might be useful to look again at the point where we stopped observing and started telling a story.
WHAT HAPPENED ALONG THOSE FEW METRES?
“Ouch.” becomes:
“You hurt me.”
And eventually:
“It’s your fault.”
Three sentences.
They can arise within seconds.
And yet they describe three different things:
Sensation.
Interpretation.
Attribution.
That does not mean nobody is responsible.
Nor does it mean we should minimize hurt.
It only means:
What we feel and the story about why we feel it are not exactly the same thing.
Maybe there is a small gap there sometimes.
Just wide enough to fit one more question into it.
What actually happened?