Hurt: The Most Neglected Emotion, Even by the Supreme Court
Focusing on Who Gets Hurt
One of the cutest things about my wife is her fear of mice. That’s a fairly common thing about many women. But yesterday I left her at our cabin in the Mt. Baker foothills with a newly set mousetrap in the kitchen, and by the time I got to our residence, she called me with such sweet emotion to jabber about finding a tiny baby mouse caught by the nose in the trap.
She was frantic but more humorous than horrified. She kept repeating that he (the go-to pronoun for mice!) was squirming for all he was worth to get out and couldn’t. She said he was so cute with such a pink nose and tail, and she couldn’t stand either to touch him or leave him there writhing to eventually, slowly die. The hurt she was feeling for him in the bind of what to do was maybe unparalleled in the 45 years that I’ve known her.
Nancy has always been deeply touched by hurt animals, even resisting the urge to kill big bugs. She can’t stand their pain, including pigs and beef cattle who get slaughtered for food, but somehow can eat hamburger at times. It is experiencing the innocent hurting that grabs at her soul.
I’ve long thought that hurt is the most neglected emotion of us humans. It is the least acknowledged among the six classic emotions: anger, sadness, joy, hurt, fear, and guilt-shame. Many writers about emotions even neglect mentioning it, reducing the number to five.[i] Most of us seem much quicker to express anger when we have been hurt. Men, at least, seem much more likely to curse when somebody steps on their toes than to complain, seek comfort, or God forbid, to cry.
Hurt is what we fear when we’re scared of getting hurt again. Hurt is what makes us sad, especially when it is prolonged or occurs in multiple ways within a short period. Hurt is often what we want to avoid when we joke feebly, to “laugh it off”. And guilt is real hurt, too, as a vague pain for having done things that hurt other people who are important to us. Shame is similar, hurting because of the discouragement of receiving too clear indications that we are fundamentally faulty.
Hurt is indeed quite basic to our living as unfinished human beings living in a constantly changing and unmanageable evolutionary world.
Deep hurt, like physical pain, either unavoidable due to the inherent finitude of life, or to somebody’s meanness or brutality, is something we try to avoid at all costs. That is what makes it so discouraging in abuse of any kind, so tantalizing for use to punish people, and indeed, so usable in torture. Intense hurt is what destroys lives in PTSD, as the very foundational values of our souls are trashed so totally and dramatically.
A basic element of Christianity was to rid the world of the interpersonal hurt of meanness, causing one another hurt through murder, theft, infidelity, greed, and abandoning the truth. The recent movements to effectively treat people therapeutically who have been radically wounded, emotionally battered through mistreatment, all kinds of abuse, and radical neglect, are now at the forefront of the therapy movement, without the religious flavor.
My best and perhaps saddest story about hurt involves my dad. Of his 10 siblings on that Northeast Iowa farm, Dad was the only one who could shoot the farm dog when it became time. There were no veterinarians then to “put them down”, and if there had been, that family would not have been able to afford them. The five sisters and five brothers, of whom Dad was in the middle, apparently could not stand the thought of killing a dog.
When the dog was showing persistent signs of serious and irreversible decline, dad would grab the rifle, call the dog, and quietly start walking to a nearby field. The dog would dutifully follow, hanging its head. Dad thought the dog knew what was up. Whether that is true or not, it was part of his sad reverie. When far enough from the farmhouse, he said the dog would stand sideways between him and the barn, facing Dad. He would simply raise the rifle, aim, and shoot. A shallow grave was enough. And dad would walk back alone. He never mentioned it, but I bet he was crying at least part of the way back.
That story illustrates the pain aspect of the human condition better than all the others I know. The choice was slim. Take action or watch the dog die miserably over time. Either way, there was a heart that hurt.
A version of that same situation flows through our lives frequently if not constantly. We rarely get things to go as we would like, as we hoped or wished. It is, after all, an evolutionary world, largely unfinished. There is some truth in the phrase that “life is what happens to us while we make other plans.” Ancients saw that in the natural world, at once incredibly beautiful and horribly tragic.
Our interpersonal world reflects the same condition. Our love lives, our parenting, our life ambitions, and our incessant experiences, both the frustrating ones and the delightful ones, show us our limitations and our gifts. We’re frequently caught between some form of disappointment on the one hand, and serendipity on the other.
Making sense out of that stark reality has been the project of thinking individuals for several millennia now. Some religious leaders even got so much attention with their teachings about it that entire religions resulted. And that same set of dilemmas characterizes our lives today. Our individual spiritualities are made up of whatever we do, think, get convinced of, and hurt from, in order to both cope with and enjoy what we can’t control, and sometimes even can’t even influence. Such is an evolutionary world, gradually moving us towards a global, enjoyable, close community. We need only look at where evolution has been, look deeply at ourselves, and decide what we can contribute to the evolutionary process, while facing what comes and meeting it with whatever virtue we can muster. That, in short, is the “good life”.
Maybe that is what lies beneath the U.S. Supreme Court recently referred to cryptically when it implied that “the law is not real.” (Matt Ford, The New Republic, July 16, 2025). It is still way too imperfect, especially when the top court in the land seems to treat it so casually.
The Hebrew Scriptures show a gradual and disappointing progression of organizing themselves into a people, a community, that never became what was hoped for, and is still striving for it in the future. But the Old Testament also suggests that law is not enough. The New Testament, promoting, teaching, and responding with care, and indeed love, has a much better chance to move the world and its humanity forward.
Like our traffic system, correctional system, and educational systems, our legal system and political systems are necessary but not enough. They are only as good as those people who implement, maintain, and continually improve them can achieve. Only specific virtues of those dedicated to their missions will suffice, as far as we can see, to reduce hurt and promote care for one another. They are what shows us the way amidst what so easily seems like devolution rather than evolution. But don’t be fooled. Love will out!
Meanwhile, whatever progress government can make to reduce hurt in humanity will be an addition to evolution. We need it badly, and for our top leaders to see it as their primary purpose.
Gordon Hilsman is a retired clinical educator living in the Pacific Northwest, the author of Assessing the Character of Candidates for National Political Office, and can be reached at ghilsman@gmail.com.
[i] Guilt is similar to shame, one being regret about what you have done or neglected, the other about something being fundamentally wrong with you as a person.