Category: Don’t Look Away

More than hurt: what harm looks like, why it happens, and what could be different.

The Puzzle Pieces of Harm

That is part of why it can be reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt when something happens. We ask whether it was a mistake, whether we misunderstood, whether there is another explanation, or whether it is something that can be talked through and fixed. Most of us do not want to treat every bad interaction as proof of a larger problem. The difficulty comes when we keep looking at each new event as though nothing similar has happened before. At some point, the question may no longer be only, “What happened this time?” It may also be, “What keeps happening?” That is where patterns start to matter. One piece is not the whole picture I like the puzzle-piece metaphor because it captures something I struggled with for a long time. If someone hands you a single puzzle piece, you can describe it accurately. You can see its color and shape. You may even have a good guess about where it belongs. But you cannot reliably tell what the whole picture is from that one piece alone. The same can be true when we are trying to understand harm.

Harm In Relationship

One of the things I have had to learn is how much the relationship between two people changes the context of what happens between them. The same behavior can have a very different effect depending on who is involved, what they know about each other, what they have agreed to, and how much trust or reliance already exists between them. A stranger, a friend, a parent, a coworker, a casual partner, and someone we have built a life with do not occupy the same place in our lives. They know different things about us, and we rely on them in different ways. Someone close to us may know our fears, our history, our routines, our finances, our boundaries, our vulnerabilities, or private parts of our lives that we simply do not share with everyone.

What Can We Harm?

A more useful question is: What actually changed in a harmful way? What became meaningfully damaged, constrained, lost, or put at unnecessary risk because of what happened? That sounds simple enough, but once we start answering it, we find that harm can reach many different parts of a person’s life.

More Than Hurt: What Is Harm?

Hurt tells us something about our experience. Something was painful, upsetting, frightening, embarrassing, disappointing, or difficult. Harm asks a different question: what did this actually do to the person? Did it take something away, limit a choice, create a risk, or damage something that mattered? That distinction matters because hurt is unavoidable.