Why do some people enjoy hurting others

By M.Farouk Radwan, MSc.

Enjoying hurting others

If a person hates you he will certainly feel good if something bad happened to you. But some people seem to enjoy hurting others emotionally even if they don't hate them. Some people get pleasure from hurting others and making them feel bad. See also Why Criticism hurts

Those people usually need to do so in order to maintain their own psychological stability. Two different people could go through the same bad experience yet develop totally different personalities.

A person could get treated badly by others then develops compassion as a result and learns how to not hurt others while a different person could go through the same experience and ends up being a psychopath who enjoys hurting others. In the case of the later person he didn't know how to handle his bad emotions and as a result he decided to make others feel bad in order to feel good about himself.

This is a clear case of courage verse cowardice where a person who lacks courage tries to find a short cut to fix his own emotions and to feel better about himself. See why some people criticize and put others down.

What cowards do

When a person fails to fix his emotions in a socially acceptable way he turns to socially unacceptable shortcuts even though he knows they are wrong. In such a case the only reason that person took that path is that he is not brave enough to handle things in a different way.

A person could feel jealous of someone then finds no other way to feel good about himself but to hurt the one he is jealous of. In most cases people try to hurt others intentionally because they don't know what else to do in order to fix themselves.

If a person lived a horrible childhood , and wasn't brave enough to do something about it, then he might try to hurt all of those who seem to have lived a better childhood than his. In such a case the main intention behind that person's behaviour is to make those lucky people suffer the way he did.

Again had that person been brave he would have learned more about his own psychology then sought help or even helped himself out.

The different degrees of sadism

You might think that i am talking about psychopaths or people who are extremely sadistic but in fact such people are present in our everyday lives. It's just the fact that the degree of sadism differs from a person to another that makes some of those people undetectable.

The officer who enjoys torturing a prisoner in a jail is not really different than a person who enjoys making others suffer by criticizing them. Of course the severity of their desire to hurt others is totally different but still they have the same psychological goal which is to hurt others in order to feel good.

Once you find out those people you need to help them if they are close to you or to completely avoid them if you don't really care about their friendship. Fill your life with positive people and their positivity will be reflected in your mood.

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