Hurt people cope in the ways they were allowed to learn.
Some externalise.
Some internalise.
Neither is inevitable.
Harm explains behaviour β it does not excuse it.
βHurt people hurt peopleβ survives because it comforts observers. It reassures bystanders that cruelty has a cause, that harm is contagious rather than chosen, that no one has to draw hard moral lines. It turns responsibility into weather: unfortunate, understandable, tragicβ¦ but not actionable.
βHurt people hurt themselvesβ is much harder to sit with.
That version forces us to look at addiction, self-erasure, over-giving, self-sabotage, staying too long, shrinking desires, numbing, and quiet despair β the kinds of harm that do not make headlines nor does it give anyone else a villain to point at. Romanticising trauma is also out.
Most injured people turn the blade inward. Not because they were noble or broken, but because harming others requires entitlement. You have to believe β even unconsciously β that your pain justifies occupying someone elseβs body, time, or safety.
That belief is not universal among the wounded.
Hurt people hurt others when they externalise pain and feel entitled to discharge it outward.
Hurt people hurt themselves when they internalise pain and believe they do not have the right to burden anyone else.
Both are trauma responses. Only one reliably gets a cultural pass.
The saying stuck because it protects aggressors more than it illuminates survivors. It collapses wildly different trajectories into one neat sentence and quietly implies inevitability: what did you expect, they were hurt.
It sounds like compassion when it is really moral laziness.
The phrase also erases agency. Plenty of people endure abuse and still choose restraint, ethics, care, and responsibility. They do not get medals.
They get silence.
Sometimes they get told they are βtoo sensitiveβ or βnot over it yetβ β especially if the damage shows up as self-denial rather than spectacle.
Trauma may explain the wound. It does not get to decide who bleeds next.
This is refusing absolution without accountability not denying empathy.
It is ethical clarity.
