By Ann Estaki · November 3, 2026
Where does deliberate hurt come from? On the poisoned wells inside people, and how to keep their poison from becoming ours.
The QuestionHurt That Is Meant
I have been thinking a lot about hurt lately. Not the accidental kind, the stubbed toe or the clumsy word you regret before it has left your mouth. I mean the deliberate kind. The look, the comment, the small act designed to make another person feel smaller. The part of human nature that, in certain moments, can only be called evil.
Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere. In the school hallway, where a child is mocked for the clothes their family could afford. In the family living room, where someone’s deepest insecurity becomes the punchline of a “joke,” and everyone laughs except the one person who can’t. In the office, where a manager seems to enjoy handing out impossible tasks, just for the pleasure of criticizing the failure.
I know these rooms. I have stood in all of them, sometimes as a witness, sometimes as the target. I can still remember the particular heat that rises in your face when a room laughs at you and you have to decide, in a split second, whether to laugh along.
This kind of cruelty is so personal. And it leaves behind one haunting question: why?
The cruelest rooms are the ones where everyone laughs except the person the joke was built for.
The SourceThree Poisoned Wells
Watching these moments over a lifetime, I’ve come to believe that most people who behave this way don’t wake up and decide to be villains. The source runs deeper and darker than that. It seems to spring from a few poisoned wells inside the human spirit.
Knowing where the water comes from has not made it taste any sweeter. But it has helped me stop drinking it.
Where the Cruelty Comes From
The first well
Festering insecurity
The most cutting people are often the most fragile. Tearing someone down builds them a shaky platform to stand on, a way to hand their own worthlessness to someone else to carry.
The second well
A failure of empathy
A kind of moral colorblindness. They see the flinch, the tear, the slumped shoulders, but can’t connect them to a living world of pain. You become an object: useful, or available.
The third well
Plain, mundane habit
For some, cruelty becomes a reflex. The sharp tongue is always ready; the suspicious mind always assumes the worst. Small, constant, and easy to miss.
The first well is the one I understand best, because I grew up beside it. When a person feels worthless inside, another person’s pain can feel like relief. It is a tragic, zero-sum game in which they genuinely believe that your loss is their gain. I have watched people I loved play it for decades, and I have seen how little it ever gave them.
The second well frightens me more. To look at a trembling person and feel nothing is to have lost something essential. To them, the other person is not a universe of thoughts and feelings. They are a surface.
But the third is, in its way, the most chilling, because it is so ordinary. It is the evil of erosion rather than explosion: a thousand tiny cuts, so small that no single one seems worth complaining about, that over a lifetime can drain a person’s spirit completely. Many of the women I grew up around were not broken by one great blow. They were worn down, comment by comment, until they forgot they had ever been sharp themselves.
No single cut seemed worth complaining about. That was exactly how they did their damage.
The AntidoteA Response as Personal as the Wound
So what is the antidote? If this kind of evil is personal and psychological, then the answer has to be personal, too.
It begins with a fierce, uncomfortable honesty. We have to ask ourselves the hard question: Have I been the source of this pain? Have I, in a moment of weakness or insecurity or simple carelessness, been cruel? I have. I have a sharp tongue when I am tired and frightened, and I have used it on people who did not deserve it. Admitting that was humbling. It was also necessary, because you cannot heal a pattern you refuse to see in yourself.
How We Answer It
First
Fierce self-awareness
Look honestly at your own behavior, and change what you find there first.
Second
Stubborn empathy
Choose to imagine the world from behind another’s eyes. Not to excuse the cruelty, but to understand its source, so it cannot poison your own heart.
Third
Firm boundaries
Understanding why someone is cruel does not mean you must stand there and take it. Name what is unacceptable, and leave.
Empathy and boundaries can sound like opposites, but they work best together. Empathy lets me see that the person in front of me is wounded. Boundaries remind me that their wound is not my job to bleed for.
The first time I said those words out loud, the way you are speaking to me is not acceptable, my voice shook so badly I wasn’t sure the sentence would survive the trip. But it did. And I walked out of that room taller than I had walked in.
We are allowed to protect our own light.
The small cruelties of the world will not vanish. But when we recognize them for what they are, the outward symptoms of someone else’s inner sickness, we take away their power. We can refuse to swallow the poison.
And we can choose to give the world something else instead: understanding, resilience, and a quiet, unwavering kindness.
Ann Estaki
Leave a Reply