I study psychology, I can change them

As a psychology student, I’ve trained myself to seek answers beneath the surface. I don’t take behaviour at face value; I turn it over, dissect it, and trace it back to origin stories that might explain why people are the way they are. I look for theory in their silence, for trauma in their cruelty, for pain in their betrayal. Every time someone hurts me, I feel a familiar ache rise, but it’s not just pain. It’s a question. A relentless, burning question: Why?

Why would they say that? Why would they do that? What went wrong in the wiring, in the raising, in the living? I tell myself there has to be a reason. Maybe they didn’t mean to. Maybe they were projecting. Maybe they’ve never been loved the right way, and so they don’t know how to offer love in return. I search their actions for attachment styles, emotional dysregulation, and unresolved grief. I diagnose in the silence between texts. I theorise in the middle of the night when sleep won’t come.

I tell myself that if I can just understand them, then I’ll feel better. That if I can find the why, I’ll finally be free. That knowing is closure.

But the truth is, no amount of theory can explain some kinds of hurt. No amount of psychological insight can undo the moment someone looked at you, knew your softness, and chose to be cruel anyway. You can read every paper on adverse childhood experiences and still never understand why someone would choose to humiliate you in a room full of people. You can understand narcissistic traits and still never feel okay about how they manipulated your kindness. You can explain their behaviour in ten different ways and still lie awake feeling raw and confused.

Sometimes, I think I dig for explanations not because I want to understand them, but because I can’t bear to believe that someone could hurt me just because. Just because they didn’t care enough not to. Just because they could. Just because they were selfish, or reckless, or unkind. Sometimes the pain isn’t in the act, it’s in the realisation that nothing made it necessary. That they weren’t pushed to the edge. That there was no trauma response, no desperate need for self-preservation. Just choice.

And it breaks me in a way that psychology never taught me how to hold. Because I would never do that to them. I would never betray someone’s trust just because I felt like it. I would never speak cruelly and sleep peacefully. I would never turn away from someone who needed gentleness. So when people do these things to me, the betrayal is twofold: they hurt me, and they shatter my belief in the kind of decency I thought we all held deep down.

And so I return, over and over, to the comfort of theories. Of Maslow and Bowlby and Freud. Of trauma and cognition and schemas. I trace their family dynamics like I’m drawing a family tree with broken branches. I wonder what love they were denied. What lessons they never learnt. What wounds they carry in silence.

But sometimes people are not wounded children. Sometimes they are just grown people who choose the easier path, the selfish route, and the cruel response. And nothing in the books can prepare you for that.

Psychology has taught me so much about how people think, how they feel, and how they become who they are. But no textbook has ever helped me understand how someone can see your tenderness, know your story, witness your efforts to care for them, and still decide to cause you pain. No case study ever truly captures the experience of being left on read when your heart was wide open. No theory can tell you what to do with the kind of betrayal that doesn’t come with a diagnosis.

And maybe that’s the greatest heartbreak of all. for people like me, who want to understand, who crave the safety of reason, the clarity of cause and effect. We are left with question marks that stretch into silence. We are left with the knowledge that some people will never be explained, only endured. Some things will never be understood, only survived.

So here I am, still learning, still searching, still aching. Wanting to believe that understanding human behaviour will save me from heartbreak. But also learning, slowly, painfully, that sometimes people hurt you not because they’re broken… but because they’re human. And being human is messy. And unpredictable. And sometimes, unkind.

And maybe the work, in the end, isn’t to keep seeking their reason, but to find mine. To protect my peace even when I don’t get the answers. To hold onto my softness even when the world feels sharp. To be the kind of person I wish they had been, even if I never understand why they weren’t.