Hurt and Harm, Rebuke and Repair

"[T]here’s a really important distinction between hurt and harm... hurt is the subjective experience of pain that you have, for example, when you stub your toe. And harm is the actual damage that occurs to your body.
So if you look at that stubbed toe and it turns purple and it’s swollen, that’s inflammation and evidence of crushed capillaries. But it turns out that hurt and harm are not the same. You can have damage to your body without accompanying pain. You can have pain without accompanying tissue damage. And what has happened, understandably, is that our brain conflates the two. "
--Dr. Rachel Zoffness

"When there is a threat to a community's moral life, each person has an obligation to address that threat. When people do bad things without receiving a critique, they assume that their conduct is being accepted, and when others see a wrongdoer, they assume they are observing proper conduct. Doing tokheha, offering reproof, not only has a potential positive effect on the conduct of the person reproved, it also reminds the person offering the reproof not to emulate bad conduct. In the long run, it can have an important impact on the community as a whole by providing a counter-example to the initial impropriety.
The method of offering reproof is critical to its success. Done badly, it can create defensiveness, resistance and defiance. Gentleness, clarity and avoidance of hostility are important. Speaking in a way that recognizes and reaffirms the person's essential goodness and expressing genuine caring for the person help to make tokheha successful."
--R' David Teutsch

"The first step of teshuvah which is the most essential, and at the same time the most difficult, is vidui, the confession, or rather, the admission to oneself that one has sinned. It is not God who needs an avowal or confession from us, for God knows us through and through; in fact better than we know ourselves. But, we ourselves are very much in need of honest and unreserved confession, it is to our own selves that we must admit that we have done wrong, for without such a confession to ourselves, we can never become better. It is a difficult admission for a [person] to make. There is within each and every one of us a small defender who is ready at all times to deny outright that we have done wrong at all, or at least to make excuses, to mitigate and cloak our transgressions. In this manner, our defender veils from our eyes the true picture of ourselves as we really are, but by so doing, also effectively blocks the path to our betterment. Therefore, the first, the most essential and indispensable part of the confession that we must make to ourselves is 'Aval anachnu chatanu--but truly, we have sinned.'"
--Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch

"We need all the humans, and especially the hurt humans. We need the people who have been through it and understand both our power and our powerlessness, and understand that we can all cause harm and understand that we can heal. I’m much more interested in people who are like, 'yeah, I really caused some serious harm, and here’s how I changed so that I no longer cause that harm.' Those to me are the most valuable people alive right now. Those are the most valuable teachers we can have right now. How do we learn to hear those people and how do we create more room for those people to exist. "
--adrienne marie brown