[A] catastrophic illness does one of two things. It either makes you bitter or makes you grateful. It made me grateful, especially for my family and my friends and colleagues. (Marguita Lister as quoted by Eisenberg, 2009).

The purpose of this chapter is to show that the whole organism will suffer when presumed hurt feelings are produced by repeated, traumatic, aversive, painful, or objectively or negatively perceived circumstances or events. Even more specifically, presumed hurt feelings per se do not produce personal and relational dysfunctionalities. The avoidance of expressing them and the lower ratio of sharing joyful and pleasant experiences to hurt feelings is what causes those internal and relational dysfunctionalities. However, there is a growing concern in the United States about avoidable, unjust differences in health associated with sociodemographic characteristics, such as socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity. This concern has sparked research to identify how disparities develop and how they can be reduced. Studies that show that disparities occur at all levels of SES, not simply at the very bottom, suggest that psychosocial factors play an important role (Geronimus, Colen, Shochet, Ingber, & James, 2006; Geronimus, Hicken, Keene, & Bound, 2006). Therefore, this chapter will consider how presumed hurt feelings are present and influential in physical illness, in severe psychopathology (Axis I of the DSM-V), and in personality disorders (Axis II of the DSM-V), as well as in the population at large. These feelings constitute, therefore, the so-called unconscious (Bargh et al. 2008; De Giacomo et al., 2010).