Parenting & Family Quote by David Soul

David Soul isn’t reaching for a sound bite here; he’s forcing the listener to sit in the ugly interior of violence, after the adrenaline and excuses have burned off. The sentence keeps circling one abrasive phrase: “to deal.” Not “to apologize,” not “to change,” not even “to be punished,” but to deal with what can’t be undone. That repetition reads like someone pacing a room, trying to find a door that isn’t there.

The phrasing is careful in a way that reveals its own anxiety. “Hit or hurt” broadens the act beyond a single punch into a spectrum of harm, suggesting how easily people downgrade what they’ve done to something more palatable. Then he sharpens it again: “a woman or child.” Not an abstract “partner” or “family member,” but the two categories our culture codes as needing protection. He’s naming the taboo without softening it.

The real subtext is about the psychology of accountability: the collision between “the initial responsibility you have not to do that” (a baseline moral rule so basic it’s embarrassing to restate) and “the knowledge you did do it.” Soul is describing cognitive dissonance as a kind of psychic injury. It’s “incredibly hard” not as a plea for sympathy, but as an explanation for why denial, minimization, and self-justification are so common: because truly facing yourself as the person who crossed that line threatens your identity.

Coming from an actor, it also lands as a grim piece of character work: the moment when the story can’t be rewritten, only owned. The quote doesn’t offer redemption; it diagnoses the first obstacle to it.