Pain
“Life is painful in large part because you haven't given yourself permission to feel your pain.”
– M. Scott Peck
Pain is an evolutionary gift. It keeps us away from fire and other mortal dangers. However, much of pain’s original evolutionary purpose is irrelevant in our modern world. Nevertheless, pain persists, and we naturally seek to avoid it. We avoid a lot of types of pain, particularly emotional pain,that the truth is, we would often really be better off feeling. In fact, the reason we remain in pain is because we avoid and repress it, rather than allowing ourselves to feel it, mourn it, and thus, move beyond it. As we saw earlier in regards to sadness and we’ll continue to see with other so-called “negative emotions,” the real way out is through.
Avoiding physical pain has a lot of merit. If holding a hot plate is burning your hand, you’d be wise to put it down. However, I came to realize that avoiding my emotional pain did not cause me to put it down like the hot plate; it caused me to stuff it deep within me. The way to be free of the pain was to go through it. “Through” being a key word. I had to allow myself to experience my pain and allow myself to come out the other side.
In order to heal from my divorce and the abandonment agony that followed, I had to own my pain. I came to realize with a sense pride that it is my pain, and I am entitled to every drop of it. No one could feel it for me. Part of my healing and my recovery from that emotional injury was to give myself the incredible albeit difficult gift of letting myself feel all of my hurt and suffering. I had to realize, I was entitled to my pain in order to eventually come out the other side and be free of it. It was an excruciating and slow process but also a life gift I can’t even begin to put into words now.
Not only do people not want to feel pain, we also don’t want the people we care about to feel pain. When a friend comes to you in agony, most people do all they can to cheer up that hurting friend. I would like to suggest a different approach: share your own pain with them. Pain is so much less painful when shared.
To some this sounds masochistic, but to others who have experienced the power of sharing pain, it sounds beautiful. It is a truly moving experience to talk about your pain with someone empathetic, someone trying to feel with you rather than take away your pain by giving advice or cheering you up.
There is a pop psychology saying, “You can’t heal what you can’t feel.” And while it may sound cliché, there is some real wisdom there. Experiencing our pain lets us deal with it. It lets us finally make sense of a world we previously refused to comprehend. Feeling pain lets us progress forward along the road of healing.
It’s your pain. No one can take it from you. And, just as I do, you have the right to feel every drop of what is yours. It may at times seem unbearable, but I’ve learned that if you keep moving forward, you will come out the other side.
Your pain is often even worse than you realize, and it makes sense to have lots of self-compassion and empathy for yourself as you experience it. After all, people have the tendency to minimize their own past sufferings (the Pollyanna principle, which was discussed in an earlier section, helps us function in life by making our memories feel less unpleasant than they really were). Emotions have a way of staying with us longer than the memories of the events that caused them.
Most of us have developed a lot of techniques to avoid our pain. We can make jokes to sidestep a painful topic. We can intellectualize our way around real emotion. We can drink, work, worry, or become addicted to unhealthy people, excitement, or a million other distractions rather than feel what our psyche yearns to have felt.
The real work is to walk through the darkness. Don’t avoid it. Don’t go around it. Go through. And then, keep walking. I promise, a brighter day awaits.
You might wonder whether by feeling your pain, you will end up with more than you can bear. However, this has not been my experience. Our brains have an amazing ability to avoid giving us more than we can handle. There maybe times when you’re just not ready to take a major step forward or to feel all your feelings. Sometimes, our avoidance tactics are a necessary form of self-protection, and when this is true, you will find that you can’t move past them. This happens for the same reason the first stage of grief is denial: our brains know we simply are not ready to handle what comes next. So, while I encourage you to bravely journey towards your pain, I believe it’s important to do so only when you are ready. As long as you head in the right direction, you can move at whatever pace works for you.
Ask Yourself:
- What tactics might I be using to avoid my pain?
- What pain from my past have I not yet let myself fully feel?
- Can I have compassion for my own suffering?
Next Letter: Anger