My emotional pains.
JANUARY 31, 2019
I was thinking about that bad bad feeling inside. You know the one – when you hurt inside so much that you feel it physically.
Others characterize it as a profound feeling of emptiness or as a sensation that something is blocking their throat or feels lodged in their chest.I know I do. Most people have a very clear picture of where it is located in the body. But however it’s defined, we don’t like it and we very much want it to go away.
We try to avoid it, thinking that if we look away, it might be gone by the time we look back.
It’s a remarkable thing though, when you reflect on it, that the process of thinking about something can cause such intense physical pain. Often, not much has changed in our actual lives, we still continue doing the same things, but inside there’s an invisible world that affects us so deeply.
Emotional pain is far more difficult to handle as compared to any physical pain. Our mind needs much more time to heal than our body.
What we don’t understand is that pain is necessary for our survival. Consider a situation where you are walking and a thorn pricks your foot. You don’t feel pain. You keep walking. The thorn slowly gets more and more in with every step you take. Ultimately it reaches a stage where you have to amputate your feet to prevent it from killing you. Had there been pain instantly, you could have prevented the situation. So pain is necessarily a speedometer of your body telling you that it’s time to get your foot off the gas or it will result in an accident.
Then there’s alot of the incorrect information we learned and practiced that may have convinced us not to show our real feelings at any cost. We were taught to bury any feelings that dealt with sadness. We were taught: “Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.” This and hundreds of other clichés about dealing with sad feelings taught us to lie about how we felt. And even the lying was protected under other misinformation like: “don’t burden others with your feelings.”
While we are taught to place value on the opinion of others, we are taught to ignore the power of self-appraisal, self-authority and self-awareness. The reality is this: few of us were raised to honor who we authentically are. Most of us were raised to honor what others thought of us over our own opinion of ourselves. We were simply conditioned to fall into line with the status quo and go with the crowds.
Therefore, when someone we hold in esteem judges or rejects us, it hurts us so. We automatically enter into a pattern of reacting with equal hurt and pain. Either we wallow in it, or we dump it back onto them or some other unsuspecting victim.The reason we automatically feel hurt is because we believe the other’s voice to be the truth about who we are. Their idea of us and way of treating us supersedes our own beliefs about ourself. When this happens, our hearts lay wide open to receive the unconsciousness of others.
But this is false because no one can ever know us. They can only know us from their experience and point of view. And therefore this opinion is always layered with bias. It can never be true.
It is my firm belief that it is no one’s job to approve of or understand us. But Choosing to believe someone or not is our choice.
What if we understood that our deepest self is essentially always pure and worthy – no matter what other’s say about us? What if we understood that it is no one’s job to understand or know or approve of us but ourselves?
Being human, I too have experienced that pain in my life. One recently. One thing I tried was to stay with it and not avoid it. I’ve found that things are less scary when you’re not running away from them.
You remember, as a kid playing hide and go seek – how thrillingly scary it was when you were running away to find a place to hide. If you stop and face that bad bad feeling and even say “hello” to it, you’ll take it down a notch on the fear factor.
But also, when emotions are in high gear, the mind cannot engage.
And even if you accept that you could have done things differently, it’s not the worst thing in the world to have done something wrong. I think we can use the same power of the mind to think things through so we don’t just tacitly react and get hurt because someone else disapproves of our behavior.
For many people, just being human and trying to stay on an even keel is a real challenge. But happiness is a choice. So even if the pain is visiting for a while and you do say “hello” to it, you don’t have to invite it to move in permanently!
Because you are feeling something, Sometimes it reminds you of being alive. Pain is addictive. This is especially true when it garners love and attention.
Happiness does not get the same level of love. When you are happy people go about their business and don’t worry about you. When you hurt they drop everything for you and wrap you in their arms and comfort.
Find something else to satisfy you.
major key to recovery is to process every feeling in the moment you have it. It does not require any special skills to tell the truth about what you are feeling. Just remember one thing , you get only one chance to live your life and its completely up to you. That’s how you wish to spend your days.
So just cheer up, set a goal for yourself and go for it.And most importantly, do socialize! Meet old friends, make new ones because isolation is not good for a disturbed mind.
