Emotional Pain: Friend or Foe

With every emotional and/or physical painful experience in life, you have the opportunity to write and store knowledge about pain. You add new volumes every year. Moments of unhappiness, confusion, failure, depression, and the act of making the same mistakes over and over, all present the opportunity for you to write and store productive knowledge about pain. The problem is that most people, who continuously struggle in relationships and life, create volumes of false and misleading information about emotional pain.

Documenting knowledge about pain began from the moment you were forced out into this world from your mother’s womb and felt that sharp slap across your bottom. With this slap, you were introduced to a harsh reality of our world: it is full of painful experiences.

If you’re like most people, the word pain is viewed in negative light. It has several friends that hang around with it: hurt, ache, suffering, and agony to name a few. The origin for pains “reputation” comes from our early learning experiences with physical pain.

Remember running around barefoot? Did you ever step on a nail? In a fraction of a millisecond, the physical experience of stepping on the nail was converted into neural energy that was transmitted through your body to its final destination: your brain. Then what happened? You yelled out in distress. You jumped up and down on one foot screaming, “Ouch!” “Ayeee!” “Aaah!”. Your brain told you that you needed to immediately stop what you were doing and look at your foot. You looked at your foot and saw that there was a puncture wound that was bleeding. You ran home screaming just as fast as you could. The moment you returned home, your mom whipped out the peroxide and bandaged up your foot. Then off to the doctor you went to get that dreadful tetanus shot. Within days, the wound healed and you went on living your life. The message quickly learned: stepping on a nail hurts—pain sucks. Do everything you can to avoid stepping on a nail. Shoes are good. Pain is bad. Pain is my enemy.

Turning to the world of emotional pain, for a lot of people the learning curve for this type of pain is far slower. They step on the same “emotional” nails over and over again. They get involved, get hurt, run from pain, get involved, get hurt, run from pain . . . Instead of going to the doctor to get a shot, they come into my office asking, “What in the heck is going on with my life?”

Pain, whether physical or emotional is trying to tell you something. And that something is “YOU’VE MADE A BAD CHOICE. STOP DOING THAT!”

We experience emotional pain for the same reason that we experience physical pain: so that we can learn, grow, and become wiser individuals, which will allow us to avoid continually suffering negative consequences.

Hence, in reality, Pain is an ally and a teacher. If you want to have relationship success, you had better start listening to it. To help you rid yourself of false knowledge and pen new and productive knowledge regarding pain, I want you to think of an emotionally painful breakup from your past, one where your reaction to the situation didn’t ease the pain but caused you even more pain. How did you react to the resulting emotional pain? Did you go running for a bottle of Scotch? Did you get angry and destroy things? Did you swear to get even with the person who broke your heart? Did you blame the other person entirely for the failure of the relationship? All of these actions are attempts to run away from pain. The belief that Pain is bad and needs to be avoided help to create the thought that these actions would help to free you from the unwanted emotional pain.

Did trying to inflict pain on the person who you believed hurt you make matters better or worse? Did getting drunk make the pain go away forever or did you numb all your feelings, good and bad, for only a short while? While you were thrashed, did you make good choices? Most importantly, did you learn anything from your painful experience? In fact, let’s be honest, most people learn very little from these types of reactions. And if you’re like many people intent on avoiding pain, you probably went out and tried to create another relationship without having learned anything new about how to create a lasting relationship. The consequence of “replace the loss” is that the next relationship fails to go the distance. How many times have you repeated this painful and useless cycle in your life?

If this all sounds familiar, I suggest taking a break from looking forward and take some time to look back. Stop seeing your emotional pain as the enemy and embrace it as an ally and teacher. Start listening to your emotional pain and try to figure out what it has been trying to teach you. Once you do, you’ll be well on your way to creating peace and tranquility in your life.