Physical pain serves as a model for understanding emotional pain and how to free yourself from it. Get a pebble in your shoe and it's going to hurt you in an annoying way until you get it out. That's bodily pain trying to tell you something. You get the message, you fix the problem, the pain eases and then dissipates.
Imagine if your pain interpretation was somehow messed up? Imagine if the pain from the pebble in your shoe caused you to think, "There must be something wrong with me!" And then you tried losing weight, making more money or giving away more money, chanting or going vegan. The pain doesn't go away and you might try harder and harder with no joy.
Those things you try to do to remove the pain are not right or wrong in themselves, but they are simply irrelevant to the pain of the pebble in the shoe. The pain of the pebble is simply telling you to remove the pebble. Addressed immediately, it's a non issue. But if left too long, it could become a complication.
So it is with our emotional pain, isn't it? Emotional pain like loneliness, anger, anxiety, guilt - they are trying to tell us something. If we address the issue immediately, it becomes a non issue. Left too long, emotional pain can fester into depression, neuroses and worse.
Why would we leave our emotional pain to fester?
Shame tells us, "There's something wrong with you. That's why you're feeling this way. You're not right in the head or something. Loser."
Guilt, as with other emotional pains, can motivate us to take healing actions. Shame, however, demotivates us from taking healing actions. Why try and heal yourself if you think you're fundamentally defective? It would make more sense to throw yourself away and let the universe start afresh, wouldn't it?
Shame keeps us from addressing the pain - it keeps us from taking off our shoe and searching for the foreign irritant. Shame tells us there's something wrong with us for feeling the pain. So we live with the pain. "I'm the problem. There's no cure. No hope."
With physical pain, your being is calling for your attention, to remove the physical stimulus of pain. With emotional pain, your being is calling for your attention, to remove the emotional stimulus of pain.
Interestingly, truly experiencing emotional pain is often enough to remove it.
Don't we often feel set aright once we've managed to talk to a trusted listener and "got it off our chest"? Doesn't telling our story to an authentic listening friend "take a weight off our shoulders"?
Fully experiencing emotional pain is, ironically, often all it takes to make it go away. Because when your soul needs your attention, it speaks its pain to you. "Look at me. See me. Hear me," it says. And when we do, the message has been received and the need for the pain is gone.
However, it takes courage and self love, because going into the pain often intensifies it until we get to the crux of the matter; but then the pain dissipates quickly. "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free," Christ said.
Don't let shame keep you from yourself. You're not defective; you're not somehow worse than everyone else. We all have our private fears, anger and guilt. The next time emotional pain rears its head, don't try and shut it up. Invite it home for a cup of tea. Hear it out. It will be hard; be bold. It will be frightening; be loving.
Look your pain in the eye. See it. Hear it. Know it. It will dissipate.
Practise looking into a mirror for a minute, directly into one eye. Talk to a trusted friend. Open a page of your journal and bleed in ink onto that page. Whatever it takes to identify the stimulus, experience your response and dissipate your pain, do it.
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