ALLOWING PAIN
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 25.
Hello, my friends. Let's talk about pain. I actually had intended to this week's podcast on more of an inspirational message about starting off the season on the right foot.
It's fall, and there's something for me about fall that feels somewhat like a new year. You get the chance to make a fresh start after some wonderful, lazy and unstructured summer days with vacations and downtime. We find ourselves in early fall, ready to get back into a routine and maybe even pick up some of those new year's resolutions that we haven't quite gotten to nine months later.
I think there's value in that message, and I'll get back to it. But what I'm realizing, at least what's true for me right now, is that when you're in pain, it is so hard to find the emotional and physical energy to focus on your goals and move forward. It's really hard.
I recently posted a quote, and I don't know who to attribute this quote to. The quote is, the pain will leave you when it's finished teaching you. Although I can't take credit for the quote, it's been one of my most liked and shared posts of all time, which makes me think that I'm not alone in my pain.
First, I want to make sure I'm making the distinction in this podcast that when I'm talking about pain, I'm not talking about allowing physical pain. Sometimes we find ourselves in physical pain, and there's nothing we can do about it. And other times, the pain rises to the level of needing to see a medical professional.
I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that we can overcome physical pain simply by allowing it. That's definitely not my area of expertise. What I'm talking about is emotional pain.
And there are so many different flavors of this kind of pain. Some of the words that we might use for emotional pain are sadness, grief, anger, resentment, betrayal, shame, guilt, disappointment, or loss. Because there are so many different categories of emotional pain, I'm not going deeply into any one of these different types of pain.
But I really just want to have a conversation about how we experience pain in our lives, and more specifically, how we respond to it. Please know if you're listening to this podcast about pain, and this is your experience right now, you are not alone. In fact, as I record this, I am feeling in quite a bit of pain.
I know I'm not alone. I would even go so far as to say I don't think there's any one of us in the world who never experiences pain. Maybe Gandhi or Byron Cady.
There may be more enlightened souls who are able to rise above the pain, but for most of us, about 50% of our lives, we are going to experience pain. There may be days that are filled with only happiness and joy, and then later we experience other days that seem to offer only pain. Sometimes the 50-50 yin and yang of joy and pain happens all in the same day.
And so our life ebbs and flows. I guess one way to look at it is how would we know happiness without pain? Maybe there is a way to look at pain that allows us to understand that the one true gift of pain is that when we are enjoying happiness, we've experienced its opposite, and so we can truly appreciate the difference. You can't have the highs without the lows.
This is a shared human experience. I want to remind you that as you go about your life and you see other people who seem to have their act together, that they seem to have this life that is only joy and light, that they seem to get to experience more happiness than you feel like you have in your own life. It's sometimes helpful to remember that all of us carry our own burdens.
We can never truly know what's going on in the life of someone else or what's true for another person. But I believe that this experience of pain is very human, and all of that has to do with the evolution of our minds and what we make the circumstances of our lives mean. There are so many reasons that we might be in pain.
I can't possibly do justice to all of them in one episode. So I want to invite you to think about the ways you are in pain, the specific feelings you're experiencing, and connect with this message about pain in a way that resonates with you. Rather than focusing on any one emotion of pain, I want to address how we respond to our pain and also why it's so hard to find the lessons that our pain might be teaching us.
There are three ways that we show up when we experience a painful emotion. The first is that we react. There are times when our pain feels so overwhelming that we can't help but react.
One of the ways we can react is to try to release the feeling by taking it out on someone else or even ourselves. Often when we experience pain, we can perceive that someone else is to blame for the way we feel. Maybe our partner, our kids, our parents, our boss, our co-worker, or the person to blame could very well be ourselves if we feel a sense of shame, guilt, or self-loathing.
When we feel pain, sometimes it's because our minds are making someone else to be the villain and so our pain fuels us to fight back, to lash out. Our minds come up with all of the reasons that the other person has hurt us and how they are wrong or of all of the reasons we ourselves are unworthy, that we've done something wrong. There's so many facts that we can point to.
He cheated on me. She stole something from me. He told me I wasn't good enough.
My daughter doesn't call me. My husband yells. I got fired.
I cheated. I didn't tell the truth. Let's say all of these examples are facts, provable facts.
Let's take the example of a yelling husband. The provable circumstance might be that the husband speaks in a loud voice and says the words, I can't believe you spent so much on the credit card. What's wrong with you? Your mind makes that mean that he's belittling you and questioning how you spend your money.
You feel angry and one way we might react to the situation is to yell back. You might find yourself saying, what's wrong with you? I hate it when you do this. Here's another example.
Let's say a husband cheats. It's not a big jump for our minds to think, I can't believe he did that. He's ruined our marriage.
We feel betrayed. We might react by screaming, leaving or having our own affair. If our daughter doesn't call us, we may make it mean that she's ignoring us and not appreciating us.
We might feel resentful and in reaction, we might not call her or we might tell her how disappointed we are when we do talk. If we do something that makes us feel ashamed because whatever it is that we've done or not done makes us think we ourselves are wrong or a terrible person, when we feel ashamed, we sometimes react against ourselves, constantly looking for all of the evidence that supports the thought that we're terrible. This is not about judgment.
This is about self-realization. It's natural for us to react. It's a human response, fight or flight.
When we feel pain, we react to protect ourselves. When we are convinced the other person is wrong, we're often either reacting to convince them how wrong they are or to get back at them for being wrong. We want to retaliate and make them feel the same pain we feel.
We're not even conscious that we're doing this. It's instinct to protect ourselves. Again, no judgment.
This isn't about the right or wrong way to respond, but I want to offer that often when we react to our pain, we create more pain for ourselves and for the other person. In the example of the yelling husband, we think he's belittling us, so we get angry and we belittle him back. If our partner cheats, we think they've ruined our marriage, and so we react in a way that could make it inevitable by retaliating with words we can't take back or by cheating on them back to seek revenge.
When we ignore the daughter who doesn't call us because we're making it mean that she doesn't appreciate us, we don't appreciate her back. When we feel ashamed because we think we're terrible people, we become stuck in our story, ruminating on all of the reasons why we're wrong, and we perpetuate the pain. It is natural for us to react, but if you find yourself in a cycle of reaction that isn't serving you, isn't making your relationships with others or yourself better, ask yourself how you might want to show up differently.
Thinking about how we respond to pain is different than making the pain go away. We feel pain because of what we make the circumstances of our lives mean, but sometimes it's not that easy to talk ourselves out of the pain. If your partner cheats on you and you feel betrayed because you make it mean they've ruined your marriage, that feeling of betrayal may be your reality right now.
Our minds can't just put a positive spin on a situation just because we don't want to feel the pain. So that brings us to the second way we respond to pain. We avoid it.
Look, I've reacted to pain quite a bit in my life, but I've also spent quite a bit of time in avoidance. Sometimes the pain feels so great that you just need to shut down and not feel it for a while. We just want it to go away, to not be in the situation.
We might know that hiding from the pain doesn't fix it, but avoidance does sometimes make the pain more bearable for short periods of time. You get a break from the relentless churning thoughts in your mind that are causing your pain. Avoidance can look like simply shutting down, not being able to function.
You feel your energy is depleted. You may not want to get out of bed. You just don't want to face the reality of your situation.
Avoiding the pain can also look a lot like numbing, doing something to distract yourself so that you create something of a buffer between you and your pain. Common buffers include overeating, drinking too much, binging on TV, hours of scrolling through social media, or overspending. These activities offer a dopamine hit of pleasure that distract us from our pain.
Pleasure offers a little bit of comfort to make the pain more bearable. In our society today, there are so many different ways that we can find these momentary sources of pleasure to keep us from facing our pain. And what often happens if you have a particular pleasure of choice, whether it be eating, drinking, scrolling, these activities that allow us to channel our energy into something that gives us a little bit of a reprieve, those pleasures can become crutches that we need to rely on to feel better.
We don't even realize that we're creating that connection in our minds. Over our lives, we actually build neural pathways that make us associate pain with our buffers. So for example, for a long time, I would come home after a long day of work and I would have a glass of wine.
It was how I relaxed and how I felt better after a stressful day. Before long, my habit of pouring a glass of wine became my go-to anytime I felt any kind of negative emotion, stress, boredom, frustration. And when we practice these habits, they stick, like brushing our teeth or driving our kids to school.
We don't even have to think about it. So before I would know it, I would have a glass of wine in my hand at the end of the day. For you, maybe it's a habit of opening Facebook and scrolling or reaching for chips or cookies when you feel stressed.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with us that we're doing it. But what we've done is trained ourselves to respond to stress or negative emotions with a particular response, be it eating, scrolling, drinking, watching TV. And none of those things are bad, except for when we do them to excess or to the point where we feel negative consequences, like eating more than we need to leads to weight gain or drinking too much makes us feel crappy the next day.
Spending too much time online shopping, all of a sudden we're racking up debt. We tend to beat ourselves up for the consequences of these buffers. But can we have a little compassion for ourselves that these buffers are actually solving a problem for us? This is seriously the realization that helped me kick the habit of pouring a glass or two or three of wine each night.
The wine was solving a problem for me. I wasn't broken. I wasn't an alcoholic.
I had simply come to rely on wine to help me feel better, whether that's because I felt stressed and frustrated at the end of the day or because I perceived that the wine made social situations a bit more fun. I'd forged an association in my mind. Look, our brains like to be efficient.
You drive to the supermarket without needing to remember each and every turn because you've done it so many times, it's become habit. You drive almost unconsciously. Think about it.
If you had to relearn how to drive to the supermarket every time you got in your car, you'd waste a lot of time relearning that skill. But our brains, they master skills quickly. Now your subconscious mind knows exactly how to drive a car and all of the churns you need to make to get to the supermarket, and you don't even think about it anymore.
This is a serious superpower of our brains, except for when we apply it to buffering because our brains also learn that wine helps us relax or that cookies help us feel a less sad, that watching TV makes the pain feel a little better, at least in the moment. So our brains learn and then we find ourselves unconsciously doing these things in the face of stress, sadness, or any other type of negative emotion. If you've read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, you can learn that when we're faced with triggers that create in us a habitual response, meaning that prompt us to do something, typically the reason that the action we take becomes a habit is because the action gives us some type of reward, and the reward is what instills the habit.
So in the case of buffering, my nightly wine habit was triggered by coming home at night. Honestly, whether I was stressed or not, I poured the glass of wine, my habit, and then I was rewarded with a bit of dopamine that I perceived made me feel more relaxed, which was wonderful, until I started feeling headaches in the morning and guilt and shame around not being able to not have the glass of wine at night, weight gain because I was overeating while I was drinking. I thought there was something wrong with me, but now I understand that this was my mind at my best.
My brain had learned how to associate my buffer of choice with relaxation, and ultimately a relief from the pain of my life, until I realized I was creating more pain in the morning with guilt, shame, and headaches. I know I'm not alone. Some of us have been seeking pleasure in food or alcohol for so long that we don't even realize we're doing it.
When I was in the throes of over drinking to feel better, I would spend so much of my energy thinking about how I should diet or cut back on my drinking, thinking all of that was the problem, when really those were just the symptoms of me not being able to withstand the pain in my life. That's what avoidance looks like, and it's such a reaction. Both reacting to pain and avoiding pain, they're primal.
It's natural for us to respond to pain that way, but there is another path, and I've found it to be a superpower, even stronger than habit. The third way to respond to pain is to allow it, and now I know that sounds terrible, like, why would I want to allow my pain? But the pain is going to come. Life is 50-50.
We will feel pain. We think we shouldn't have to feel it, that we should feel happy more of the time, but maybe those thoughts are just making the pain we have worse. Beating ourselves up for feeling emotional pain is like piling pain on top of pain.
It's actually another form of resistance. It makes the pain bigger. So if we can have some compassion for ourselves that we will feel pain some of the time in our lives and that everyone feels pain, when we stop fighting against that reality and actually creating more pain with the consequences of reacting to the pain or avoiding the pain with buffering, when we stop fighting, there's just pain, just sadness, just fear, just guilt, just disappointment, betrayal, and loss.
Now, I know this doesn't sound fun, but when you stop layering additional pain on top of these feelings, like when you stop layering the guilt and shame of overeating on top of the sadness, and when you don't layer on top of betrayal your own guilt, it doesn't make the original pain go away, but it also doesn't amplify it, doesn't compound it with additional suffering. So now we feel sad. We acknowledge that we feel sad and we can get curious.
Why are we sad? Maybe we feel sad because our kids are away at college. That's the circumstance. Our kids are away, and the reason we feel sad is because we miss them.
Our lives feel a bit emptier without them at home. Can we just give ourselves the collective hug that if we feel sad because we miss our kids, would you have it any other way? Would we want to not miss them if the missing is what's true for us right now? Or let's say we feel fear. Our kids are independent and living their lives, and we're thinking of all of the things that could go wrong, projecting the what-ifs of the future and creating fear and pain for ourselves right now.
This type of fear is so common for us right now, and yet we think there's something wrong with us that we feel it. But if you could allow this fear and worry to be there for a minute without fighting or avoiding it, you can get curious about how and why your mind is creating this reality for you, this pain, this fear. Allowing pain opens your mind to the curiosity of why it's there.
This is not curiosity with judgment. It's curiosity with love and acceptance. I feel anxious right now, and nothing has gone wrong.
I'm simply feeling a feeling because of the way I'm thinking about the circumstances of my life. And when I can sit with my anxiety and love myself through it, I can watch how my mind is creating the pain. I can question the underlying beliefs fostering this anxiety.
What does it mean for me to be a good mother? Why is it hard for me to let my kids fail or be unhappy? The pain will leave you when it's finished teaching you. Do you know when I ask my clients what they want more than anything else for their own life? They often don't know. They often tell me that they haven't even thought about it.
I can relate. I was there once too. I was so busy reacting to and avoiding the pain of my life that I didn't allow myself the space to dream what is possible for me in my life.
Allowing pain has become my superpower because as I've learned to allow the pain that comes up for me as my kids have become independent adults, I've had to learn how to let go. As I've learned how to allow that pain, I'm now able to allow and harness the pain that comes from my own personal growth, trying new things, getting outside of my comfort zone, believing in myself even amidst lingering doubt and insecurity. The pain will leave you when it's finished teaching you.
What are your dreams? What do you want for your life? Until next time, friends.
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