Most people want to avoid pain, which is completely understandable… it hurts! But that avoidance does not help. I want you to know why you should get to know your pain better because it will make the rest of your life so much better!
Let’s say you’re pretty savvy in the kitchen – a fine baker. You go to an event and have the most decadent cake you’ve ever had. It is mind-blowingly good – every detail. It is perfect.
You’re able to bring a second piece home, and you so dearly wish you could have the recipe but it’s ‘the family secret.’
Would you, being the baking goddess that you are, just eat the piece of cake, or would you slowly take it apart, enjoy small bites… try to figure out what its exact ingredients are so you could hopefully make your own cake just as decadently as your friend’s?
Your pain is like that cake. Believe it or not… there are similarities.
When you feel unhappy, when you’re carrying around pain from years ago – you must get to know that pain. The better you know that pain, the more you’ll understand about how it affects you, and the easier it will be to heal once and for all.
I’ll tell you about Tina – a client I worked with years ago.
Tina’s pain was that she lacked confidence. It held her back in every area of life – from career to romance. She desperately wanted to figure out how to become more confident.
So I had her look at the opposite – what was it that made her so unconfident?
As we go to know the pain that went with her lack of confidence, we found so much more important information. Tina remembered significant information from when she was a little girl and from her college days. The pieces started to fall into place.
From the time she was about six years old she was taunted by a neighborhood kid. This boy, slightly older, was always telling her bad things about herself. She tried to get help, but no one ever witnessed it. It went on for so long that she started to believe she was stupid, ugly, useless, and no good at anything.
In college she dated a young man for a few years. It started off good but then very similar abuse started happening – even some of the same language was used: stupid, ugly, useless, and no good at anything.
She stayed with this man for far too long considering his verbal and emotional abuse, but thank God she didn’t marry him. Now, in her mid-thirties, she began to see why her lack of confidence came from. There’d been many other smaller incidences that contributed to this negative belief, but these two – from being eight years old and in college – were like the main seeds of this confidence issue.
It wasn’t easy to look at these painful parts of her past, but each time we did she felt lighter.
She felt some hope and it loosened the grip she had on the past. After deeply understanding the source of her pain and how it had influenced her for decades, she better understood what it was doing to her and how she allowed it. THAT led to her changing some behaviors and thought patterns. Tina pushed herself to take some risks and to refuse negative thinking. She even chopped off her very long hair – that she’d always hid behind – and got a great style that really fit her age and profession.
Last I knew, Tina was happily married and expecting their first baby :)
If you have some painful events in your past – things that still causing you pain, that limit who you are, what you do, or how much happiness you experience… let’s start exploring your pain.
Tap on the image below to set up a free consultation call with me. Even if we don’t start to work together, I promise this one call will get you moving forward with your healing and freedom from the past.
Cheers to healing and happiness,
Shannon
Next week’s blog will be about why forgiveness comes last when healing emotional pain
Life can be a bit stressful at times, that’s why learning how to remain calm is so important – meditation is the best path to that inner peace.
Want to learn how? Sign up below to learn more about my course, Meditation 77 – coming soon!
You should never stuff pain inside. Never. It does not heal there, it just remains and then upsets you whenever something reminds you it’s there… sitting inside you.
Hopefully you read my post about 9 things you need to know about the bad things that happen in your life. It explains why we have pain in our life. If not, read that first.
It’s natural and totally not surprising that you’d want to stuff pain inside. Ignore it. Deny it. Keep it as far from your thoughts as possible. It’s PAINFUL after all.
Many people find all sorts of creative ways to hide their pain – alcohol, work, shopping, drugs, medication, and the many options of technological distractions like social media, music, and television.
But when you ignore your pain what do you think happens? Does it go away?
Imagine there’s a very large bag of trash in your living room. In the bag are things like rotting meat and dog poop. The living room is your place to chill, relax, get all comfy. But how on Earth can you do that when it stinks horribly?
If this happened would you ignore the trash and just deal with the stench? Would you, rather than deal with the garbage, just put a clothespin on your nose so you wouldn’t smell it so much? Would you miss out on your favorite room and start hanging out in the bathroom instead?
No, you wouldn’t do any of these things! You’d take care of the garbage, even if – for some odd reason – that took you a few months. You’d take the stinky mess out of your home!
When you stuff pain inside it’s like the garbage. The pain sticks around. Sure you can fake it – act like you’re ‘over it’ and ‘doing fine now.’ You can wear your happy face, move on to the next best thing, and even take it out on others.
No matter what you do, the pain will be there – stuffed inside.
And you know what happens… every once in a while that pain is sparked. Maybe it’s something someone says, a song on the radio, a movie you watch, or perhaps it’s that you bump into someone and suddenly the memory of your pain is staring you right in the face.
When that pain is sparked, it’s right there again – causing you misery.
A much better option is to deal with the pain. It’s not a simple answer, especially as there are many different ways of suffering in the world, and it’s not always a quick fix, but it’s a lot better than holding onto pain from the past.
Here’s the most important thing to remember – when you do heal the pain, something amazing happens. You’re transformed, you’re free, you’re better, you’re happier.
That healing leaves behind a wonderful gift for you to unwrap… all because instead of stuffing pain inside to ignore it, you chose to heal.
I help people heal emotional pain. If you have pain you’d like to heal – set up a free consultation with me… go here or tap on the image below. I’d love to spend some time on the phone with you to see how I can help you stop the suffering once and for all!
Love & Peace
Shannon
Next week I’ll be writing about why you should get to know your pain better… it can become an ally (really!)