Why you should get to know your pain better

You should get to know your pain better.  Invite it in to your home (and heart).  That might sound crazy, but the pain entered your life for a reason.

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?

Your pain is like that cake.  Believe it or not… there are similarities.

Even though you don’t wish to replicate the pain (like you do the cake), there are reasons why you want to dissect it and figure it out.

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.

Let me 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 got to know the pain that went with her lack of confidence, we found so much more important information.  Tina remembered significant events 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.  

There were other smaller stories – a math teacher who embarrassed her, a girlfriend who tended to put her down, and even a sibling who was always ‘above’ Tina.  Now, in her mid-thirties, she began to see where her lack of confidence came from.  Many experiences contributed to these negative beliefs she held onto about herself, but these two – from being eight years old and in college – were the most influential of her 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.

Tina’s thinking changed.  Her perspective shifted.  She started to love herself and say a strong, ‘NO!’ to the chatter that used to leave her feeling crappy about herself.  She forgave the bully from her childhood and the college guy she dated for too long. She forgave herself for not using her voice.

Tina healed the emotional pain from her past, and then she became the confident woman she was meant to be!

Last I knew, Tina was happily married and expecting their first baby :)

If you have some pain in your past – something that’s still causing you pain, that’s still limiting who you are, what you do, or how much happiness you experience… let’s start healing 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.

Love & Peace
Shannon

Next week I’ll be writing about why forgiveness comes last when healing emotional pain