Emotions fuel our lives, and our choices, whether we realize it or not. Often, we make choices based on what we think will make use feel good, even if just for a moment. Meanwhile, we do our best to avoid pain as much as possible, especially emotional pain.
Yet, this drive towards pleasure, and away from pain, doesn’t always serve us. In fact, sometimes it makes things worse. How often do you self-medicate with alcohol, food, or other substances to avoid dealing with fear, anxiety, or sadness? Do you ever distract yourself with work, social obligations, or mindless TV because it’s easier than being with difficult feelings?
Emotional pain is an inherent part of life, and none of us can escape it…no matter how hard we try. The challenge is, you may not know how to deal with it when it shows up in your life. Because, unfortunately, many of us were never taught how to process our pain, let alone heal or grow from it.
More often we are taught to avoid or numb; to shut down difficult emotions. However, when you do this, you shut down ALL emotions. This includes love, happiness, and joy. You cannot experience the feel-good emotions, without opening to the painful ones. They are two sides of the same coin. Although numb may feel safer, it disconnects you from life. I see this all the time in my practice…people come in feeling numb to life because they’ve literally shut down their emotions to avoid pain.
What is Emotional Pain?
Emotional pain creates suffering within us, such as unresolved grief, anger, despair, shame, or fear. This happens when the emotions feel too overwhelming, or too difficult to face.
Although emotional pain is influenced by our perception of an experience, it’s not the only factor. Our history also plays a big part, especially when it comes to trauma. And everyone has experienced trauma to some degree in this life…everyone.
Let’s be honest, just watching the news can be traumatic. The violence, hate-crimes, sexual abuse, and natural disasters we witness each day impact us, whether we have experienced them personally or not.
Avoiding Emotional Pain
In childhood, we develop defensive strategies for dealing with difficult emotions, like fear or shame. They help us avoid the pain of rejection and abandonment, which to a child, is equal to death.
According to Psychoanalytical Theorist Karen Horney’s Mature Theory, our defensive strategies fall into 3 main categories:
- Moving against others (projection) – Energy is projected outward, against others, in an aggressive or expansive way. To deal with fear, insecurity, or pain, these these individual’s lash out. They hate weakness, and will often view emotional pain the same way. As a result, they deflect and project their pain on to others, thus disowning it. Further, to avoid rejection and abandonment, they focus on building mastery, success, achievement, and perfectionism.
- Moving away from others (avoidance) – In this strategy, energy is withdrawn from others, through detachment and isolation. These individual’s handle difficult emotions by shutting down, and shutting others out. In a sense, they give up in resignation, and they are typically adverse to change. As a result, they avoid dealing with emotional pain all together, accepting it as just their fate, which keeps them stuck in it.
- Moving toward others (repression) – This is the overly complaint, overly accommodating, people-pleaser strategy. People using this strategy seek to overcome their emotional pain by focusing on others. They sacrifice themselves for those they love, or what they deem to be the “greater good”. They may seem unselfish, loving, and humble, or appear to be content with little in life (a way to avoid disappointment). However, underneath it all, they repress emotional pain to their own detriment.
These strategies were adopted in childhood, as a way to create safety, and avoid emotional pain. Yet none of them actually allow for the processing, or healing of that pain.
The truth is, if we don’t process difficult emotions, we become stuck in them. Resistance through projection, avoidance, and repression doesn’t get rid of the emotional pain – it strengthen it!
The Consequences of Resistance
Emotions are the bridge between the body and the mind. They are literally energy in motion. Any form of resistance to emotional pain creates contraction, which traps the energy.
Over time, this stuck energy becomes like an armor in the body, leading to chronic muscle tension and pain. Stuck, unprocessed emotions can even lead to physical illness and dis-ease.
According to Chinese medicine, emotions are generated by our organs, with each organ responsible for specific emotions. For example, the liver generates anger, the lungs and colon generate grief, and the kidneys generate fear. When we bury emotional pain, that stuck energy can then create stagnation or other issues in those organs. I’ve seen this in my own life.
In addition, at the mental level, stuck emotional pain can lead to depression and anxiety. It takes a lot of energy to repress emotions, and over time, your body and mind become like an energetic pressure cooker of emotional energy. This can quickly fuel anxiety and/or depression. Further, that buried emotional energy directly influences patterns of thought, such as in negative rumination.
Anytime we repress, deny or avoid dealing with emotions, they take up residency in the shadow part of the psyche. Your shadow contains all the disowned part of yourself, including the emotional pain you don’t want to process. We hide in the shadow what we don’t want to accept. However, here’s the kicker…anything that’s in your shadow has power over you. And over time, it will leak out in your life and relationships, in unwanted ways.
When Suffering Become Identity
Sometimes emotional pain is too big to avoid. In this case, it’s easy to become stuck in the pain if we don’t have the tools, resources, or support to fully process our experience. Unfortunately, if we stay stuck for too long, we can even become identified with the pain.
However, identification with suffering is more than an emotional problem – it’s also a psychological and physiological one. Trauma changes the brain and the body over time. The constant flood of stress hormones, and a nervous system stuck in fight or flight, can create a new normal. Dr. Joe Dispenza explains in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, that we can become addicted these states of being, similar to a drug addiction. The body and mind begin to associate suffering as our normal state, which makes it harder to let go of.
Unfortunately, the ego resists letting go of anything it is identified with. That resistance shows up as a hundred different excuses for why you can’t change your emotional experience.
If you start hearing yourself make excuses for why things can’t, or won’t ever change, know that your ego is in massive resistance. Yet, it’s telling you lies, and it is NOT to be trusted. It is not helping you in any way.
Remember what I said about emotions being energy in motion? The only way to process, heal, and move the energy out… is to move through it.
4 Steps to Healing Emotional Pain
The first step in healing emotional pain is to welcome and honor your emotions. This requires a willingness to allow yourself to feel what’s there, to name the emotions, and to accept them without blame, shame, or judgment. This level of self-presence and self-compassion is expansive in nature, which creates space for the energy to move.
Second, I invite you to explore the message within your emotions, as a path to healing. For instance, if it’s anger you’re struggling with, perhaps a boundary or core value has been violated. If it’s loneliness or grief you’re facing, perhaps you need to connect with those you love.
Think of painful emotions as signals, and get curious about why you are experiencing them. If you can understand the why, you will know how to move through them. Sometimes, it’s a change of perception that’s required, or an action you need to take. Other times, there is a deeper trauma that needs healing.
Emotions are created by two key factors: 1.) a current experience your having, and 2.) your perception (or story of what’s happening) based on past experience.
At times emotional pain is so entangled in the past, that it’s hard to see present clearly. This is just one reason why it’s important to know the why. Often the why can give you insight about a wound or trauma that needs to be addressed. For example, if you’ve experienced a lot of betrayal in your past relationships, you may perceive an argument with a current partner as a betrayal, rather than a simple disagreement.
The third step in working with emotional pain is to move the energy! Remember, emotions need to flow, so give yourself an outlet to get the energy moving up and out.
Strategies for processing emotional pain:
- Cry it out! Tears provide a cathartic emotional cleansing!
- Journal – This is a great way to externalize your feelings and emotional experience. I often like to write down everything that’s coming up, including the message, and the why. Next, I burn the pages, and dump the ashes into a plant or into the earth as a form of alchemy.
- Move the energy through dance or exercise. Put on music that resonates to what you are feeling and move your body. As you move, be present to your emotional experience. Where do you feel the energy stuck in your body?
- Talk to a friend – Sometimes it’s helpful just to talk it out with someone who can hold space for you, empathize, and love you without trying to fix you.
- Energy Psychology – This is my #1 way to move through emotional pain. You can easily learn Tapping or EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) at home. Check out the book Try It On Everything: Discover the power of EFT by Patricia Carrington, Ph.D., or go to https://www.thetappingsolution.com/tapping-101/ to learn the basics of EFT.
Last, the fourth step is to embrace healing and get support! Don’t try to go through difficult emotional experiences on your own. If you’ve suppressed or repressed past emotional pain, you did so because that felt safer than feeling it.
Healing happens when we feel safe, and this is important to understand. This is where a trusted professional support system can be immensely valuable. Find a coach, therapist, counselor, or healer who can hold space for, and facilitate, your emotional process.
Next Steps
This blog is dedicated to all those who are sitting in emotional pain right now. Allow it, learn from it, move it, and embrace this opportunity for healing and growth through the experience. I am here for you!
If you’re ready for some help, please reach out for a complimentary consultation here. I’d love to support!
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To your healing, Michelle