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The Purpose of My Pain

alainahalbur

Have you ever been in a competitive sport or activity? When I think about pain, I instinctively think about physical pain. I remember when I was younger and participated in swim team. We were all complaining about the temperature of the water, being tired, our bodies hurting, and feeling unmotivated to continue. I remember my coach giving us a pep talk saying, “It’s going to hurt, but I promise you as soon as you finish the race, the pain will be gone”. I was annoyed with her for that comment because that didn’t solve the problem. I was still going to experience pain, but…she was right. If we want to experience growth and change, pain or discomfort often shows up somewhere along the way.


We often hear people refer to this as character building, right? Sports, clubs, relationships, community organizations, church, jobs, and the like provide opportunities to learn valuable lessons while providing us with ways to develop character during difficult times. So, what happens when we experience pain?


Our body responds to pain in a variety of ways. For most of us, pain registers as discomfort. You burn your hand, step on a Lego, overdo it when exercising and have achy muscles the next day, it’s not a pleasant feeling, and we’d prefer not to do it again. These are all ways that pain manifests physically. We can feel it, we can see it (red/swollen, bruised), it makes sense, and our brain says "avoid this!". My swim coach was alluding to a different kind of pain even though she was responding to our complaints about physical pain. She was helping us mentally and emotionally prepare for pain as well by conditioning our minds.


Mental and emotional pain are often harder to identify because they are less visibly present, and we often don’t see a concrete end to this kind of pain. Unfortunately, this is the kind of pain we often forget to take care of. Why is this?


There are plenty of societal views about mental and emotional health. Some of these views influence our thoughts about feelings within ourselves and the world. They may play into the way you talk to yourself when you’re feeling down. Maybe your family didn’t talk about emotions very often growing up, so they don’t seem important. Maybe even the words “mental health”, create feelings of discomfort. Regardless of your belief and the beliefs of others surrounding mental and emotional pain, it’s real. When we experience emotional pain, it is critical to acknowledge the feeling instead of rejecting and displacing it. Once we acknowledge the pain of being left out, being dumped, the death of a loved one, failing a test, losing a job, ending a marriage, or fill in the blank_________, we can process how to move forward. If we don’t acknowledge it, it might disappear temporarily, but your body won’t forget it’s there. Eventually emotions have a way of making themselves known. When we process emotions instead of suppressing them, we build resilience.


Resilience strengthens our willingness to be vulnerable and build connections with ourselves and others even if we’ve had some failures along the way. When we choose to be vulnerable, we are often taking a risk that might feel uncomfortable in the moment. We really don’t know how it will turn out and sometimes it’s painful. Resiliency is what happens when we work through the painful experience in an active way (name it, repair the relationship, take responsibility etc.) while simultaneously acknowledging the difficulty/discomfort of the situation. It measures how well you can recover from experiencing adversity which can often come from physical, emotional, or mental pain. Strengthening your resilience does not mean your life will be pain free, but it can allow you to move through your pain with purpose.


Here are a couple of ways to build resilience:

· Recognize that change in inevitable

· Use your past experiences to help learn more about yourself

· Seek help/connect with others

· Maintain a sense of perspective (avoid fluctuating in and out of extremes)

· Extend help to other people

· Avoid unhelpful coping skills (substance use, gossip, workaholism) that temporarily mask or project pain

· Develop goals/ambitions


Pain and discomfort are natural symptoms of growth and change. In order for us to strengthen resilience and move through our pain, it’s important to acknowledge and look for ways to understand the pain and how it relates to our lives (its purpose) so that we can choose where our pain takes us. If you’re in an abusive relationship, your pain (physical, emotional, and/or mental pain) is helping you by signaling the need to leave the relationship and find help. If you’re an athlete and your body is experiencing physical fatigue, your pain is signaling the need for rest in effort to avoid injury. If your spouse is telling you they miss seeing you and want to spend time with you, their pain is helping them by signaling a need for emotional/physical connection and prompting communication with you. If you resonate with constantly feeling the ups and downs of day to day life, try taking some time each week to assess your mental, emotional, and physical health to better understand why your brain might be signaling you with physical, mental, or emotional pain.




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