Take Away My Emotional Pain And Sadness?

Introduction

We live in times where many people want their emotional pain and sadness taken away from them. They either want someone else to do this for them or they want to do it for themselves. Self-help books are full of quick-fixes to be happy, to cast aside negativity and to live positively. We all know that it’s difficult to feel in pain emotionally, feel in despair, lost and alone. Perhaps guilty, or in shame or in grief. It’s the most natural thing in the world to want to escape, to want the pain to stop. And we find many ways to make the pain stop: drinking, drug-taking, working too hard, overeating and other damaging behaviours. We numb ourselves from pain so that we can’t feel its distress. The problem is that when we numb ourselves to pain we also numb ourselves to good and positive emotions like happiness and joy. And if we constantly deny our pain we are burying these difficult emotions. This acts rather like a pressure cooker. As we put more and more into the pot and keep the lid closed, eventually, it will explode.

Here are a few of my thoughts on dealing with emotional pain:

Acknowledge And Accept Our Pain

This seems like an easy thing to do but it’s surprising how many of us find this first step the most difficult. We hide from our pain, we say “we are fine.” We carry on with life, “we soldier on.” We distract ourselves. We look for company. Anything, rather than being alone and being faced with our pain and sadness. We fear telling people we are struggling for then they might think we are weak. Or, worse, they may show no understanding of our situation, which leaves us feeling even more alone and isolated. And the reason we struggle with this is that once we acknowledge to ourselves that we are in pain then we have to confront it directly – no hiding, no denying.

Share And Process Our Pain

Having acknowledged we are in pain, sharing and processing is the most important part of handling our emotional pain. This acts directly against denial and stops us burying our emotions.  This in turns prevents a pressure cooker effect whereby we explode or implode emotionally. Talking to a trusted person, someone who will understand, is often helpful. But there are many other ways to share our pain, be open to our pain and so willing to acknowledge it. A personal journal is an excellent way to release our emotions. Creative pursuits in the form of writing, art or making music, allow us to explore our feelings. Any place where we can get our pain out in a safe way is valuable. We can also just spend time thinking and contemplating what has happened to us. Contemplating – looking to understand our situation – is not the same as the damaging practice of ruminating and running a negative script over and over in our head. Anything that enables us to process our pain and work with it, rather than hiding from it, is a positive way of processing our pain.

Learn To Live With Our Pain

This may not be the news we want. We may not want to have to learn to live with our pain – we may think that we want rid of it altogether. Well, sometimes, we can move from one experience of emotional pain and sadness and be released from it. But at other times our pain remains with us at some level. It may not be at the hottest and sharpest end but we may carry it with us always. Living with pain, allowing ourselves to feel it, seeing it as a part of a full and healthy life, is a positive way forward. At some level, if we have empathy for our fellow travellers in this world, we will have feelings of emotional pain and sadness. For even if we are feeling happy, we know that, somewhere, another person is experiencing hardship. We may just have got our dream job, but out there, someone, somewhere, has just been made redundant and is in despair about how they will cope. And even on a day when we are at our happiest, it is likely that there is something, some part of our life, that holds sadness for us. Perhaps there is a person who is no longer with us, no longer able to share our successes. Maybe while one of our children is doing well, another is struggling. This is the complexity of our lives as fully rounded human beings. There is rarely an unalloyed, happy emotional experience that is not tainted by another one that has some sadness. And this is why we need to learn to live with our entire range of emotional life, including our pain. We need to accept the full range of our human condition and acknowledge it head on – not try to continually hide from the things that are difficult.

Conclusion

So would you really want someone to take away your emotional pain? For who would you be without it? A person who has never lived or loved or lost? A person who has no empathy or thought for other beings on our planet? Emotional pain and sadness is not something to hide from or to be afraid of. It is what makes us know that we are alive and it makes us the deep, empathic people that we are. It’s what shows us what matters. Why would we want to hide from who we truly are, the depths we have travelled, the experiences that show us what life has meant to us? Sadness needs to be seen as a part of the experience of our lives. In embracing pain and sadness, in allowing ourselves to look at it, feel it, be open with it, far from dragging us under, it releases us and allows us to actually cope more positively with our lives.