The healing process can be such a tricky, winding path...
Check out this awesome post I swiped from an EFT practitioners Facebook group:
I love it!
Isn’t that just exactly how it goes? We feel uncomfortable, then try to avoid the discomfort, and it just gets worse. I have learned through this modality (and the marvelous teacher of life) that my resistance to feeling what I feel is far worse than just feeling the damn feeling.
But have you ever thought about why that is? It seems a pretty universal human condition to experience suffering. So why is there such a strong tendency towards running away from it?
Perhaps obvious, the most prominent reason would be that suffering is, well, uncomfortable. It is a natural survival mechanism to want to do anything necessary to get ourselves out of a painful situation. Think about accidentally setting your hand on a burner that had just been lit for a long time. You instinctively want to jerk your hand away from the hot, painful sensation, right? It doesn’t make sense to sit through the actual physical discomfort that is signalling that your flesh is burning. That’s kinda the opposite of self love or healing.
So what is the difference between emotional discomfort and physical discomfort? It seems the ancient parts of our brains have just lumped these two very distinct categories into one general pile of pain. And in fact, some recent studies have shown that the same areas of the brain light up under emotional pain or physical pain. Check out this article!
However, the physical signals communicating that the body is in danger are sooo not the same as the pain we feel from emotional distress. Emotional pain may light up the same areas of the brain as physical pain, and it is definitely true that emotional distress is the underlying cause of many physical symptoms, but perhaps that is because the original emotional distress was overlooked in the first place!
Perhaps, at the initial point of injury, had those feelings been given the space to be fully felt, they would not have lodged themselves in the body to be dealt with later.
Maybe, this is the very thing that causes both emotional and physical pains to persist and develop into chronic conditions like:
fibromyalgia
headaches
back pain
insomnia
depression
digestive disturbances
anxiety
autoimmune conditions
endometriosis
and so many more…
Intense emotional distress is a form of communication from the body-mind to the self, just like physical pain.
This signal is saying, in essence, that some part of our well being is in danger. And, just like any other kind of communication system, the communication of the emotions must be learned.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly did not take a class called “Emotional Intelligence 101” in school. In fact, most of what I picked up from my environment, from school, family, and the culture around me did NOT encourage the full awareness and "sitting with” of my emotions. It was kinda the opposite.
I was taught to appear content, polite, pleasant and happy. I was taught “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” And there are so many cultural messages that we ALL receive, from day one, that basically encourage the same thing.
“Girls are meant to be seen, not heard.”
“Be polite!”
“Boys don’t cry.”
“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed!”
“You should learn to grin and bear it.”
“Just get over it!”
and of course…
“Keep calm and carry on,” anyone?
Ugh. No wonder it can be so difficult to just be with what we are feeling, instead of ignoring, avoiding, or overlooking these painful emotions.
I have gone through such great lengths to distract myself from what is going on within me. Even things that have been disguised as “healthy behaviors” have acted as my methods of avoidance from time to time!
Distractions can take many shapes and forms.
drinking, smoking, using drugs, altering consciousness/perception
overworking, burying self in work, busyness
FOOD. over eating, under eating, obsessing about food in general
Any kind of obsession
sex
exercise
endlessly scrolling through social media
TV, magazines, media consumption
This list could go on forever. Basically, we can do anything to try to replace the action of simply being with what is.
This is what I mean when I talk about ‘sitting in the discomfort.’ It is not necessarily about just wallowing in the cesspool of a sucky situation. It’s more like noticing that the cesspool exists, and being with it enough to notice where it is coming from and why it is there obstructing the path of your lovely stroll through the park. And then, doing something about it, out of such a deep love for the natural beauty it is obstructing. I mean, who can just hang out with a nasty smelling puddle of stagnant water, and not eventually want to clean it up?
Sitting with the discomfort is about loving your life enough to get real with the patterns you are playing out that bring in painful experiences, and where these patterns are coming from. Let me be clear: this “being with the cesspool” situation is NOT about blaming yourself for this obstruction, this pain, being present in your life. You did not consciously put that obstruction there! Of course not. Who would consciously choose to create painful experiences in their own lives?
Much of the time, this original injury happened at a time when we relied heavily on others, before we learned to advocate for ourselves or had any tools to protect our hearts from getting hurt, often by the people closest to us. In essence, many people pick up wounds during early development. If these wounds are accompanied by the message that it is not safe to feel the hurt, fear, sense of abandonment, etc, then they are stored away in the body, hopefully to be accessed at a later and more safe time. This leaves the child, and later, the adult, to come up with whatever coping strategies that help them self-soothe and forget about these wounds for a while.
We develop ways of distracting from the pain in order to survive.
This is part of all humans, and what a beautiful, miraculous thing! Deep down, we all have such a strong and fighting desire to live that we figure out this way to survive until a time when it is safe to process what happened!
In-come the Cesspool situation. In-come learning how to decode the signals of our emotions. The body has stored the painful memories, and anything similar triggers this sympathetic nervous system response. The pain receptors light up under emotional distress, communicating a lack of safety. This feeling may actually indicate a real lack of safety in your present situation! But, more often than not, the kind of fight-or-flight triggering discomfort is linked to another pain, and there is vital information there.
The trick to healing is creating situations where we can safely sit in the discomfort, so that we can glean the vital information this uncomfortable feeling contains.
So don’t go setting your hand on the stove burner, thinking that is what I am talking about! Burning ourselves (physically or metaphorically speaking) is never a self-loving action.
And why might it actually be loving and beneficial to sit within the emotional discomfort of a situation? Because this discomfort is a signal from a very real part of us, a part that deserves love and attention and acceptance. That part probably didn’t get the attention it needed, starting a looooonnnggg time ago. And look at the cesspool that has created, keeping you from enjoying the natural beauty of your life!
Maybe, it is time to see what happens when we hang out with our own inner cesspool.