Avoiding your pain only prolongs it

In my experience avoiding my pain only prolongs it. The simple, but certainly not easy, act of feeling pain helps you through it. But the problem is we often fear that if we felt our pain, it would never end and/or it might swallow us up, and so we run. We run in many different ways and in many different directions. But the ways and the directions don’t matter, they only serve as a smokescreen as to what’s really going on.

Self-regulation is the ability to handle all of our emotions. But self regulation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, we need to have been taught and shown how to regulate our emotions, particularly difficult emotions, or what might be termed negative emotions. Our care givers are our most important and influential teachers in this regard. They show us how they handle their emotions and we learn from them. If they can handle their emotions, they can then provide a safe container for us to feel our emotions, that is, they co-regulate us. We learn self regulation from co-regulation.

Of course this is the ideal situation and many of us didn’t have that, not only for reasons of abuse and neglect but also because very few of our parents were taught how to self regulate by their parents. We’re mostly living in an emotionally illiterate world where we divide emotions into positive and negative and so most of us are emotionally constipated, our barrels are full of unprocessed stuff which makes us feel like crap.

The important thing is that you find a way through, not under, over or any other way except through. The way for each of us will be different, find what path feels true and right for you.