I was talking to a client today about how to embrace and process emotional pain when it inevitably comes, as an alternative to resisting, suppressing, numbing, reacting, etc. It's actually a really tangible, concrete, and especially a LEARNABLE skill, so I wanted to share how I broke it down.
Embracing pain is almost purely a physical act. If you look at what pain is, it turns out that it’s a collection of really intense sensations in your body. It can feel like it fills up the entire universe, but the only place it’s actually happening is inside your body.
Our normal human instinct is to resist these sensations. We tighten our muscles, shorten and quicken our breathing, focus our attention in our thoughts (and not in our bodies), and attempt to energetically push the sensations down or out of the body.
So embracing pain is about reversing these reflexes: intentionally softening all of the muscles, allowing yourself to go limp, slowing and deepening your breathing, keeping your attention and awareness down in the body. These things are probably going to intensify the sensations at first, so there also needs to be this sense of surrendering to it all.
It might feel like they're twisting your guts, or like you have acid in your veins, or like you're being electrocuted. Awful as that is, they are still just sensations, they can’t damage or injure you.
Often we suppress the sensations because we are afraid that they will just take us over, make us do things we’ll regret, or never go away. But the reality is that your body is an energy and sensation processing machine. If you go limp and surrender, they will run their course through your body, like an energetic digestive system, and that process itself will metabolize, resolve, and complete them.
There really is a beginning, middle, and end to this process. Most folks get this instinctively when it comes to grieving the death of a loved one. It’s so final and undeniable that there’s just no hope of escaping it. We know that we have to just give in to the “waves” whenever they come for us.
The sensations and emotions don't last forever when they're allowed, but they could last your whole life long if they're compressed into a box of resistance (and that turns into mental, emotional, and physical health problems later).
As you practice embracing pain, you learnin to surf these intense waves of sensation gracefully, rather than getting tossed about and dragged along the sand.
It's like you've been struck by lightning, and all you can do is allow the electricity to flow through you and down into the Earth, knowing that you will absolutely fry yourself if you resist it.
And when you start to get really good at this, you can find yourself in moments where you would normally get triggered out of your mind, and find yourself instinctively relaxing into all the intense sensations, letting them flow through you and out of you, instead of trying to get away from them by suppressing them into yourself or reacting at the other person.
