Lately, I have watched multiple people that I care about go through some stuff that has been scary, painful, or all of the above. Some of these situations have been due to external factors beyond their control. Some are, I believe, born of years of hurt that has compounded to the point where one’s demons are no longer merely whispering in my loved ones’ ears. When the bottom falls out and it all hits the fan, it can feel like you are trying to escape a complex maze in the pitch black of night. You believe (or fear) that there are monsters and/or pitfalls along each path but you don’t know how to anticipate them or even see them until it may be too late.
Not having the information we need to clearly envision our future and/or not being able to control the outcome can be paralyzing. If you are anything like me, you also know the heart wrenching feeling of helplessness as you watch someone you care about undergo such torment and there is nothing you can do to take their pain away. I’ve been on both sides of the coin in my life. I know that everyone’s experience is different and I don’t presume to know what each person feels or needs. For what it’s worth, however, I do think there are some things that are universally true and that may be helpful to remember as we go through times of darkness. These are the things that I wish I had known much earlier on for if it were possible I would certainly write a letter to my younger self so that she could perhaps navigate the darkness with more grace or at the very least, with less fear. Before moving on to concepts that can help us through what can seem like torture, I think its important to first explore why we are in such pain in the first place.
The Purpose of Pain (aka, How Our Personal Demons are Born)
Let me acknowledge that going through something like this sucks- and that is a huge understatement. It can be confusing, denigrating, mortifying, traumatic and terrifying beyond words. For those of you reading that are currently in this situation, whatever is causing your pain, I am so sorry that you are having to go through this. Here’s the thing about pain-as author John Green asserts, it demands to be felt. As much as I hate to quote a popular young adult novel, it’s true. But more than demanding to be felt, it demands to be seen, acknowledged, and HEARD. It’s like being on fire. Our first instinct is to run, to make it go away but that only feeds the flame and makes it worse. The same is true when our body is ablaze with pain. I don’t think that there is one person in this life that I have ever met who could unequivocally tell me that running from their pain or pretending it didn’t exist made it go away. If anything, everyone I know who has tried that tactic has found that it eventually blows up in their face in one hell of an explosion.
Pain is often misunderstood. Rather than being an intentional entity of torment, it is a messenger and a teacher. Just like a physical pain tells us that something is wrong in our body and compels us to diagnose what is wrong and administer some sort of remedy, emotional pain sheds a light on the pieces of our heart and soul that need our tender loving care. It can compel us to take the time that we need to heal, grieve, and be gentle with ourselves. It forces us to pay attention to those things which no longer serve us. It sheds a light on the cracks in ourselves and our lives that, if left up to us, would go unnoticed. Often times, the thing that we think is causing our pain is actually one more reminder of a deeper pain that we may have incurred much earlier in our lives but which has gone unaddressed.
I kind of think of it like a child. When we go through any kind of trauma in our lives-big or small- it’s like a piece of our heart gets stuck there. When the rest of our body, mind and soul moves on, this aggrieved piece can’t because it hasn’t been allowed to express itself fully and fulfill its purpose. So this uncertain and injured piece of us, like a child, sees that it is being left behind and it gets scared. At first, it whispers to us ever so softly, “Come back.”
But whispers are easy to ignore. Pretty soon we accumulate more and more pain and it globs on to this first broken piece until eventually it transforms and our personal demons are born. Each time we ignore it, it becomes bigger, stronger, and LOUDER. The more we run, the more it will chase us. If we don’t acknowledge its existence and listen to what it has to tell us, eventually it will back us into a corner, where we are at its mercy as it launches a screaming, angry and possibly destructive tirade. Often at its core is a part of us that desires to not only be acknowledged and validated but to be able to access and receive unconditional love.
The irony of this is that once our demons attain enough influence because we have repeatedly refused to give them their due, they begin to get scared that they will lose their subtle yet significant power over us. History has shown us that systems in power will do anything (whether consciously or not) to remain in power. Overthrowing ingrained systems and governments which no longer work is certainly possible, but it is not an easy task and does not happen without pain and loss of some sort. The same is true for our demons.
So they convince us that the only way to feel better, hold on to those people and things which we most covet, and move forward is to deny their origins. Yet by doing so, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy and do the very thing which caused our problems to begin with, thus resulting in a potential eventual loss of all of the things and people we love. The pain intensifies, and we then often seek ineffective and sometimes dangerous, hurtful, or destructive ways to evade the pain and quiet the thoughts that taunt us. These choices make us feel even more ashamed, embarrassed, or unworthy. With each turn of this cycle, our demons get stronger, and we get even weaker. Tricky little buggers aren’t they?
The only way to diminish the power of our demons and the power of our pain is to feel it, listen to it, explore it and figure out what is at its core. We cannot remove a burden from our shoulders if we don’t first acknowledge that it exists. Peeling away the layers of illusion that we put in place to protect us is so incredibly daunting, to the point that it often feels impossible. But each time we do, the monster that towers over us and insidiously tells us that we aren’t worthy or good enough in some way inevitably becomes insubstantial. Once we have learned –truly learned- from what the pain has to teach us, it transforms in a spectrum from simply lessening its grip to completely vanishing. I know this may be hard to believe, but I can tell you that in every battle that I have ever seen between the heart and the ego (where our demons most often dwell), when equal investment and power is given to the heart and when the person wielding that power is brave enough to honestly assess what led to this war, the heart always prevails. In order for this to happen, you need to release the pain, release the lies that you told yourself about yourself, and stop believing that your choices have somehow mitigated your value as a human being.
I will leave you with those ideas to chew on. Next week, I will share some concepts that can help us as we attempt to slay the dragon that is our pain and/or if we find ourselves watching our loved ones having to battle their demons.