How Emotional Pain Leads You to a Deeper Place of Power

Recent events continue to remind us about the stunning cost of unprocessed emotional pain.

As a neuropsychologist who treats loss and trauma, I want to offer you what I hope will be a powerful and soothing way to think about emotional pain. By emotional pain, I mean your own painful experiences of unworthiness, anxiety, numbness, hopelessness, fear, worry, alienation, and so on.

There are 2 opposing ways to consider your emotional pain.

First, your experiences of emotional pain—your feelings of unworthiness, numbness, fear, etc—are simply there to torment you. That your own body—your own brain and your own nervous system— have turned against you. There, not to aid you but to torment you while expending copious amounts of energy in the process.

The problem with this conceptualization is that it doesn't make much sense. Not biologically, logically, spiritually or evolutionarily.

The other explanation for your emotional pain is this: That your miserable experiences of emotional pain are there to set you free.

I realize this may sound counterintuitive—alarming even.

To make this clear, let's use the example of unworthiness. Unworthiness is a depressing, awful feeling that, to varying degrees, we all know.

First ask: To whom am I unworthy? In other words, who is the holder of my unworthiness?

The reflexive response is often to start talking about "them"

• "He doesn't think I'm good enough."
• "She doesn't think I'm important enough."
• "If you cared about me more, then you would..." and so on.

Very often, this is a psychological dead end, a cognitive illusion that renders you unable to ignite your sense of worth.

The most powerful person who doesn't think you're good enough, interesting enough, attractive enough, loved enough, or important enough is YOU.

Said another way, if you're feeling chronically unworthy, it's likely because there are places in your life where *you* are dividing yourself from the truth of your energy.

To understand what I mean, ask yourself the following questions: Are there often times in your life when you:

• want to say "no" but instead say "yes"?
• want to rest but instead overwork?
• want to speak up but instead keep your mouth shut?
• want to trust yourself but instead defer to others?
• want to connect, but instead retreat?

In each of these moments, you betray yourself.

While plenty of pain can be inflicted upon you—this is, for example, what various forms of abuse and assaults are—a significant amount of pain in your life comes when you abandon yourself. In these moments, you show yourself that you are unworthy of your own protection.

You show yourself that the dangerous person in the room is you.

In our own private lives and collectively as a society, we will continue to have repetitive, but superficial mental health conversations until we realize this: It does not matter if the whole world is for me when I am busy being against myself. Until I am willing to honor the truth of my emotional energy—not the part I play, or the money I make, or the job I have, or the expectations I meet—I will feel alone because I have shown myself that I already am.

I've done this work for 20+ years (or 40 depending on how you look at it). And the message I'm on this planet to deliver is this: The painful feelings you keep trying to avoid are not there to torment you.

They are there to call you home.

There is a liberation that comes when I have the courage to stand before myself and say: I have abandoned myself.

I do not find this depressing. Quite the contrary, I find this soothing because if my life—if my wholeness and my hope—were really tied up in somebody else saving me, I would be in desperate danger.

But when I shift my locus of control, I see: I am the one I have been waiting for.

#EmotionalAuthority #loss #resilience #mindsetshift #hope #traumarecovery