We spend a lot of time running away from pain. I for one hate pain…I’ve always hated pain since I was a child. I remember that I would complain about every pain I had to my mother. It could have been something small or something large, but immediately I felt discomfort I would go running to her to fix it. I remember one time I was bending my pinky finger and told my mom that “mummy I feel pain every time I bend my finger like this,” to which she quickly responded “then don’t bend it like that.”
I can understand why we don’t like pain, because often times it tells us that something is not right, that something is broken, and it can be very uncomfortable, which would lead us to run away from the pain. So I can see why pain is everyone’s least favorite subject.
I’ve been thinking about pain lately, and I’ve begun to realize that not all pain is the same. For example, have you ever cut yourself while you were slicing onions or carrots or tomatoes, or sweet potatoes. While you were so excited about what you were preparing, you nicked yourself. You may have noticed when the cut happened, or not, but you may not have really felt any pain, perhaps you would have just been upset with yourself for not being more careful. And then maybe a few minutes or a few hours later you start to feel pain in that finger… the pain is not because you just cut yourself, but it’s your body responding to the cut, protecting you, and healing you from the damage that was done to your body…
Heartbreak can be like that sometimes. Sometimes the pain and the longing can be so overwhelming, you want to do everything you can to get away from that pain, to the extent that you even consider going back to the person who caused the pain in the first place, just so you can get some temporary relief. But what you don’t understand is that the pain is not telling you that you are dying, but instead it is telling you that you are healing. It is telling you that something had caused damage to your body, to your being, and now you are going through the process of healing from it. Now when you put that into perspective you may realize that the pain is not as bad as it seems, or that you have the energy to survive the pain no matter how bad it is, because afterall it is only temporary.
It’s up to you to realize that this pain is evidence of the healing that is going on within you, and the creation of a new and stronger you that will be the result of your experiences. It’s up to you to decided whether you will try to “dull” the pain, and then get into something more harmful and painful to you, or whether you will just face the pain for what it is and learn and grow from it, because in the end you can win – if you choose to.
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