*If you are sick and tired of hearing people tell you to “put the past behind you” or “get over it” or “move on with your life already”, I want to ensure you that this is not the message of this post.
Today, I had a small epiphany. I was thinking about what life would be like if I wasn’t sad, if I no longer carried the pain with me. In that moment, I felt a twinge of sadness about not being sad. I felt grief about living life without pain. I felt fearful about living with the faith necessary to open up my life. It was as if I might be saying goodbye to a long-term relationship, a dysfunctional relationship, but a relationship nonetheless.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the pain. I push through it. I will my way through life with gusto despite it. I want nothing more than to move past it. But I have inner parts. And I may have an inner part who isn’t ready to let go of the familiar.
There is a phrase: “the evil you know versus the evil you don’t”. I think it sums up the recovery journey well. When pain becomes familiar, letting go of that pain can cause more of it, at least at first. And recovery doesn’t feel like jumping off a cliff. It feels like jumping off multiple successive cliffs. So when faced with one more change, one more risk to take, it might feel better to go with what doesn’t feel good at all, because at least we know it. In this journey, pain may be the only thing that isn’t new.
I remember when I thought life was about creating an environment of familiarity. I thought that if nothing changed, if life was as predictable as possible, I could “survive”. I could “make it through”. I thought that was as good as life was going to get for me. I thought there was nothing more I could shoot for. If I could get through the day without a major “surprise”, it qualified as a good day.
But I have learned that this recovery journey is not about stability, familiarity and predictability. It is a rare day when I wake up without something new to consider, process or try out. And just as I get used to it, it changes. And this, apparently, is life when we choose the path of growth and recovery.
So, when I have one of those days, I can sit with my pain. I can even enjoy the familiarity of it. But then, I have to remember that the pain doesn’t have to stay forever. I can choose to feel it, let it go and move on. Of course, there will be more pain. There always is when trauma runs deep. But living in it all the time is not necessary, unless I need time with what I know.
And one day, the balance will shift. The pain will be less familiar and the freedom will be more familiar. It will bring more happiness and presence. It won’t be there all the time, but the pain will be the visitor. The pain will come, but then it will go. And that is what this journey is about. It isn’t about a momentary shift that turns our lives upside down in an instant (while that does happen). It is about moving the balance, one small change at a time, until the unfamiliar becomes the familiar, the unknown becomes the known. It is about shifting our human experience over time.
So after a while, I will know a new familiar.
And I will welcome it.
It’s interesting for me to read this, because for me the pain is very new. I’m dissociated, and so while there was pain, I didn’t feel it. The familiar is not pain for me. And so a part of the process has been accepting that there is pain, that it’s necessary to feel it, and that there is quite a lot of it. It’s not going to go away after a few days or a week or even after six months There is so much of it, in fact, that it is almost relentless. If I don’t dissociate, it is there nearly all the time. There are hours without it, at most. I’ve had a few small accidents recently and I knew I was getting better because, oh my God, it *hurt.* Things like that had never hurt that much before. i’ve really had to fight my impatience with the pain and my wishful thinking that everything can go back to “normal” soon. Nothing is ever going to go back to “normal,” because normal was numbness.
That makes so much sense. My experience has been very similar. I think it is actually an inner part that is familiar with the pain. My experiences have been mainly numbing, anxiety and depression.
The part may have only known pain and be assuming that life without pain means a return to not being able to express feelings. It’s just a thought.
In other words (in case that wasn’t clear), the pain might be assumed to be inescapable. When you talk about life without pain, the part may be assuming you mean you are going to stop listening again.
She may even think there is death without the pain. I think it is likely that she does. I am keeping this in mind as I travel this path with her.
Yes, that would be a scary thought.
I believe one of the most beautiful faces in life are those that you could never tell there was heartbreak and evil in their life just by looking at them or talking a while with them. They shine outward and inward. Their words you cannot resist. They pour out wisdom and kindness instead of what they have truly endured. <3 I mean of course eventually you might hear of their 'story' but they don't make it evident. I have met people like that. And they are AMAZING!
Imagine how many people like that we walk by everyday without even thinking about it! Because they choose to walk about in freedom. I believe they are secret hero's. 🙂 But I also believe we all can be those kind of people. Because everyone has or will go through tramas in their own life.
I know personally for me… Having a (non- religious) relationship with God has enabled me to continue to walk in freedom. Even though at times when I am alone I don't 'feel' so strong. But God's strength is always enough.
Reblogged this on Rescuing Little L and commented:
It is a brave woman that can sit with her pain. Sometimes it seems as if that’s all I do. But I will trust you on this and feel the hope again.
After just getting back to twitter
tonight & replying to a couple of ur tweets I wanted to come back to this article u wrote & respond to u. I wanted to do so
immediately when I read it,but
didn’t have the time. I want u to know how much I have (do) felt
so similarly-esp when t read ur
1st paragraph about the pain being so much a part of u (my
words-& feelings), that there is
this (surprising) feeling of of sadness when contemplating the thought of no longer being
sad. As the title of ur article
caught, to me, quite exquisitely
the ESSENCE of the dilemma:
“The Familiar Pain.” It strikes
me as odd, at my age (w 2 grown children) & “all” the work I thought I had done, that I had never spent any time-in-or out of therapy reflecting on how “comfortable” (aka familiar) my pain was to me. I know u know that I don’t mean comfortable in the positive sense, but in the way u used familiar. So ur article hit me like a huge boulder, rite in my gut. Here I’ve been working my entire life (since my teens) to recover from my childhood, with
varying degrees of effort at different times, but always having the feeling that I’m
trying to change, to grow (@
times very hard, & other times
not so hard.)
So that’s why ur article was so
powerful for me. How could this not jump out at me before
as it did the moment I read ur
words? It’s given me a lot to
reflect on & I thank u for that~
How this never rose to the surface thru all the hell I carried from childhood to
my adult life, the rage, the pain & brokenness (which of course led to broken marriages & more guilt about how it all affected my kids).
But, in truth, upon reflection-I do in fact know why. For whatever reason the time wasn’t rite-until now. So now
begins just another piece of the work: learning to REALLY
want to be happy~
Wish me strength, wisdom & perseverance-as I do to YOU & to all travelling their own journeys of deep change &
transformation.
Take Good Care,
Elizabeth
Thank you Elizabeth. You are so right. You were not ready to look at this aspect of your journey until now. I often find that readers glean from my articles what they are ready to glean. Sometimes, I even get comments about aspects of my article that I didn’t know were there and I have to go back and read it again. We get what we are ready for. I wish you strength, wisdom and perseverance as they are all needed on this journey. It sounds like you have all three. 🙂
Yes to this! It’s what it’s all about; rewiring the neuropathway for a different experience.
Personally, I have safety in the pain because I’ve learned how to defend in it. But I don’t have freedom from it. I find myself wondering what freedom tastes like, smells like, and then feeling as if even the imagining of it is too much.
Exactly! We trade safety for freedom. I love that.
This is exactly what it feels like to mourn the person I once was…the person who fell for the broken….the person who was addicted to the drama of it all….the person who thought I could change them….the person who thought changing them meant they loved me….It was very hard to look at my own faulty beliefs that made me susceptible to being treated like crap, but after all the pain, it felt great to let go of that person…
This is so beautifully said. Thank you Jackie for your courage to heal your beliefs.
I, too, feel more numbness than pain. I wonder how to let go of numbness! Maybe I can let go of the blocks to feeling- pain, joy, anything. I’m good at enduring, coping, surviving, because I don’t expect anything else to work. It’s not going to change, get better. One day looks a lot like the next. I do think, maybe, it’s not so much letting go of pain and taking on a “new identity” as just adding to the pain? Saying, yes, pain, and yes, numbness, and yes, ouch, that stubbed toe hurt, and yes, I like the color red, and yes, I liked nachos and queso, and yes, I like the feel of wind, and yes, it’s ok if the cat looks at me with kind eyes. Trying to get out of the either/or way of thinking, but using both/and. I mostly feel trapped in quicksand, that if I struggle too hard, I sink faster. Futility is more a long, slow drift to bottom – maybe change, taking on new, hanging out in the area between old familiar and new familiar – requires some anxiety/ie excitement. Adrenalin is not usually seen as my friend – in Toastmasters we reframe fear into excitement. and yes, we go hog-wild learning to ride a bike, falling over and over, but determined. But it’s exhilarating. I wish I could get back/forward to the exhilaration of mastering freedom.
You are going amazing work on yourself. The numbness is our base. It is the safe place. And we can’t and won’t pull out of it all at once. But as you get to know your controller and detach a bit from them, the numbness will lessen little by little. The futility feels awful, but if we can let it express, it does move out bit by bit. And freedom lives underneath.
So great, than you for all your good work, Elizabeth <3