Everyone is carrying pain. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your background looks like. You can have come up with a family that struggled financially or was wealthy and loving–either way, you will have struggles and pains that make you suffer.
Often, people find ways to discount their suffering. They make excuses for their pain and try to talk themselves out of the idea that it’s real and really affecting them. For example, one might use comparison to try to belittle their pain. They might say, “Sure, my Mom was emotionally abusive, but at least she wasn’t physically abusive.”
That logic doesn’t square. If you’ve been starving for ten days, pointing to someone next to you that’s been starving for eleven days doesn’t make you any less hungry.
Suffering is universal. It comes with life, no matter what your path has been. Ignoring pains, large and small, will only create internal pressure, which forces emotions out in drastic ways like explosive anger, addiction, and self-disconnection.
Confronting that truth is the only way to heal. However, since people live with pain throughout their lives, it takes on a sense of normalcy. People get “used” to their internal suffering because it’s all they’ve ever known. So therefore, they think that’s “what life is.”
These pains live as quiet, heavy, sinking feelings that rise in the stomach and chest. You know them when they appear, but they seem vague and unclear. It’s like feeling that you’re standing under a shadow without being able to tell what’s casting it.
Feelings like these seem vague because you haven’t named them–an incredibly valuable practice.
When you name your pain, you give it shape and definition. Doing so helps clarify what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. This is the first step of processing it and letting it go.
For example:
Let’s say you feel a painful emotion arise whenever you discuss finances with your partner. You might feel that feeling and try to block it out or come up with a reason to disengage from the conversation so you can avoid the pain altogether.
Instead of doing that, acknowledge the feeling. Ask it what it wants. Then start labeling it with whatever words first come to mind.
Say the first things that came to mind in this example are:
“Fear. Insecurity. Low Self-Worth. Vulnerability.”
Now you’ve given shape to that pain and understand it more clearly. It’s no longer a cloud of darkness. It’s a defined set of connected emotions.
Labeling your emotions gives you a road map to understand why you feel the way you do. In this case, you might look at those labels and realize that you feel those things because you grew up in a financially unstable environment–even though you’re financially secure now.
Having this insight can help you create space around that feeling. You can understand that the undefined negative emotions were conditioned feelings from the past and have nothing to do with who you are or what your life is like in the present. Then, armed with that insightful knowledge, you can apply it the next time you speak to your partner about finances, let that feeling go, and approach the conversation while being grounded in the present moment.
You can label any types of emotional pain that arise in your life. No matter what you’re dealing with, giving shape and clarity to your suffering is how you understand yourself more clearly. When you do, you can reflect, reset, come to the present, and mindfully set your pain free–because, through labeling, you actually know what it is you’re trying to let go.
That’s all for today, friend.
Much love.
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I was raised in the 60’s by a mother that married early to get away from home and then lost her first child to illness at 6 years old. Since that is “the worst thing that can happen” everything else for her following children was met with “life’s not fair” and “at least you’ve got...” So the phrase “emotionally abusive but not physically” really caught me. Thanks for this article, at age 70 I need to remind myself to name my emotion.
I love this. It touches on two main points I feel are important to personal development.
1: Being comfortable with one's uncomfort.
2: Nearly all power is derived in language, and one's ability to define themselves and their experiences in an authentic way gives access to power over it.