On Pain: Why We Look Away & How to Break this Habit
The short answer is we try to avoid pain because it hurts. It is normal to want to avoid something that hurts and therefore individuals can develop habits of trying to avoid looking at or feeling pain under the pretense of believing they are protecting themselves. In addition, it can feel easier in the moment to look away rather than look directly at the source of pain. While it is natural to want to avoid pain, it is not always conducive to actually healing it.
Think of how you might approach or tend to a wound or injury. For muscle wounds or painful injuries, for example, RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) is the recommend treatment approach by sports medicine doctors. They do not recommend that you just avoid or ignore it. Can you ignore the injury and not take the appropriate mending steps? Yes, of course. But most professionals in this field of medicine will tell you that this can take more time to heal and, worse, sometimes actually results in an even more harmful injury. This means that by avoiding or ignoring the injury it could actually result in an even more devastating injury. Let that sink in. On the other hand, by tending to, paying attention, and caring for your injury, the outcome is likely to result in healing.
This is the same with emotional pain - and not just ours but also collective pains (insert: COVID19, racism, injustice, mental health, etc). It may seem harder to do the actual work of going within and seeing the raw pain and tending to it. But what does happen when we actually do dive in? When we see others deep struggle and also are able to see our own? What happens when we bear witness to pain? Why is it so important to do the work? Because only when we show up for ourselves and others can we truly heal the wounds. Only when we tend to and start to mend ruptures do we grow.
Sure, you might be able to avoid the pain for awhile, but ultimately avoiding it all together doesn’t make it go away. In fact, it can make it even harder in the long-run. This is because while you might be able to suppress it for some time on the conscious level it likely will continue to live on the somatic level in your body. This can then surface in other ways, such as in negatively impacting your sleep, feelings, energy levels, eating habits, and relationships.
So, what if instead of looking away from pain we look toward it and use it as an anchor for how we are doing. What if we use its presence as a sign of something going on within us that needs to be nurtured, tended to, observed, and cared for? What if we invite feeling into our every day life, allow it to move us and to move through us, so that we can become authentically aligned humans who show up this way to both our relationships and to society as a whole with that same level of expectation and care? Well, we might actually start healing.
The world is grieving on multiple levels and is in a whole lot of pain right now. It is likely that you are experiencing, or have experienced, some pain along the way as well. If you can, start to tune in to your pain. Comfort and tend to it, like you would your closest friend. It might sound scary at first, sure, but trust me you (and the world) are deserving of the attention and care your pain is asking for. Also remember that if you’re needing additional support, therapy can serve as a space for you when you are ready.