What are you thankful for today? :-) I have some many things to be thankful, I sometimes have a hard time picking one to share - even in my down days, when I sit an think or make a list of what I can be grateful, I realize how truly blessed my life has been. There’s nothing better to lift my spirit. Even if the sad day doesn’t really go away, I have a touchstone of gratefulness to remind me that good things DO happen. Today, I’m thankful (again and again) for my son. He’s such a sweetheart. I can ask him to do anything, and he will do it, or try to do it. He may not always take initiative, but his willingness is an example to me to be more open to helping others when they need help.
So I wrote a little bit about control. I wanted to jump into archetypes and get back to telling stories, but I saw so much about the topic of pain over the past couple of days, I wanted to address that before I move into storytelling. SO, I thought about control, and why we try to maintain a sense of control, and what I’d been reading/seeing about pain. In my mind, control and pain are connected. Our brains translate pain to help keep us safe - genetically, safety and less pain means survival.When we can control our environment, we reduce the risk of pain and increase our chances of survival. In that way, control is strongly related to pain. As far as keeping our physical bodies safe, this is very normal. I believe we can also apply this desire to control and reduce pain to our relationships.
First, I want you to know that fear and anxiety are absolutely normal reactions to pain - those reactions keep us from experiencing more pain. They are our bodies’ ways of keeping us safe. For instance, when we burn our hands on a stove, we fear touching the stove again so we can avoid the pain of the burn. Our emotional pain triggers the same response in our psyche. The problem is that our reaction to emotional pain can prevent us from achieving what we really want - connection with others. Our actions following a painful emotional episode can lead us into nasty circles of sabotage and unhealthy behavior, leaving us lost in the forest of our reactions without really understanding how we’ve created our own personal “pain loop.”
Here are some thoughts on our reactions to a painful experience:
1. We want the pain to go away - we don’t want to feel it.
Recognize that our actions during the pain are usually an attempt to dull the pain (addiction). We want to find something to fill our mind so we don’t have to notice the pain - something to numb the pain. What would happen if we simply accepted there is pain in our lives? Why is it wrong to feel pain? Doesn’t that mean that we cared about something, and whatever it was we cared about is over? Who’s saying the pain shouldn’t be there?
2. We want to blame someone else for causing our pain.
What often happens when we come out of a painful circumstance is that we end up focusing on what other parties did to us. This reduces our responsibility for being in the circumstance. We feel better because the blaming takes the place of feeling the pain - it helps numb the pain. Some of us are addicted to blaming others for anything bad we experience. The blaming helps us feel in control of what happened. However, the other person or people in the circumstance didn’t do TO us. No. Someone did something - period. We choose to make it about ourselves. We don’t have to be around actions we can’t tolerate and that is many times painful because we care about the person who’s actions are intolerable to us. But our personal pain comes from deciding that someone “shouldn’t” be acting that way around us. What if we could let go of thinking that someone “should” be acting a certain way, and when he/she doesn’t act that way, we could then not take it personally? Really, we can only speak our mind about how we think someone should behave, but we can’t control how another person will act. Those actions are solely their own actions, and really have very little to do with us.
3. Society conditions us that we must constantly be happy.
Society conditions us to believe that it’s better to be in a relationship - that we’re incomplete without someone else. Have you ever heard anyone ask people in a relationship why they aren’t single? LOL! We are conditioned to think we need another person to compete us. We don’t NEED someone to be happy - and what a lot of pressure to put on another person… Needing someone to “complete” fills an addiction and allows us avoid confronting ourselves.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes and lecture about the Life-Death-Life cycle of our lives. Like our day begins, comes to a zenith, and ends, the patterns and paths of our lives begin, rise, and come to an end. Through the endings, a new opportunity to begin anew appears. Seeds are planted, grow, harvested from the dying plant, and consumed; or seeds are planted, grown, harvested from the dying plant, and saved to plant for the new crop. In our religions, we see the birth/death/rebirth motif play out. Death, physical or metaphorical, isn’t a pleasant experience. To avoid it means to avoid what is an essential part of our human nature. Understanding that pain is a natural part of this process, feeling that pain, marking the place in our lives where we felt the pain, then choosing to grow past it, are all ways to help us cope with the cycle of our lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment