Into every life, pain must come. It may come from any number of sources: from loss, from betrayal, even from growth. Regardless of where it originates, the general outlines of the experience are universal. Foremost, we feel what we recognize as emotional pain. Heartache settles on us like a heaviness that we can’t shrug off, that no amount of cheerful banter or amusing distractions can unseat. Our expressions remain blank, our eyes reflect a kind of lifeless dullness, in conversation, our voices lack sparkle. Although there are many similarities, pain is not the same as clinical depression. Unlike depression, emotional pain has a recognizable source. We can pinpoint why and where we are hurting.
Whether or not we recognize it, each of us constitutes an organic whole. We can’t somehow separate out our emotional pain from our physical being, our mental acuity, and our spiritual focus. When painful emotions overtake us, we can expect to experience physical discomfort (that ‘heartache’ again), mental dullness or confusion, and spiritual aridity. The entirety of our personhood goes into retreat from a condition we might call ‘feelings deprivation.’ Pain is big. It’s so big that it fills our inner space to the breaking point. It leaves no room for anything else. Ordinarily, we have room for many emotions at the same time: joy, excitement, anticipation, intimacy can all together share the same emotional space and still leave room for more, like anxiety or fear. Not so with pain. When it settles in, there’s no room left for any other feelings. We are joy-deprived. What can we do then?
Emotional pain, stretching our endurance to the breaking point, needs to be released. It needs to be let out and given its freedom. So long as we keep it pent up inside, it festers and begins to consume all our resources: our energy, our attention, our time. Emotional pain is corrosive. So long as it’s kept captive, it eats its host alive from the inside out. The ‘good news’ is that no powerful emotion (and this is no doubt the most powerful of all) can be sustained indefinitely. Eventually, even pain will wear itself out and go numb in time. However, while we’re waiting it out, real damage may be done to our organism. What price are we willing pay in terms of stress and in lost productivity while we wait for our feelings to subside? And what about the emotional cost? Even after the sharpness of pain and anger have subsided, they can still remain sullenly in the background, blocking out the emotions that we long to experience again, like joy, enthusiasm, and intimacy.
We can speed up the healing process. There are a number of approaches we can take, like talking openly and honestly with a close confidant or a therapist or mentor. Letting other people know who you are and what you’re going through is an essential part of the healing process. It’s at least one step beyond the limits of the playground of your own mind: a very dangerous place to spend unsupervised time, I’m afraid. And yet, merely talking about how you feel, difficult as it may be, has drawbacks. If you’ve been lying to yourself or deluding yourself about what’s been going on, you may succeed in convincing others to join you in your distorted view of the facts. After all, if you’ve convinced yourself of the truth of your illusion, how hard will it be to convince others? True, a very perceptive person who knows you intimately may call you on your ‘stuff,’ but, maybe not. There is a better way.
If you’re experiencing emotional pain and you’re not journaling, you should be. Thinking and talking employ similar regions of the brain (where that dangerous mental playground can be found). Writing engages different mental faculties and generates electrochemical changes. It’s much harder to lie on paper, where, no sooner have you set the words down, they stand as not-so-silent witnesses against you. Did you ever wonder why ancient societies (like the Babylonians and Hebrews) carved their laws on stone tablets? Once carved, those tablets stood as witnesses against the very people who carved them. That’s the magic of the written word. Once you’ve written it, you no longer own it. It becomes the exclusive property of the reader. If s/he doesn’t understand what you meant, or, for some reason misinterprets your meaning, that’s just too bad: it’s theirs to do with as they choose.
Writing creates a mystical dialog between the writer and the reader. This remains true even when the writer and reader are physically the same person but separated into two by the passage of time (no matter how short). The writer remains locked in the past, powerless to influence her/his work in any way. The reader lives in the flow of the present, deriving meaning from what s/he reads not only by absorbing whatever experience the writer has entombed in the words, but also creating new meanings by means of the interplay of the words and her/his own experience. That’s why foundational texts (like the religious Scriptures) can be read over and over again, and, each time, the reader will learn something new. Your writings not only stand as a witness to the person you were, they also generate a brand new truth every time they are read even if the original text was born in self-delusion. In time, a perceptive reader (even when the reader and the writer were the same person) will discern what is honest and true from what was illusion.
By writing from within your emotional pain, and writing out your emotional pain, you give yourself the gift not only of emotional expression, but also of objectivity. By appearing in words, the cycle of self-deception and self-perpetuation that feeds the emotional pain can be broken. You not only experience the catharsis of pouring your emotionality out in an expression that’s both perfectly safe and uniquely yours, you also give yourself the gift of being able to resonate with what you’ve written, saying at one time, “this is so true,” and at another, “I was kidding myself.” As it emerges, your pain begins to gain definition and to retreat within much more manageable boundaries. It no longer expands wildly, threatening to overwhelm you. You get to choose what aspects of it to own, and which to dismiss as irrelevant to the person you are now, as compared with the person you were when you wrote those words . . . even if the time that has passed is only a few minutes. Change never pauses to take a break. That’s why, “This, too, shall pass.” Do you want to ride out the pain? Then write out the pain! It’s as simple as that.
See, I feel better already!
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown
Tags: anger, change, emotional pain, emotions, fear, journaling, midlife, Midlife Mastery, pain, Spirituality
June 5th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
About six months ago I did something which was truly awful.
About six months earlier, a year ago, just after my Dad had died, my ex-wife began to seek modification of the child support order for our daughter, seeking a great deal more money. In the immediate aftermath of that, I began drinking frequently in a misguided attempt to kill the pain and hurt that I had as a result of feeling manipulated by my ex-wife. It’s worth mentioning, I think, that after my divorce, I had adopted my ex-wife’s son because he wished to live with me rather than her. In any event, on one such occasion of drinking, I spoke with my ex-girlfriend, Peggy, on the phone while enraged about my ex-wife. She came over to my house next day and told me she could no longer be with me (we’d been together just over ten years then) as I had a history of drinking when angry (usually about my ex-wife) and upsetting her with my rants. I was very hurt and now even angrier. But I took it as best I could and departed on a long-planned trip to California to see my family. While on the drive out I stopped and made frantic attempts to reach Peggy which I eventually did. I persuaded her to return to the relationship, saying I would seek counseling and stop drinking.
When I returned home (S. Dakota) I succeeded in not drinking for about 2 mos. I tried to find a suitable therapist with the advice of a friend who is himself of a therapist but such are hard to find hereabouts and I never did get into therapy. In any event, overwhelmed by the mounting emotional and legal battle surrounding the support issue, I began drinking again.
Finally, in early December, 2009, just receiving word from my attorney about the income disparity between me and my ex-wife (she makes far more money than I), Peggy arrived for dinner. I (not drinking) began ranting about the situation and in the course of doing so, slammed down a pot lid (I was preparing dinner) and tossed it across the room (at no one!). Peggy arose and said “I’m leaving now” and with that left me watching, hurt, angry, paralyzed, in stunned silence. I began drinking more or less immediately and continued on through the night into the next morning, fuming angrily about having been “abandoned” in my distress. I left Peggy an angry message of “Fuck you!” on her work phone which I immediately regretted. We spoke the next evening, Thursday, on the phone and she was icy in her response to me and I knew she was about to break up with me again but nothing was said about the matter. She said she would speak with me on Friday. I took up drinking again.
In order to evade the axe blow I stayed out all day Friday and drank. When I came home, I called Peggy and she said that she was in fact breaking things off again and would not be going with me to California as planned. I asked her to please let my mother know and to have no further contact with my children. She said that my son (25) was an adult and could make up his own mind about what sort of contact he wanted with her. We hung up. I immediately called back and started angrily to recount occasions in the past when I had held our relationship together. She said “I’m hanging up now” and did so. I drove to her house to see her but she had taken off to evade me. And then I got very much uglier and angrier. I took note of all the things that I had made for and given her over the almost eleven years we’d been together, things which she had put out as a special display for her sister who had recently visited and become enraged. And I began to break those things, cards I had painted for her for Valentine’s Day, pictures I had had framed for her, etc., lots of things. I took out of her closet many of the dresses and blouses which I had given her over the years. Took from her bookshelves volumes of poetry I had given her, other books. Took from her bathroom necklaces of beads and shells I had made for her. I threw all these things away. Then, in remorse and intense pain, I began to clean up the damage, albeit ineffectually. I went home and drank. An re-inflated my rage. I went to my shed and got my chain saw and returned to her house. I sawed cleanly in half a seat-swing I had made for her porch. I went home, collapsed from drink and exhaustion. I arose three or so hours later and began a plea for help to all who would listen which continues to this day, hour and minute, not quite six month later.
I am so desperately alone in this pain.
June 6th, 2010 at 10:26 am
[...] on another of my blogs: Midlife Matters, by a fellow named Richard. You can find his comment here: http://midlifemaster.net/2010/02/writing-out-the-pain/#comment-562. With apologies to Richard, his comments can serve as a powerful example to all of us of the [...]
June 6th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
[...] on another of my blogs: Midlife Matters, by a fellow named Richard. You can find his comment here: http://midlifemaster.net/2010/02/writing-out-the-pain/#comment-562. With apologies to Richard, his comments can serve as a powerful example to all of us of the [...]