Think of a situation that has caused you a great deal of emotional pain. It could be from a situation created from your own choices and decisions, or the actions of someone else whom you had no control over. How did you respond?People generally respond to emotional pain by altering (changing) their thinking, feelings and acting in one of three ways.Moving—Towards, Away, or AgainstYou can react in one of three ways, TOWARDS, AWAY, or AGAINST, and you react in these three ways with regard to YOURSELF, OTHER PEOPLE, and GOD (or your own understanding of spirituality).TowardsWhen you hurt, and move towards the hurt, it is working through your problems in an attempt to solve them. It is reflecting on your problems yourself in an attempt to arrive at a solution. It is talking over your problems with another person or people and obtaining outside support, and it is letting go of your fears and pride and reaching out to the eternal, the spiritual or God (for those who believe in God).Towards yourself is thinking about the situation, trying to figure out a solution, acknowledging that you hurt, and are unhappy.Towards others is reaching out to someone else. It is also talking about your problems with a friend or someone else that you trust. It is sharing your pain and there by reducing it, modifying it and letting it go.Moving towards God is praying that some how and in some way things will get better. It is finding that faith and hope from deep within that you will be ok, because you are worthy as a person and deserve to be loved and to have a good life. Being happy is not the absence of emotional pain in your life, it is learning to grow from it. Because I have hurt deeply in my life, I truly appreciate my life when it is really good.AwayThis is moving away from yourself – by drug use or trying to run away from or hide from your problems. You cannot run away from yourself – even someone who gets drunk or high eventually wakes up or comes down.Moving away from others, is not dealing with the person or people who are causing you pain. It is allowing someone else to hurt you, and possibly hurt others. It is also moving away from your support system or people who can help you. Ultimately most substance users – end up alone, in their own little world, or feeling like no one can ever understand what you are going through. Sometimes people need to be confronted with the fact that their behavior is hurting other people. So, talking to those who have caused you pain – and telling them how you feel, can only be a good thing. You cannot guarantee how they will respond, but at least you are standing up for yourself.Moving away from God, is hiding from your own spiritual nature. It is trying to hide from that place where your poetry flows, and you can find peace in your life. Reach out to the eternal – that which is greater than all of us, which we do not understand, but believe that “one day,” we will. AgainstThese are the things that you do to hurt yourself, other people or your relationship with God (your sense of spirituality). Such as: drug use, self-abuse, putting yourself down in your own thoughts, the taking on the lies that someone else might say and believing them. Reject the lies! Believe that you have worth, and that you life is special. Use all the crap that you have been through to turn around and help others. Moving against others, is doing or saying things to hurt others, like stealing, vandalism, etc. Moving against God, is just blaming God or other people for what is going on is your life. No one said life was fair, but that is no reason to feel sorry for yourself for the rest of your life. Do not let your problems hold you back from being the best you can be!So how do you respond?Once you have thought about how you tend to respond now… Have you always responded to painful situations in your life this way? Or has you strategy and ability to respond to painful situations changed?Why is it unhealthy to block out (not deal with) your emotional pain?The people who can mentally burry things and NOT have it bother them, are often called psychopaths. I worked with one teen boy for nine months, who brutally axe murdered both his parents. Fairly early on, I asked him how he could live with himself – knowing what he had done. With a smile on his face he said: “Simple, I just choose not to think about it.” Guess what I got him to do for the next nine months? Think about it!If he was to ever rejoin society (even after 11 years. He is out now), he needed to feel remorse for what he had done. He needed to experience the emotional pain in a deep and personal way almost to the level that he had caused his parents (their death). He also needed to get in touch with the earliest pain in his life that drove him to act as he did – and work through that pain.We are all capable of Helping and HarmFinally, he needed to see himself as both a victim, and killer, and learn to forgive both himself and others. I believe that he left jail as a sincere born again Christian – dedicating the rest of his life to service work.The two years I spent specializing in working with teen murders (over a dozen of them), was one of the toughest periods of my life. It was also one of the times where my own spiritual life was most challenged—yet was at its best. |
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