Doctor: 'How may I help you?'
Patient: 'I am in pain for some time now. I don't know what is WRONG with me but I am NOT FEELING OK!'
Doctor: 'No problem, you need some painkillers. I will give you a prescription. Start taking them today and you should feel better soon. Come back if the pain doesn't go away.'
Patient returns few months later: 'The pills you gave me helped initially, but I am starting to feel the pain again.'
Doctor: 'OK, no problem, let's try stronger painkillers…'
Would you think the doctor is mad for medicating someone like that, relieving just the symptoms, not investigating the SOURCE of pain? How long has this patient got to suffer, till someone finds where and WHY he/she is hurting?
It would be undeniable neglect. Dangerous. Plain WRONG!
...if our pain was PHYSICAL! But when it is EMOTIONAL pain, sadly, this is regular practice.
We get prescribed anti-anxiety, anti-depressants, sleeping pills to numb our pain, but no one really bothers searching to find out WHY we are hurting! Nor will anyone explain the REAL repercussions of taking this medication.
We ALL suffer emotionally. Most of us greatly in fact due to our conditioning. We carry our childhood emotional wounds around our whole life. They make us insecure. We live many concepts following our parent's footsteps, falsely believing that we are somehow inadequate, imperfect. And this gets us in all sort of trouble and drama at home, at school/work, and in relationships.
THIS in fact is the root of all evil, negativity, darkness, or whatever you like to call it. Because if all of us GENUINELY BELIEVED we are just perfect, that we are just fine as we are, we would not need to prove anything to anyone, nor ourselves. We would not need to please others to gain their approval. We would never try to control another to feel more powerful. We would not put others down, criticised and judged them, to feel better about our 'little Self'. We would certainly not cause them pain, if we weren't hurting ourselves, thinking they deserve it as much we do. 'If I suffer, you will too’ is what we go by...
I am sure we would all agree that to eliminate darkness from a room we need to let the light in. So why are we so crazy, thinking that we can eliminate darkness with darkness in our lives? That we can fight hurt with hurt??
You know why this pain-for-pain, tooth-for-tooth exchange is happening, don’t you? Because we don't act consciously. We act automatically, driven by our pain unconsciously. Only those who are somehow damaged can cause damage.
Know that the more you AWAKEN to your pain the better you can attend to YOUR wounds, and actually HEAL! Instead of wasting your precious energy on wounding others.
Those of us who experience a lot of emotional pain on daily basis since childhood fall (reliably at some point) into depression. Combined with anxiety or/and panic attacks, aggressive and resigned, we start self-medicating with alcohol, over the counter sleeping pills or even illegal recreational drugs. OR we see our doctor who will prescribe legal drugs with the exact same effect:
Emotional dissociation. We STOP FEELING, because feeling causes us pain...
The cycle goes like this: our conditioning causing us being insecure - we falsely believe we are not good or enough, feeling BAD about ourselves - we are hurting and fall ‘unconscious’ (not understanding that we are hurting yet acting out of our pain) - we hurt others in line with what we believe about ourselves - we feel even worse about ourselves because deep down we are not happy - we hurt others unknowingly further, blinded by our pain - we cannot bear it any longer so we numb - we get disconnected from our pain, but also from ourselves and OUR FEEDBACK, from the good feelings... from life.
The illusion of numbing ourselves is that we stop hurting. No, we DON'T. We are still hurting, and in time this is killing our Soul!
Our Soul is what makes us feel deeply fulfilled, realised, whole, and ALIVE. And we can only be that if we FEEL. But when we kill our pain we also kill what keeps us truly alive, what gives us the ability to feel happy.
Our soul speaks to us through the voice of our intuition, which will speak whenever we go against ourselves. We will feel somehow 'off', strange, not ok deep down, and certainly NOT happy. We will feel emotionally 'disjointed' as our mind wishes to go in one direction, and our soul in another. Our discomfort, which in time turns into real pain, is there to warn us against the damage we cause to ourselves. So by numbing we basically sign a disclaimer for a life support (minus the machine), living in a state of EMOTIONAL COMA...
Is it necessary? Are we really that scared to see who we truly are, and aren't? We are not fighting others, or the stress in our lives, but our own FEAR...
All we need to do is 1/ to feel our fear of feeling like a failure, as this will allow us 2/ to accept we have a problem! Only then 3/ we can get to know our pain, and 3/ start healing those childhood wounds by breaking down our insecurities and false beliefs we hold about ourselves. Yes, the process hurts, but for me it was more like a corrective operation with a lengthy recovery :) It was well worth overcoming my fear of, and resistance to, making necessary changes.
Understandably, our Inner Child is scared of pain having experienced it before. But we can assure him/her that it is just an unavoidable part of the process, which will make us feel whole lot better when its over. That otherwise we remain handicapped, 'emotionally disfigured', unable to live the life we absolutely deserve...
Thank you for reading. If my article contributed to understanding yourself, please be generous and share it with others.
Copyright © 2016 Michaela Patel