Processing Pain – 8 Steps to Help You Through It

When you process pain, you’re choosing to feel pain “on purpose.”

Say what?! Why on earth would you want to do that?!

Because here’s the thing, pain doesn’t go away when you avoid it. It just gets shoved to the side and then stews and festers there in the background. And if you leave it long enough, it can end up seeping out into every other aspect of your life so that your always creating this low grade unease and anxiety.

No, this is not how we live life anymore. The goal is to process and allow pain now instead of stockpiling it for later.

And you do that by actively letting it in instead of trying to escape the pain with pleasure (food, alcohol, media).

Here are eight helpful steps to break this process down:

1. Allow the feeling to be in your body. You can say in your mind “I am processing disappointment.”

2. Notice any desire to react, resist and avoid. Just let the desire be there without acting on it.

3. Acknowledge that this feeling is part of being human. Allow it to be there and notice the thoughts that increase it.

4. Write down your thoughts as they come up. Notice how they affect the feeling.

5. Don’t try to change your thoughts yet. You have to process the feeling first before you’re ready to think something different.

6. Own your pain and that you are the one causing it with your thoughts, and that is okay.

“I am responsible for this pain. I have created it with my mind. I can learn so much if I go in without resistance. I can meet myself intimately on the inside. I forgive myself for my part in this. I accept myself for who I am. I am not this experience. I am good. If I create pain with my mind, I can create relief with my mind.”

– Brooke Castillo

7. Invite yourself to let the thought that’s creating the pain go.

8. Repeat with every negative emotion that comes up. As you practice, you will get better and it will become easier.

As you start processing pain in real time when it first becomes activated, you will notice that you will have less days where you store up all the feelings and then explode three days later in a yelling and crying meltdown.

Just a year ago, I used to do this all of the time, but as I’ve worked on processing, I now catch the thoughts and feelings earlier when there’s just one or two emotions.

Instead of letting them back up (like old to-do lists or unanswered emails), I try to allow them in real time.

This is possible for you too! And the sooner you get started, the more life you’ll get to experience with this skill in your back pocket.

Pain is a Part of Life, But We Don’t Have to Fear It

For the couple of years that I was considering divorce, there were lots of moments of intense pain interspersed with brief respites where I’d think things were going to get better and change.

But the pain always came back around.

At the time though, I didn’t know enough about pain to be able to use it to look deeper at myself and start changing.

Instead, it was more like a black pit that seemed to pull me in deeper and deeper with each new fall down into it.

It became a bludgeoning force in my life that would set off a cascade of shame, fear, panic, despair, and hopelessness.

I was in so much pain, that I began to believe I WAS the pain. That something was broken inside of me, and I would never be able to escape it.

But coaching changed all of that.

It taught me that pain is created by my thoughts, and my thoughts are not me. They’re just sentences that pop into my brain.

It taught me that the pain was there to be felt and processed. To be stepped into and examined rather than locked away and buried.

And as I started to look at my pain, it led me to beautiful realizations.

  • That I wanted more in my life – more self-love, more joy, more presence.
  • That I wanted to have my own back and honor how I felt inside.
  • That I had dreams and desires I wasn’t acknowledging, and they were screaming inside of me to be let out.

Coaching gave me the tools to start making peace with the pain of life, and instead use it to feel more, go deeper, and evolve faster.

Now when pain comes up in my life, instead of running away and numbing and distracting myself from it, I usually get still and curious.

I know that there is something here wanting to be acknowledged, felt, experienced, and I now have confidence in myself that I can go there and come back deeper and more of myself than I was before.

Avoiding Feelings – Part 2

How to feel your emotions instead and change your life.

The alternative to resisting and reacting is allowing.

Allowing is about feeling emotions in the moment as they come up.

Like a pipe with water flowing through it, when an emotion comes through, we stay wide open instead of constricting, resisting, and ultimately trapping it inside us.

Most of us have something like fear or sadness come down our pipe and we immediately close off and restrict flow. Then it’s like a blockage, and more and more emotions get stuck behind it as we continue resisting allowing it to process.

That moment when we explode on our kids or spouse, or end up crying it all out in a big overwhelming deluge, is usually the blockage getting pushed through finally.

You know that relief you feel after a good cry? It’s cause you’ve let the emotions finally come through.

But what if you could feel that relief from processing all the time, and in small manageable amounts rather than giant overwhelming floods?

It’s absolutely possible and it’s a skill that you can learn by just using 5 questions.

  1. What are you feeling now? – name one emotion
  2. Where is the feeling in your body? – heavy in your chest, tight in your throat, fluttering in your stomach
  3. What color is this feeling? – dark grey, deep red, bright green
  4. Is this feeling hard or soft?
  5. Is this feeling fast or slow?

As you go through each of these questions, stay in your body rather than your mind.

Try to experience the emotion as a sensation in your body rather than thoughts in your head.

Going forward in your life, whenever you notice yourself resisting or reacting, you can stop and take yourself through the 5 questions.

Allowing your feelings is absolutely possible and a skill that you can learn with practice.

As you learn how to process rather than resist or react, you will show up in your life more centered and empowered because you know you can feel any feeling.

Avoiding Feelings – Part 1

Why we do it and why it’s so bad for us.

Feelings. They are freakin’ everywhere if you’re a living breathing human, but boy do we try to avoid them.

Say for instance, fear. When’s the last time you felt it’s presence and didn’t find yourself reaching for your phone or some ice cream to soften the ugliness of that emotion?

It’s what our society does and it’s what most of us witnessed our parents doing as we grew up.

We saw emotions get processed in one of two ways:

  1. Reacting or
  2. Resisting/Avoiding.

Reacting looks like that 45-minute cry session you had after 3 weeks of keeping it all together.

Or the outbursts of yelling and losing your shit with your kids cause you just can’t seem to keep it inside anymore.

Resisting/Avoiding goes hand in hand with reacting as it’s like the sneaky build up before the storm.

This looks like numbing your brain with Netflix, food, productivity, alcohol, shopping, cleaning, etc. to distract yourself from feeling.

But here’s the thing, humans are not built for emotion storage.

We’re meant to be processors of emotion, letting it come up, be felt, and pass through us.

But somewhere along the way, we got the message that negative emotions are bad and we need to avoid them. That the whole goal of life is to be happy.

“Isn’t it called ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ for goodness sake?! Then why do I keep feeling all this other crap?!”

Well here’s the reality.

Life just isn’t happy all the time.

In fact, if you really get honest with yourself, you’ll see that it’s much closer to 50/50 – 50% positive emotions and 50% negative.

And why that’s so important is because, when we want it to be sunshine and daisies every day and it’s not, we resist and react and make it way worse than it really is.

I like to use the visual of a tea kettle on the stove.

When we are constantly resisting, it’s like the stove is always on, and the pressure inside just keeps building and building until it finally screams out of us through reacting.

But thankfully, you don’t have to feel like a tea kettle fully pressurized and ready to burst all the time…

(Check back next week for part 2 and how to feel your emotion rather than resist/react/and avoid it.)