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.

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.

Mind Drama: How to Clean it Up with Three Steps

Pain is a part of life.

Like the opposite side of the coin for pleasure, one can’t exist without the other.

But there’s the natural pain that occurs in life, and then there’s emotional suffering that comes from all the mind drama we add to the pain.

This is the torture we self-inflict with our brains through negative thoughts.

For example, your husband makes a comment about your outfit such as “You’re wearing that again?” And your brain, instead of just interpreting it as a question, answering, and moving on, goes “What the hell man!? Obviously, I’m wearing it again, it’s on my body. He’s so freaking critical of me. He doesn’t like it. He never likes what I wear.”

Now I’m not saying your husband likes the outfit. Maybe he doesn’t, but ultimately, we don’t care because where we want our focus is on you and whether YOU like the outfit.

And when you start bringing everything back to you and how you want to think and feel about the situation, a lot of the drama can fall away.

To do so takes three steps:

  1. HAVE AWARENESS – Notice the thoughts you are choosing to think and what emotions they are creating for you. Remember that no matter what your husband does or says, you get to choose how you want to think and feel about it. This DOES NOT mean you choose to always feel “happy,” but it does mean you remember that you do not have to take on any of his thoughts or opinions.
  2. PROCESS EMOTION – Allow yourself to feel whatever comes up for you in your body without judgment. Maybe you feel shame because you think “He doesn’t like the way I dress.” Allow the shame to be processed by dropping into your body and breathing into it. Then see what’s left behind. Be curious. Why does it matter to me that he likes how I dress?
  3. CHOOSE INTENTIONALLY – How do YOU want to think and feel about your outfit? If you love it and think you look amazing, then that thought and feeling is available to you regardless of whatever your husband says. If you don’t, then explore more around what thoughts and beliefs you want to have in the future around your body and what you wear.

Life dishes up plenty of experiences for us to grow and learn.

We don’t need all the excess drama on top.

Photo by Mark Thompson on Unsplash

Allowing Fear While Considering Divorce

Cause running away from it isn’t working.

You know the feeling.

That deep dark stomach gripping, squeezing, twisting pain.

The fast fluttering in your heart and fingers and the urge to run away.

Fear is one of the most powerful emotions we can experience right up there with love and grief.

And if you find yourself considering divorce, then the emotion of fear has been visiting more often.

As humans, our brain interprets fear as if it were a lion about to eat us, and it wants to move us into fight or flight.

For a lot of us as women, that looks like fighting against yourself for even considering a thought that created fear (“maybe I want a divorce”) or taking flight and running away from the feeling through distracting yourself.

This can look like excessive cleaning, productivity, people pleasing, care-taking, and shopping among other things.

But here’s the thing,

Fear can’t hurt you.

It can’t kill you. It can’t even touch you, because all it is is a vibration in your body that’s created by a thought you’re having.

And thoughts like,

“If I get divorced I’ll have to find a job and I haven’t worked in ten years” or

“I’ll be alone for the rest of my life,” or

“If I leave, I’ll hurt my children, but if I stay, I’ll hurt myself” create loads of fear.

And the more you run away from the fear, the bigger it gets.

It doesn’t go away and you can’t outrun it because it’s created with your mind. And last I checked, you can’t get away from your brain.

So stop running.

Just stop, turn around, and allow yourself to look that thought of yours in the eye.

“If I get divorced, I’ll have to find a job and I haven’t worked in ten years.”

  • Notice the fear as it comes up. Name it out loud. Focus on what it feels like in your body, not in your mind.
  • Close your eyes and ask yourself, what color is fear in my body? Is it fast or slow? Does it move?
  • Allow curiosity instead of resistance – “If this is just a vibration in my body, I wonder what will happen if I step towards it, instead of running away.”
  • What do you notice? How does fear feel different than other emotions in your body like excitement, joy, love?

I promise you can open to the human experience of feeling fear.

It can’t hurt you. It’s just a vibration in your body coming from your thoughts.

Photo by Vital Sinkevich on Unsplash

Feelings are Meant to Last 90 Seconds

Say what?!

What do you think of when you hear the word sadness?

Or how about anger?

You might envision someone crying or yelling. A visual representation of what they’re feeling inside.

But what if I told you that you could feel an emotion as strong as hatred in a room full of people, not react at all, and still have processed it within 90 seconds. Crazy right?

Not so. It turns out this is actually physiologically what our bodies are built to do.

In Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book she explains this fantastic ability we have to process emotion,

“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.”

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey

No one teaches us how to feel emotion.

In fact, we’re presented by the media with the exact opposite of that – movies and shows where people “act out” their feelings.

This makes for good entertainment, but it’s a different thing entirely when we start believing that’s what feeling our feelings looks like.

Instead, I describe this 90 second process of feeling emotion to my clients as a wave.

  1. You have the stimulus and thought that trigger the emotion.
  2. It starts to build rapidly and increases in intensity until you reach the crest.
  3. Then you come back down, and it’s like the emotion washes back out to sea.

This is how emotion is meant to be processed.

A wave of emotion cannot hurt you.

In fact, it’s only when we drive ourselves insane by running away from it all the time that we start to hurt ourselves with all of the excessive actions we take to avoid.

Instead, consider watching your emotions. Get curious.

How do they start? What does the crest feel like in your body? What happens after it leaves?