The Art Of Voluntary Pain

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Author: Julia Khodakovskaya Source:

As a person who fights with his inner monsters for a long time and stubbornly, I have repeatedly received advice “just let go” and “forget it and move on”. I never understood what that meant. How can you simply step over a black hole, which is located in the very center and, looking into which, I have never seen the bottom. I watched as the hole was constantly expanding, gradually absorbing the last bastions of joy in my life. As in Brodsky: “First, a chair fell into the abyss, then the bed fell. Then - my table, I pushed it myself, I don't want to hide it."

In especially poignant moments, the people around me sincerely tried to help me. I was told that everything will be fine, I need to rest, listen to cheerful music. I did it all. Moreover, it helped. For hours, days, and sometimes weeks. I tried not to be alone, to meet with friends a lot, worked late, read, listened to music and never, just never allowed myself to think about my inner horror.

But sooner or later a stage came when even a comedy film with a happy ending could make me daze and again find myself on the edge of the abyss. This swing lasted for years, until I myself voluntarily and purposefully jumped down to the very bottom, into emptiness and darkness.

Traditions of experiencing problems and depressions in the modern world have been reduced to the phrase "We must move on." Physically, there is not enough time, energy, and, what is most interesting, skills to “feel sad”. We do not know how to be sad and experience grief. When we part with a loved one, meet death, lose our job - we move forward, continue to live, although most often these losses cause us enormous damage. We are blocking the problem. Instead of stopping and getting rid of the need to "hold on." Crawl into your shell and slowly and piece by piece live the pain.

The first time I encountered something like this was when my best friend died. I remember how everyone around me was trying to keep me busy, to bring me to couples, to take me to a bar, to engage in a dialogue about anything but the most terrible. And when I said her name (because that's all I wanted to talk about), everyone suddenly froze in awkward silence. And in order not to spoil the conversation and not cause discomfort to others, I had to change the topic myself.

Then, for the first time, the lesson was learned that talking about problems is awkward and uncomfortable, and feeling and experiencing pain is inappropriate. And scary, after all. Pain was always equated to something negative, all-consuming, frightening, and if there were mechanisms that made it possible to avoid suffering, I grabbed at them.

It felt like water was flowing from the tap at full capacity, and I kept plugging the hole through which it could pour out. Music, alcohol, humor, friends. Anything. Because she could not otherwise, and no one told that it was possible in another way. I did the same with all my problems and grievances and further.

Now I understand that this is how people become emotional cripples. Not allowing ourselves to feel the inner pain in time, we let it stay inside, freeze and settle in us forever. And in the future, it will become the basis of complexes, neuroses and phobias that will determine our actions and deeds, give a green or red light to things and people, exhaust us and poison the lives of others. This pain can be anything - death, separation, dismissal, hurt, or fear - anything that evokes resonating emotion and causes damage.

You have to live your pain. In psychotherapy there is even a special technique of "paradoxical intention" - the patient is asked to desire to meet his fear. Knock out a wedge with a wedge. For example, the doctor offered to pay 5 cents for each wet sheet of a boy who was peeing into bed every night. By the end of the week, the child had received only 10 cents. The boy tried so hard that the vicious circle was broken. Once the patient stopped grappling with the problem and allowed it to BE, the symptom subsided.

This is very important for the pain to work - to become physically tangible, to go through all the insides with furrows, to leave scars. And in the end, leave, making the person more aware and older. Internal work with our own fears gives us a chance to allow ourselves to be weaker than we used to think or than it is accepted in society, and to come to terms with ourselves in the present. Find out who we really are. And then pain and fear will lose all power.

You just need to admit to yourself that it is painful, scary and insulting. And that there is a specific reason for this. Usually, intuitively, we already know it, and if not, we must continue to ask until the answer appears at three o'clock in the morning, either in the shower, or while waiting in a traffic jam. And then it is worth taking off the armor. Name the reason aloud or write it down, break it down into pieces, ask yourself why it is difficult to talk and think about it, walk through every aspect of it, crack, recess, look into every corner of it. Let her cheer. It's like a vaccine - only after receiving a fraction of the virus, we can develop immunity.

We cannot get rid of internal problems forever, and they will remain scars on us, but, having come to terms with our horrors, recognizing them as a part of ourselves, we get the opportunity to control them, deprive them of power and destructive power, make them our weapons. We find out who we really are, where our vulnerabilities are, we learn that, despite defeat, we are still able to love and fight. And so we become wiser.

Accept your inner pain not as an enemy, but as a good old friend, because, remember, it is she who signals danger when you are unwell. Feel where it hurts, where the break occurred, why it happened, dive to the deepest bottom to push off from it and, recognizing yourself, freely swim further.