Finding Freedom from your Emotional Pain
Pain doesn’t have to rule your life
Have you found yourself to be in a place of deep emotional or physical pain daily? Does it impact your relationships? Have you been lashing out for no reason? Making problems bigger than you know they are?
What causes our pain?
Life is hard and has a way of holding us down if we are not vigilant about letting things go. We begin to feel like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders. It’s important to recognize you are not responsible for carrying all the weight of the world’s problems. We must share in our pain, or we do risk being crushed by it. We are not islands existing by ourselves, and we need community support to heal from emotional wounds. People are typically what cause our emotional pain and they are also what we need in order to heal from the wound/s.
In order to release our pain, we need to be truly SEEN and HEARD. We need to have our experience, and our response to it, witnessed by a person who can be gentle and tender with your pain. We need to share our experience with someone who can validate our emotions and how much the pain hurts. Therapy is a great place to find someone who can do this for you, especially if you don’t have a great support system. I have seen many clients who have never had someone truly validate their experience and how they felt about it. So many people don’t have this type of experience in their family, which is why so many are in conflict with their family so often.
For many people starting therapy or healing work is scary. There is a lot of fear around rehashing the past and old, painful memories. It’s important to enter therapy open minded and allow the process to unfold. Try not to get too caught up in what you should or shouldn’t talk about. When I’m working with a new client, I always like to remind them I am here to help support their goals, not pressure them into doing work they don’t want to.
What gets in the way of seeking healing?
However, I find many clients genuinely want to heal and experience relief from their pain. I find the biggest block to doing this is one single fear: If you open the floodgates to the pain, that you have been holding shut, everything will pour out at once, and flood you to the point you will never recover. Does this sound familiar? Have you experienced this fear before? It is as if the pain will never end if you start to let yourself finally feel it.
But I’m here to tell you the opposite is true. Emotions work best when we treat them like a conveyor belt in a facility. Conveyor belts work most effectively when everything moves along as it should in the process. If we constantly pull packages off the conveyor belt because we ‘don’t like’ them, pretty soon we are going to have a big pile. If that pile continues to grow, eventually the packages are going to tumble over, on to the conveyor belt, and cause a huge backup.
This is what happens for most people. They don’t like to feel certain emotions, so they avoid those emotions, and suppress them, or put them to the side. After time, these ignored emotions start to build up, create more tension, and eventually people have a breakdown and can’t take it anymore. This is when we see someone or their life melt down. It will happen to the best of people after years of suppressing emotions. It is typically worse for people who are stronger, because they have been holding on to more pain for a longer period of time.
What helps us release pain?
Ideally, we want to stay present with our experience, no matter what it is, feel it, and then release it. For example, we feel anger…If we stay present for our anger and let yourself feel it as it relates to that moment, then we can release the anger as the moment is over, and move on to the next experience and whatever emotional state it brings. When we do this, each emotion is processed, experienced, and released, just like a package moving on a conveyor belt. Everything moves as it is meant to and nothing gets stuck.
Most people have a stockpile of emotional pain they have been avoiding for years. This is where the fear of going through it comes from. Most people don’t know this, but when starting therapy things can actually get worse before they get better. This is normal and doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong. This is because generally we are starting to work through the stockpile of unprocessed emotions from over the years. We are starting to peel back layers to things that have long been covered up and ignored. This is a sort of peeling off the band aid and it’s not a fun process. It is however crucial to healing. We cannot move forward into the future we want to create if we are carrying a ball of pain around with us each and every day.
So in order to release emotional pain we need to share it with the right people, and we need to work through the experiences and emotions that have been ignored for years. When we do this, we find more freedom from the baggage we have been carrying. Because it is a painful un-shedding process, it also makes us realize we don’t want to keep having to do it. Thus, we can learn to stop letting emotions get stuck. We learn to stop attaching to any emotional state—good or bad. We learn to become more like a conveyor belt with our emotions. Feel your emotions. Acknowledge them. And release them, sending them off to the universe. Through this process we can learn to reopen our hearts after they have been closed for many years. We can learn to keep our hearts open.
To learn more about releasing your pain and working with me, click here.
Sarah Seraphina is a Spiritual Activator and Liberation Guide. She is the owner of Nurtured Essence, a healing space, aimed at helping women overcome their past patterns and fears, so they may thrive and live with more power, purpose, ease, and joy. She specializes in working with healers, recovering empaths and “Damsels in Distress”, highly-sensitive women, lightworkers, and women with a sacred mission.
