We all go through periods of emotional difficulty at times. Neurological studies have shown emotional pain networks overlap with physical pain networks in your brain, so we feel emotional pain in a very real way. How can you effectively care for yourself when you are suffering with emotional pain? Here are a few tips that may help.
• Practice Radical Acceptance With Difficult Emotions. We can expend a lot of effort struggling to not feel what we are feeling. And as a species we’re just not very good suppressing emotions. They tend to pop up in unexpected and unwanted ways. Studies have show you can’t just suppress “bad” emotions. To the extent that your are successful in suppressing any emotion, you end suppressing your range of emotions, good and bad. It certainly fine to distract ourselves, sooth ourselves, and to put our attention elsewhere. But struggling to not feel what we are actually feeling is a huge waste of time and energy.
Don’t try to fight or push down emotions just because they are painful. Allow your thoughts and feelings to be just as they are. We may not like them or want them, but there they are! Just like the weather or a traffic jam, it’s not something we have control over. Practice dropping the struggle with difficult thoughts and feelings that we can’t change and practice instead allowing them to come and go. You might try visualizing them as clouds in the sky or waves in the ocean that come and go at their own speed.
•The Chessboard Metaphor. Imagine a giant chessboard stretching infinitely out in all directions. On the chessboard are black and white pieces. The black pieces represent all of your “bad” thoughts and feelings. The white pieces represent all of your “good” and comfortable thoughts and feelings. These pieces are involved in a huge struggle. We don’t want all these pieces. We’d like to hold onto the ‘good’ pieces and throw the ‘bad’ pieces away. The problem is, we can devote our lives to it and never really get rid of the ‘bad’ pieces. They are there because of our histories and life experiences and the way our brains work.
But what if you weren’t the ‘bad’ thoughts and feelings. And what if you weren’t the battle between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ thoughts and feelings. What if instead you were the chessboard, able to hold all the pieces without having to struggle with them. The board is in contact with all the pieces, and is aware of the pieces, but it is not invested in the pieces and does not care who wins. It can hold all the pieces, experience them, and yet not be them. And the board itself not broken or defective in any way, even if that’s what one of the ‘bad’ pieces is saying.
•Committed Action. When we feel fear, anxiety, sadness, hopelessness, or think of ourselves as unworthy, we often tend to withdraw from life in an effort to protect ourselves from pain. Don’t do that! Even if you are in pain, you still have the freedom to engage in a full and committed way with your life.
“Starting from the place in which there is a distinction between you as a conscious, mindful human being on the one hand, and all the private experiences you are conscious of on the other hand,are you willing to feel, think, sense and remember all those private experiences, fully and without defense,as you directly experience them to be, not as what your mind says they are, and do whatever it takes to move you in the direction of that which you truly value, at this particular moment, and in this particular situation? YES or NO?” ––Stephen Hayes
There Is Pain Because You Care. You are in pain because you are human and you are experiencing a gap between what you care about and what you have. If you were given the choice between having all of your pain disappear, but never being able to care about anything again, which would you choose? Write down on a piece of paper something that causes you pain in your life. Turn the paper over, and on this side write what it is you truly care about that is connected with this pain. They are two sides of the same coin.
“What Can I Learn From This Experience?” Is there some lesson here for me? Can I take responsibly for my part in the negative situation, if there is one? Is there anything on my side of the street that needs cleaning up? Is there anything I would do differently in the future?
None of us likes or enjoy emotional pain. None of us would willingly volunteer to go through it. But given that it is a fact of life, when we use these and other techniques it is possible to learn to better navigate the waters of emotional pain without causing more problems for ourselves or unnecessarily increasing our suffering.