Coming to terms with all that pain out there

Pain is one of the feelings that you will encounter on your healing journey. It’s one of the big ones. Our body stores the pain. Our nervous system remembers the pain. Releasing pain is an intense feeling. Sometimes it feels like poking an area in the body where pain is stored and poof! it disappears.

Other times it makes its way through the entire body. Seemingly not wanting to leave. It stops and causes physical pain in certain areas and then releases through the feet. I felt like shaking my legs after this just to make sure it was gone.

This process will be different for everybody. I am highly sensitive so any sensation in my body is multiplied. I am fascinated by what my body is doing and has done on this journey of healing wounds and reprocessing memories.

What I find hard to accept is that all of us have been hurt and hurt deeply in our lives. It’s part of being human. What this also means is that all of us have hurt others, have caused others immense pain. It’s impossible to go through life without having done that. It’s the nature of life. We don’t know about other people’s experience in life or of life and a joke might backfire or a flippant remark that we’ve not given a second thought could have hit somebody really hard. There’s just no way of knowing.

Now, we’re not entirely off the hook. There are times when we know we’re hurting others, when we know that our actions are going to cause others pain and we’re still doing them. Or when we only realize that we hurt somebody after the fact. That’s also human. Those are the times we can apologize and do better next time.

I’m not going to go into systematically hurting others at this point. That’s also out there of course.

So, here’s my point: it can’t be the “other” person’s job to heal our wound. They most likely have no idea they “caused” it. Me telling them that something they said to me in primary school really had a profound negative impact on me when they hardly remember having been in my class – that’s not helpful. And if they don’t remember, why would I hope for an apology or remorse? And why would they give it or have it? How does blaming them for it help me? It doesn’t.

Do you remember everything you ever said or did? Do you know which of your actions or words unintentionally hurt others? There is no way of knowing. There’s no way of avoiding it. I’m having a hard time getting to grips with that. It hits home the fact that we are solely responsible for processing our pain, our hurt, our emotions. We’re the only ones who know. We are the only ones who have experienced them.

Be gentle with yourselves and good luck on your healing journey.