The Real Cost of Avoiding Healing
This year on Thanksgiving, I am most thankful for pain.
Pain?
Why would I be thankful for pain?
Well, pain is an indicator that something is wrong and so even though this year, I faced a lot of pain, it made me address some things that were wrong. So, yes, I am thankful for pain and I honestly wouldn’t change it. And even though I am still in pain and many times find myself crying out asking God when it will end, I also know that I still would not change it even if I could. You could not pay me to go back to where I was or who I was.
I would’ve said my pain came from my heart and that signaled to me that there was something wrong in my heart. Hence the term ‘heartbreak’. I’ve learned this year though, through writing, through reading, through hanging with friends and seeking counsel, through walking, through yoga, through praying, through singing, through many many avenues that the pain was in my mind. Not that it wasn’t real, but that it wasn’t in my heart. That’s not where the brokenness was.
I was reading an article recently on pain, mainly as research for this writing so I wouldn’t sound like an idiot and ran across this explanation of how acute pain turns chronic:
Most of the time, pain is a useful alarm system designed to keep us safe. But sometimes pain signals keep firing even after the body’s tissues have healed. When pain continues for a long time―such as during a long illness or after a serious injury―it can cause changes to your nervous system, which make you more sensitive to pain. This means that certain stimuli make you feel pain more quickly, and the pain can be more intense and last longer.
Treatment
Your experience of pain is influenced by a complex set of factors that are unique to you, including your genes and biology, past experiences, emotions, and environment. That means that everyone’s pain feels differently. There isn’t a way to measure it objectively, and there isn’t one single treatment that will work for everyone.
Ref: National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health; International Association for the Study of Pain; Institute of Medicine
Imagine for a second that this article was not talking about physical pain-like a broken bone or a sprained ankle, but emotional pain. We all experience emotional pain. There is not a single person walking this planet who has not been in emotional pain before. You may relate to their pain and you may not, but know that every person you walk by everyday is in pain in some way. It’s why it is so important to be kind to people, you never know what people are walking through because most of us only send out our representatives into the world, not our true selves. If we all walked around showing our pain to everyone we came in contact with, we’d either be a much better or a much worse society. We have learned what is acceptable to show to others and what we must keep hidden behind walls (figurately and literally).
Pain over time causes changes to your nervous system which can make you more sensitive to pain. Again, thinking emotionally here, emotional pain over time can change our nervous system too, making us more sensitive to emotional pain. Thinking of myself, when I am in emotional pain, my nervous system reacts and I do become more sensitive emotionally. Have you heard the saying “When it rains, it pours?”. The idea that because one thing went wrong, more things will go wrong? Like a pile on of sorts? How true is that? It feels true, that’s for sure!! It felt true for me this year. Sometimes I have felt like I just could not catch a break. And, of course, because I haven’t fully healed from previous pain, the new pains feel…well, more painful than they may otherwise have. My pain was an indicator that something needed to be addressed in me. Looking for someone from the outside to heal it would have been like expecting the diagnosis from the doctor to actually help with the physical pain, illness, injury, etc.
A physician can’t just diagnose you and send you on your way (although that is sometimes what it feels like). No, they work with you to find a solution, a treatment, a plan. They prescribe a diet or a medication or a surgery. They work to reduce the pain, heal the body, remove the illness/object/cancer. They are on your team. Just announcing the diagnosis does nothing for the pain you’re feeling. You must address the pain. Even if you know what it’s from, you still must address it, one way or another. Even deciding not to address it is a form of addressing it and choosing to live with things the way they are and let the cards fall as they may.
It was my responsibility to seek healing so I do not just live with the diagnosis I was handed. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t my fault, it was my responsibility to heal. Staying in a state of victim does nothing in the same way that deciding that just because you didn’t cause the car accident you were in means you do not have to do the work to heal from it. Healing is hard-physical healing and emotional healing. It’s all hard. Addressing what needs to be addressed without knowing for certain an outcome is a leap of faith but choosing to make the leap and do the work to heal will make you different.
I had a guy friend a long time ago say to me “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Or it kills you.” What he meant was, there is more than one way to die. Maybe healing isn’t easy, maybe it isn’t pretty, maybe it isn’t linear or clean or fun but the other option is this: you didn’t die but you died. You let your pain kill you while you still walk this earth. I want what doesn’t kill me to make me stronger. Better. Kinder. More lovely. More loving. Closer to who I want to be. And maybe healing makes me more sensitive to pain in the future, but that’s okay too because I am in the company of every other person to ever have lived who is also in pain and maybe the pain I had helped me to see myself in them and for that…well for that, it would all have been worth it.
