What’s The Pain You’re Trying To Kill?

I wish I could take away your pain. I really do. But the truth is that I can’t. I can only love you, care for you and support you until you heal from what has scarred you.

Unresolved trauma comes with a high price. To not choose healing is to inflict on ourselves more suffering. By attempting to numb, eat, kill, or fuck our pain away, we are only expanding its size. Isn’t ironic to think that by engaging in the unhealthy coping mechanism of our choice to try to reduce the hurt we feel within, we are only adding additional layers of pain onto ourselves?

Locking our emotional wounds deep within the confines of our heart without ever daring to look inside it is one of the most damaging things we can do to ourselves. Stuck with no air to breathe, no space to be felt, our pain screams in agony for us to feel him until he can go to rest again. Like an infant, we can only deprive our pain of such crucial attunement for so long until acute damage starts to take a hold of him.

Self-compassion goes hand in hand with healing, and it is such a vital attribute to develop in order to rebuild a healthy and loving relationship with the person that we are. Holding your inner child, supporting him, and allowing yourself to feel all the pain that has to be felt in this season of your life is something I deeply wish every human being on earth would give themselves the permission to do. Staying in the comforts of denial – hiding, running away from, or dismissing our hurt – is terribly destructive for us.

If society was to normalize healing, to create space for it, and to encourage it – our world would be a much improved one. Too many of us are suffering in silence, trapped in the jail of denial, shame, guilt, or hopelessness. People kill their pain because they’ve never been given the space, the support and the love to hold it gently and feel it with their whole being.

They may, as a child, have been deeply damaged and thus internalized the message that they are inadequate and unworthy of love and support. Or perhaps that they deserved the cruelty they’ve endured. The pain they’re trying to kill unconsciously serves as a means to remind them of the suffering they know too well.

Some may be self-aware of their destructive habit of self-medicating in order to go on living. At the worse, by trying to kill their pain – they may as a result end up killing themselves as well. The thought that it could all end now isn’t always enough to stop one from self-harm. Sometimes, it’s the only way we see out of this unbearably painful world. Tragically, we can’t imagine a life without our deeply destructive habits – as they’ve helped us make sense of our agonizing reality - when nothing or no one else did.