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You are listening to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale, and this is episode number 30, "Processing Pain." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living. Well hey there, good morning to you. It's morning for me right now. It's actually pretty early. It's a little bit before 6 o'clock. I do tend to be an earlier morning person, just because I found over the years that that's when I could get things done, especially when I had all those little kids running around, right? That's the only time I had to exercise, and then over the years I realized it was the only time of day that I could stay awake to read my scriptures. So I started getting up early because otherwise I would just fall asleep in the afternoon, and that didn't help me at all. So it is early this morning. I'm not exercising because I'm going to the temple with my daughter later this morning. It will be her first time, so I'm kind of excited about that opportunity. And then we're going to be going out to lunch to an Ecuadorian restaurant because she just got her mission called to Ecuador. And so we are going to be going to try some of the Ecuadorian cuisine. The cuisine? How do you say that word? That we found a restaurant here in the Salt Lake area that we're excited to go give a try. 

01:23 

So that's what my days got in store, and I'm really, really excited about it. And then later on I'm going to start working on a presentation. I'm going down to California next week, and we'll be doing a presentation down there for a Relief Society. This group of women is just amazing, and I've been down there two other times. And this will be my third presentation for them, and they're just great, and so loving and welcoming and kind to me. And I just really enjoy going down there to give presentations to them. So I'm going to be working on that presentation and getting that done and ready to go. And then I leave in a couple of days to go down to California, so I am super excited to go spend some time with my sister down there and give a couple of presentations actually while I'm there. 

02:06 

So, let's get started on today. Today we're talking about processing pain. Pain, pain, pain, right? It is such an inevitable part of life and emotional pain will take out even the best of us sometimes. What is it that Wesley tells Buttercup, do you remember in The Princess Bride where he says, "life is pain, you highness, anyone who says differently is selling you something." Life inevitably is fraught with pain and that's just part of our human experience here on earth. Having experiences that cause us to have pain and it's just what we do. 

02:48 

We can have feelings of pain because of circumstances with our children. So maybe they're living a life that we feel will bring them unnecessary pain or sadness or harm. Maybe they say and do things that are difficult for us to process, right? Maybe they they say things that that could be very hurtful to us. Maybe we feel pain because of thoughts about our spouse or our parents or our siblings or maybe we've been dating somebody and it didn't work out or our friends betray us. People we love get sick and hurt and sometimes they die and all of these circumstances we associate with feelings of pain. 

03:25 

So it's important to remember that it's not the circumstance that brings us the pain, but rather our thoughts about these circumstances that create the feelings of pain. Now when we're in the thick of pain, we don't want to hear that. And we just think "that is not helpful for me and don't tell me that this is not causing me pain." And sometimes we don't want to adjust our thoughts on these situations at all because sometimes pain is the right emotion at the right time. When both of my parents died about 11 years apart, I felt a lot of pain and I wanted to feel pain. Because the pain reminded me of how much I loved them. It reminded me of how grateful I was for them. It reminded me of what wonderful parents they were and and that was a time where I wanted to feel the pain. It helped me to connect with my emotions of love for them. 

04:23 

If our children start using drugs, we may also want to feel pain. Our thoughts in a situation such as this can run rampant though and we may not even be able to make sense of it. And because our thoughts are going so crazy with all of the options and things that can be happening, this can be really tormenting and this emotional pain can feel very, very excruciating at times, can't it? So when we're caught in this overwhelming feeling of pain, we make decisions usually very unconsciously at first. And then hopefully more consciously as time goes on about how to process the pain. And really we have about four different responses that we can have with the pain. We can avoid it, we can resist it, we can react to it, or we can process it. The first three of these, avoiding, resisting, and reacting, can have very detrimental effects. While the fourth one, processing, is the path that will lead us to healing from the pain. So we're gonna take a look at each one of these. 

05:28 

So first of all, avoiding. When we choose to avoid the pain, we are pretending it's not really there. And when we do that, we're actually really lying to ourselves because the pain is there, but we're just trying to do anything to keep our minds off of it. So this is never a long-term solution because the pain is still there. It's like a sliver in our finger. If we don't get it out, eventually it's going to start to fester, it gets infected, and it just causes bigger problems in the long term. So the more we avoid it, the more we have to avoid. If we take that sliver on right after it happens and we take a few minutes and dig it out of our finger, that may be some short-term pain that we're dealing with, but then it's over and that little spot just almost seems to go away almost immediately. But if we wait, then we go through days and days and days of it hurting and hurting and hurting and then it gets red and then it gets infected and then we dig it out and then we still have a couple of days while that still starts to heal up. 

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So the more we avoid it, the more we have to avoid. And this is where buffering climbs into the front seat with us because this is where we start engaging in external processes, which is buffering, to avoid the internal processes that so need our attention. There's so many things we can do to buffer. We might start eating when we're not hungry. We may go shopping and spend money we don't have or maybe we do have. We may play a game on our phone or we may get on social media. Anything that will take our minds off of the emotions that we're currently feeling, in this case, the pain. Buffering is just trying to avoid and escape the emotions that we're feeling. We work to avoid the inside by turning outside. This is not a good place to be. So avoiding, let's avoid avoiding, shall we? 

07:32 

The second way that we choose to engage with the pain we feel is by resisting. Now resisting means that we might blame other people or we might blame God. We will argue about whether it's fair or not. We'll lie about it or build it up into something that it's not. When we resist, we're acknowledging that the pain is there but we're trying to numb the feelings by turning it down some other road. Maybe we start blaming the doctor for the death of our loved one, or we start lying about our impending divorce, or we pretend that it's even not happening. Resisting, as with avoiding, doesn't do anything to help us heal from the pain, and the pain just persists. We may be focusing our attention on other things, but the pain is still there, and oftentimes when we resist we start doing things that later on we look back and we go, "wish I wouldn't have done that," right? So we need to be really cautious about resisting as well. 

08:31 

And reacting is the third unhealthy choice we might engage in when we feel pain. Reacting looks like fighting against the pain. We might yell at the other person who caused the pain. We might give them the silent treatment, or we might start talking behind their back. These are actions that hurt other people. You're probably familiar with the phrase that "hurt people hurt people." Right? And that's often what's going on when we're reacting to the pain. Because I'm hurting, I turn outward and start hurting other people. 

09:05 

So here's an interesting thing to notice about negative emotions such as pain. When we react from negative emotions, we almost always get a negative result in return. And this type of reacting is usually very uncontrolled and very unthoughtful. Ultimately, what we're doing is engaging in behavior that doesn't heal, but that often makes the situations worse as time goes on. And these three options, avoiding, resisting, and reacting, all come with long-term consequences that will drag out the pain, they don't allow us to heal, and they very often make our situation worse later on. 

09:47 

Okay, so now that we've looked at three unhealthy ways to respond to pain, we're going to look at the healthy way to deal with it, and that's to process it. By the way, did you notice one of those that you might engage in more frequently than the  others? I know for me, my biggest one is avoiding. I've spent my life being an avoider. And so try and identify what you usually do and how you usually respond to the pain. But let's move on now and talk about the healthy way of dealing with pain, and that is to process it. 

10:21 

So processing pain is just another way of saying that we are choosing to feel the pain. And this can be really hard to do because so many of us have been taught, usually subconsciously and not on purpose, that pain is a bad thing. And because pain feels bad, we don't really want to feel bad. So we start engaging in in other things rather than processing it. So society inundates us with the belief that we should be happy all the time, right? So we get this idea that negative emotions are bad, which is not the truth. 

11:02 

Negative emotions are just a part of our human experience and emotions are neither good or bad. Remember we talked or heard before about this 50-50. We should be filling in our lives about 50% negative emotions and about 50% positive emotions. That is the balance of life. Everything is in balance. There's light and dark and night and day and good and bad. There's always this balance going on and our negative emotions fit in that. But negative emotions 50% of the time, positive emotions 50% of the time. Again, these positive and negative emotions are neither good or bad, but what they do is they give us an opportunity to engage with our humanity and to connect with other people. 

11:54 

And negative emotions can be bad but just because feeling pain can feel bad doesn't mean that the emotion is bad. When we choose to allow ourselves to actually feel the pain, we realize that all it is is a feeling and that this feeling won't really hurt us long term. Processing the feeling means that we just allow it to be in our body, even if it doesn't make sense in our heads yet. And a lot of times that's the hardest part because my brain is trying to process and figure out and it's not making sense. Sometimes I don't want to allow myself to feel it because it's just not there. 

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During my latest really painful experience I found myself coming home from work and I would just go lay down on my bed and cry. And I was so tempted to avoid the feeling of pain by getting on social media or playing a game on my phone. And I had this thought that by taking my mind off of the pain that it would go away, right, but that's not what I need to do. Avoiding the pain doesn't allow me to work through the pain; the pain is still there, I've just ignored it for a while. And until I work through the pain it's not going to become manageable. 

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So this is a time when we go through these really tough situations where we just have to sit with the pain. And one thing we can do is just notice how it feels in your body. In fact we may even want to start trying to describe how does it feel? Do I feel a tightness in my chest? Do I feel a heaviness in my chest? Do I find myself short of breath? Do I get sick to my stomach? Do I feel crampy in my stomach? Do I get a headache? We may want to physically just notice what does the pain feel like? And at this point we can just start saying, while we sit there sitting there feeling the pain, we can just sit there and say over and over "I'm processing pain I'm processing pain I'm processing pain," just to remind ourselves that this is part of the process as we process pain. 

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But at this point we don't try to fix it. We just need to allow ourselves to feel it. And be aware of desires that you're going to have during this time to avoid or to resist or to react. But when you have thoughts to do these things acknowledge your desire. Say "oh gosh, I really just want to get on my phone right now." Acknowledge that and then remind yourself "okay, but that's not going to help. Getting on my phone is not going to help. It's not worth it to say something mean to somebody," and remind ourselves. And do this every time you notice the desire to avoid or to resist or react. Just remind ourselves, allow ourselves to feel the pain, acknowledge the desire to engage in a different behavior, and then just remind yourself that, you know what, that's not gonna help. That's not gonna work. It's not worth it. 

15:09 

So once we've just noticed the pain, we also need to realize that it doesn't mean that we just lay in our bed for four days to process the pain, alright? We need to just go about our lives, but notice the pain when it emerges. And I'll say that even after 13 years, sometimes I still have incredible waves of pain when certain things remind me of my mom. And these can come at any time, at any place. Sometimes I'm doing dishes, and I just think about doing dishes with my mom sometime,  and I get this total wave of sadness, right? That how much I miss her, and my heart just aches a little bit, right? When I think about sitting like this, look at this, where I just remind myself how much I love her and how much I miss her. And these can come at any time, at any place, but it's a different kind of pain than it was when she first died, and those first several months after she died. And these don't come so often anymore, usually when I start talking about something like that. 

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And this is how it should be. Those feelings that I have remind me of how much I love my mom, and remind me of how much I miss her, and what an amazing person she was, right? And I'm grateful that I feel those feelings. But even in those first few months after her death when it was a different kind of pain, it was like a physical, wrenching pain, that is how it should be, because that is what connects me. When this pain is so fresh and all-consuming, it can be really difficult to wrap our brains around what is happening and why we're feeling what we're feeling. And you know what? That's all good. It's all good. It's part of the process. Our first response for quite some time needs to be to just notice the pain and let it sit in us. Just notice it and let it sit. Don't try to get rid of it. Don't try to do something to to dull it but just feel it and let it sit there. 

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And over time the pain is going to start, we're going to start having thoughts about this pain. And these thoughts will start appearing in our mind. And this is the thing though, don't just jump right into trying to figure it all out right away. Because things will start to begin to be more clear as time goes on. So at this point it can be really helpful to start writing down some of the thoughts that we're having. We're going to notice that some thoughts will be helpful such as, "I'm so grateful she was my mom, she's such an amazing woman." But other thoughts, though they may seem innocent. will get us caught in negative thought loops that don't serve us at all. These would be thoughts such as "why did this have to happen to me?" These don't serve any purpose at all and they don't help us to process the pain we're feeling but rather they get us stuck in negative thoughts. 

18:09 

But again we don't want to try and change these thoughts at first, but we want to get them out of our head and onto paper. And we'll start to notice over time that similar thoughts are going to start coming up and we'll start having the same kinds of thoughts and they might be positive or negative and that's fine. At this point we don't want to judge our thoughts but we do want to start noticing the consistent thoughts that we're thinking and then start identifying what feelings or emotions am I creating in my body when I think those certain thoughts. And that helps us to start identifying which of these thoughts are positive and which ones are negative, which ones are going to move me through pain and which ones are going to keep me stuck in pain. 

18:51 

So once we start doing these thought downloads, like writing down all of our thoughts, we might even become overwhelmed by the huge amounts of thoughts that we're having and that's okay we might start feeling overwhelmed by that. It's okay. We can be overwhelmed by thoughts that are all over the place and yet we can still function from day to day. But once we start identifying the thoughts we're having, over time we can begin to notice the thoughts that move us forward toward more positive feelings and those that keep us stuck in more negative feelings. This is a really great place to be. It can take some time to get to this place and that's okay. Everybody is going to move through this process differently and it's going to take some people longer than others because of situations and just how we are. 

19:41 

Throughout this process we may find ourselves even dabbling in avoiding, resisting, and reacting we may find ourselves doing some of these behaviors even before we notice that we're doing it. And this may not be our best scenario. And at these times we won't be our best selves. But you know what, it is what it is. As soon as we notice that we're avoiding or we're resisting or we're reacting, just stop the behavior, pick yourself up, and start walking from where you are. Don't judge yourself about where we may have been, just focus on processing the pain. We're going to go through that back and forth, right? 

20:18 

So as you continue to process through this, you'll begin to realize that the pain really is coming from your thoughts, the continued pain as it goes on and at some point you're going to be ready to begin working through those thoughts. Give yourself the time you need but sometimes pain is the right emotion at the right time. We've already talked about that and that's okay and we need to feel it, to connect with our humanness and with the people around us. But at some point we need to start working. We will feel like we're ready to start working through those thoughts. And in the meantime, we can accept ourselves for being human and be grateful for our opportunities to feel and to love and to connect with people around us. 

21:00 

When we begin to realize that if we can create this pain with our minds, then we can also begin to realize that we can create relief with our minds. And we do this by then starting to focus on the healing thoughts that we're having that bring us peace, rather than the negative thoughts that are keeping us stuck in negative thought loops and keeping us stuck in that negative emotion place. 

21:27 

One thing I want to caution you is please remember this is not a linear process. Processing pain can be a very messy place. We're going to grow some and we're going to heal some and then we're going to turn right around and we're going to hurt somebody and we're going to hurt ourselves and we're going to blame somebody. And then we're going to acknowledge our thoughts and we're going to progress some and then we're going to turn right around and we're going to start avoiding the pain. It's not a linear process. We're not just going to start on step one and finish with step five, right? We're going to be back and forth and in and out as we work through this, especially the bigger the pain, the more challenging this process is obviously. 

22:09 

But give ourselves time to work through it and be patient with ourselves. Be accepting of the fact that this is a hard process and is challenging. Processing pain is a process, which means it's not going to happen all at once, but rather here a little and there a little. And someday we're going to just stop and we'll go, "huh, I'm feeling better." It's like when we learn to love somebody. When do we fall in love? It's usually not that we can say, "well, this happened and then this happened and this happened." It's little tiny things here and there. And then all of a sudden one day we wake up and we go, "huh? I totally love that person." Right? So it's a process. And processing pain takes time. So be patient with yourself as you work through this. 

23:02 

But as you get to the point where you can start processing your thoughts, then it's important to just start doing some some thought work. And going through this this process of coaching ourselves that we've talked about, where we start to identify what thoughts are helpful and are they getting me the result that I want. So rather than avoiding, resisting, or reacting to difficult emotions, if we'll choose to feel these emotions, to connect with our pain, to acknowledge it, to identify it, and then to process it, we'll find that the healing that we start going through will start to bring us the peace that we need and that the pain will not be so all-encompassing and crippling. 

23:48 

Alright, so that's what I have for you today, processing pain. I just love where I am in life. I love learning these things. I love sharing them with you. And I love getting to this place in my life where things are making sense, pieces are fitting together. It's all a process of growing up and I'm really, really happy to be where I am. So if you would love some personal help with me in processing some pain that you're going through or if you just want some help with something that you're struggling with, you can contact me at tanyahale.com and you can book a free coaching session to get you started because I would love to help you work through this. This is what I love and what I enjoy and I think it's an amazing process that as you learn it and as you start incorporating it into your life, your life just gets better and better and better. 

24:38 

Alright, if you haven't subscribed yet to this podcast, please go ahead and do so. Leave me a review. Those are really helpful for me. And share it with somebody else who you think would benefit from these concepts. I hope you have a really, really terrific day and I will talk to you next time. 

24:59 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!