Why do we always try and avoid pain?
Discomfort is something we naturally try to avoid at all cost, isn’t it?
When something unpleasant happens in your life do you find yourself repeatedly running away and reaching for anything that provides some kind of comfort? Food? Netflix? Booze?
Whatever your default avoidance tool is, it really doesn’t matter, what does matter is that tendency to try and avoid any kind of discomfort by numbing it out. Replacing pain with something that gives us a distraction of some kind, is really only a short term satisfaction and sadly it tends to give us added problems to deal with such as weight-gain, stress, apathy.
When we’ve reached for our default avoidance shield one too many times, it creates a sticky uncomfortable feeling inside. It’s difficult to describe that sensation, but it feels like something isn’t quite right, and we just cant seem to pinpoint it exactly. Sound familiar?
Here’s the thing though…
However skilled you may have become at ignoring this unpleasant feeling or not, it will no doubt be growing slowly, but surely inside. The thing is, that once its piled up enough to the point that you’re having trouble ignoring it, the likelihood is, it’ll show up in another form as a crisis either on the physical plane like an ailment of some kind, or emotional plane like stress or anxiety or even the material plane like a divorce.
All of this is designed to tell us that we have not been true to ourselves in one form or another! that sticky feeling is our body’s way of telling us that we have not been listening to our inner voice, we have been trying to avoid it.
Try a new motto!
I know this may sound strange, so hear me out first… but when a crisis occurs, my motto is “befriend your crisis”. Yes, thats right, befriend it!
You can spend a little while living in your victimhood at first, no problem. We all have our right to a grace period right? But, I want to urge you to take a different tact and prepare yourself until you’re ready to take that bull by its horns and look it straight into its eyes!
I advise you to start getting real with yourself. Look yourself in the eye and map out where you aren’t being honest with yourself and your heart’s true desires. Try coming at this crisis from a place of gratitude instead of struggle and strife. This will ease your journey on your way back home. It will create the space and compassion that we all need in order to feel safe enough to look this bull in the eyes and start speaking our truth.
When I was a child, I always went out into the kitchen to eat something sweet or filling when my dad was yelling or I wasn’t feeling too good. That didn’t go so well with my figure, so when I was a teenager and in my twenties I substituted food with boys. I loved getting the attention and flirting always obsessing over whether or not a boy liked me. When I got married and had kids I instead numbed myself with overworking, over-socialising and obsessing over being the perfect wife and mother. It was SO exhausting and nearly got me down on my knees – my head was so overworked. I did all of that because I had not learned how to deal with life’s uncomfortable ups and downs, I always tried to avoid the pain by substituting it with something that would either soothe or numb me.
Liking boys, enjoying food and having a healthy work ambitions is perfectly fine, BUT when the motivation behind it, is tailored to avoid your feelings, then you are sorely missing the point, and in all essence prolonging or enhancing the pain.
It isn’t easy to change old ingrained patterns so you owe it to yourself to be gentle and befriend whatever is going on in your life right now, instead of fighting it, because this will just cloud your judgment, making your journey longer and harder.
“Befriend your situation and give yourself all the love you can muster;
this, I promise, will ease the path.”
Have you gone through something that you’d like to share? Or maybe you are in the midst of it right now, not knowing where to go for help? Feel free to share how you are feeling right now with me here.
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