Almost 20 years ago, I heard a speaker at my church talk about the ways we try to distract ourselves from pain. These often end up developing addictive or maladaptive behaviors that not only don’t help, but actively get in the way of having a happy life.
I was in my early 20s and it hit me like a revelation. We don’t know how to deal with our pain, so we frantically try to avoid it at all costs.
Many of the ways we try to avoid pain not only don’t really work, but they make your life worse off in the long run.
How do you try and distract yourself from pain? What do you do to avoid dealing with your loss?
Drugs, alcohol, anger, binge-watching TV, escapism, sex. Sound familiar? You might feel shame reading this list, but you’re definitely not alone.
Why do we do these things? Don’t we know they don’t work?
When I began studying the Grief Recovery Method it began to make sense.
We need pain in order to heal
Pain is uncomfortable. It’s designed that way. Not for you to cringe and shy away from, but to get your attention.
If it’s physical pain, it’s calling your attention to something that has gone wrong and become damaged in some way. A broken ankle, a heart attack, a paper cut.
Why does pain want your attention? So you can drug it or ignore it or push it away? No. So you can take action to deal with what’s causing the pain to begin with.
Emotional pain is the same.
Your pain hurts so badly not so that you run away from it, avoid it or distract yourself from it. It hurts so that you’ll pay attention and do something about it.
The system works fine.
The pain isn’t at fault, your tools for dealing with it are
The problem is that most of us don’t know how to effectively deal with emotional pain. That’s not your fault. You just weren’t taught useful tools.
Instead, you were taught to use tools that don’t work.
You were taught:
- Get angry. If you’re angry, you’re strong, you’re not weak, you’re doing the hurting, so you’re not being hurt. (Right?)
- Have a drink. Or two, or three or seven or… A bit of alcohol loosens you up, relaxes you, lets you unwind, right?
- Slip into another world. Books, TV, movies, daydreams. Let yourself fly away into fantasy and not even live in your life at all.
- Go shopping. Nothing like some retail therapy to lift your spirits!
- Exercise. Move your body, forget what’s going on in your mind and heart.
- Distract yourself. Candy crush anyone? Hours of scrolling through Facebook or Instagram maybe? Just stop thinking about it.
- Have sex. Lose yourself in the arms of another.
- Chow down. Got a pint of Ben and Jerry’s handy?
- Work. Keep busy at all costs. So busy that you don’t have time or energy to think or feel. And what’s a better way to keep busy than to throw yourself into work?
The problem with these distractions
Here’s what’s wrong with the tools you’ve been taught. Other than exercise (and maybe sex in a loving, consensual relationship), none of these activities leave you feeling better than when you started. Most leave you feeling worse.
Many are outright damaging to your long-term well being.
None of them solve the underlying problem. None of them heal the hurt you’re feeling.
At the end of the day, no matter how or for how long you distract yourself, when you get into bed and pull up the covers, the pain is still there. That’s a hard truth, and I’m sorry that’s the truth, but there it is.
How you learned these useless tools to deal with pain
Do you know why you were taught these useless and often damaging tools? Because that’s what the people around you also knew. It’s what they were taught. It’s what the people around them did, so that’s what they did too.
If you’ve watched any movie or TV show in the last decade, you know that, if you’re down, you’ve had a bad day, you’ve been dumped or something has gone wrong in your life, a bottle of wine/beer/whiskey is your new best friend. Or perhaps you find a quick hookup, go to the mall or binge eat some ice cream. Western culture is riddled with these messages.
You couldn’t not have learned them.
How often do you see a character call up a friend for a good heart-to-heart that doesn’t involve wine or shopping? (And, let’s face it, only the female characters ever do this.) Sometimes, but rarely.
It’s nice to think that we should all be self-aware and enlightened enough to pull useful knowledge out of the ether and reinvent ourselves and our lives. It’s not particularly helpful, though. It happens, sometimes. But most of the time it doesn’t.
Most of the time, we just learn what we’re taught from the people around us, who often mean well.
Think of it this way, if you grew up in France, with French parents, you’d have learned to speak French. You wouldn’t be able to read this article. That’s not your fault, you just weren’t taught how (and possibly also not taught how to use other tools, like Google translate, to at least get a good approximation of what these words mean in the language you understand).
You weren’t taught how to deal with emotional pain and loss. None of us were.
So you’ve been using the tools you were given. That makes sense.
Moving forward through the pain
So what do you do about it now?
Now you’ve got that wonderful self-awareness to know that you’re lacking something you need in order to have a life worth living that doesn’t reduce your capacity for happiness. Now you know it’s time to learn new tools.
The Grief Recovery Method is one of the more effective ways I know to move through pain and come out of the other side free. It’s an evidence-based program that’s been in use for 40 years throughout the world and has helped more than 500,000 people let go of pain that no longer serves them so they can lose the emotional weight and live their life.
Click here to schedule a free, no-pressure, compassionate consultation with me to see if this is the next right step forward for you.