It can seem like a natural reaction to avoid painful emotions. We will distract ourselves by watching TV or eating takeaways, playing computer games. It makes sense. If we are not feeling those emotions directly then perhaps they have gone away - we have somehow addressed them because at least in the moment anyway we feel better. That must surely be a good thing right?
Unfortunately it is often more complicated than that and if we think of emotional pain as being similar to physical pain we get a better understanding of why.
So lets make that comparison.
You would agree I think that physical pain is unpleasant and best avoided. So if you put your hand on a hot stove what would you do?
You might have a few options. Distract yourself from the pain instead of moving your hands by thinking of something else? Or you could deny the pain is there by taking pain killers and leaving your hands on the stove thus numbing the pain though not dealing with it at source?
Of course a more effective action would be to automatically remove your hands from the stove. That would at least remove you from the stimulus of the pain very quickly. This seems the sensible solution.
What else is going on in this instantaneous moving of your hands though? No matter how quickly you move them, it seems there is a process at work here: your mind is made aware of the pain, the kind of pain that is being felt and that the stove is causing it. This is an acknowledgement of the sensation, of its nature and of its cause. When all this has been assessed we quickly move our hands.
We tend not to do this with emotional pain. We often deny it is happening or important, we refuse to say what is really at its heart - its just a bad week or being too tired. And finally we don't take ourselves, as best we can, away from the source of the pain. We use distraction and denial and continue to experience the pain.
As this analogy evidences that simply does not work. With mindfulness we can notice the pain, the cause and remove ourselves to some extent perhaps from its source. Of course some things are such that we cannot just walk away - we cannot always remove our hands from the stove - but with a better awareness of what is causing us pain we might have the ability to at least turn the heat down a little.
Our emotional pain is not that different from our physical sensations. If we treat them with the same respect we are likely to understand ourselves much better and make better decisions.
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