Accepting Pain

Make room for what hurts without adding the suffering of fighting it.

Some of the most painful experiences of my life became much harder because I resisted feeling them.

When I look back at breakups and disappointments from when I was younger, I can see the difference between what happened and what I was thinking about what happened. There was pain in the loss. Then I generated more pain by fighting it.

I was unwilling to accept the experience I was having.

Learning to accept pain is part of learning to feel. It gives us a way to be present with our lives instead of constantly trying to escape them.

Distinguish physical pain from emotional pain

I work with people who experience physical aches and pain every day. One of the first things I want them to distinguish is the physical sensation from the emotion they feel about it.

There is pain in your body. Then there are your thoughts about that pain.

I learned this very personally after breaking my toe. I caught it on the edge of a hotel bed and heard it crack. I was on the floor, comforting myself because it hurt so much.

The physical pain was real. I also had choices about how I would think about it afterward.

Accepting that my toe was broken did not mean pretending it was fine or running on it. It meant acknowledging what was happening without adding resistance through my thinking.

Physical pain may be telling us that something needs attention. I want to understand the cause and treat an injury when possible. Acceptance is not ignoring that.

Use the Model to see the extra layer

In the Self-Coaching Model, I put a physical sensation of pain in the circumstance line. Then I look at my thought about that sensation and the feeling the thought creates.

The sensation and the emotion are different parts of the Model.

If I am angry that I am in pain, now I have physical pain and anger. If I am telling myself I cannot stand it, I have the sensation and the emotional experience of that thought.

When the pain begins with a thought, I put the emotion in the feeling line. Someone can tell you that a person you love has died, and your thought about that news can create grief you feel throughout your body.

That does not mean you should not feel grief. It helps you understand what is creating the emotion.

Sometimes an ongoing emotional experience also becomes a physical sensation we can observe. I may place that sensation in the circumstance line and work on how I am thinking about it now.

The point is to distinguish the experience from the thoughts about the experience. That gives you more awareness of what you are adding.

Being present changed the experience

A student came to coach training while living with stage four cancer. He had significant pain in his lungs, and he was angry that the pain was interfering with his ability to be present in class.

I showed him that he was waking up with pain and then adding anger and resistance to it.

The next day, he practiced accepting the pain and allowing it to be part of his day. It changed how he could show up and relate to the class.

His wife was there too. When he was in pain, she wanted to fix it. She did not want to accept that he was hurting.

We talked about letting the truth of his pain be there. He did not have to hide it from her, and she did not have to immediately make it go away.

Being present together with what was real became an intimate experience. We were not rushing to make everything positive. We were holding space for something painful.

I see this with emotional pain too. Someone comes to us hurting, and we want to get them out of it. We want to delete the feeling rather than be with them while they feel it.

What if we could accept it first?

Acceptance gives you room to breathe

When you are in a hurry to get out of pain, that urgency can create more tension. You are hurting, and now you are stressed about how quickly you can stop hurting.

Being patient and present creates some space around the experience.

I remember being with my sister while she was in labor. She wanted a natural childbirth, but she was trying to get out of her body to get away from the pain.

I told her she needed to be present in her body to deliver the baby. If she wanted to do it that way, she would need to make peace with the pain that was part of the process.

Seeing pain as something belonging to an experience can change our relationship with it.

With emotional pain, I teach that the feeling itself is harmless. That was a significant shift for me. I had associated pain with harm so closely that it seemed impossible to separate them.

But I could experience an emotion without turning it against myself or deciding I could not handle it.

Practice thoughts that support acceptance

Sometimes I simply name what is happening: This is pain.

I do not need an elaborate explanation. Naming the experience helps me be with it.

Other thoughts I practice are that I can feel pain, that how I think about it matters, and that I can breathe into it. Sometimes I remind myself that moving toward the experience might help.

If I am going to be in pain either way, my choice about what I do now is mine. I can complain. I can resist. I can notice what happens when I accept it.

I want to get better at processing pain, not at resisting it and making it worse.

I have practiced this with hunger, with a workout, while holding a yoga pose, and while someone tells me something I find emotionally painful. I practice staying in the space of feeling.

Notice the story you tell about what might hurt

One day there was a bee flying around in my car. I noticed how frightened I was about being stung.

My reaction to the anticipation was much bigger than the pain I imagined experiencing from the sting. I was creating drama around something that had not happened.

That gave me another opportunity to see how my thoughts affected my experience of pain.

If you are hurting, consider whether you are using the pain as evidence that something is wrong with you as a person. There may be something in your body that needs to be diagnosed or addressed. But your pain does not make you defective as a human.

You can be present with what hurts. You can understand your thoughts about it. You can practice allowing the feeling before trying to change it.

Pain is part of life. The more willing we are to experience it, the less unnecessary suffering we create by fighting it.