Pain Now or Later

Buffering postpones the feeling. Allowing it gives you a chance to process it.

You feel anxious, so you eat. You feel frustrated, so you drink. You feel something you do not want to feel, so you find an activity that takes your attention somewhere else.

For a moment, that may seem to work.

But the feeling has not been processed. The thought creating it has not been examined. You have postponed the experience, and now you may also have the consequences of what you did to avoid it.

The choice is not always pain or no pain. It can be pain now or pain later.

A life without pain is not the goal

No one gets a completely painless life. I teach that life is fifty-fifty: pain and the opposite of pain are part of the experience.

When I say my life feels amazing, I do not mean it has no negative emotion. I have made peace with that part of being human.

Opening to painful feelings also lets us become more open to other feelings. We do not have to close down our emotional lives because we dislike part of what is there.

The work is not to guarantee that pain will never happen. It is to develop the capacity to experience it without continually trying to outrun it.

Notice what you learned to avoid

When I began understanding emotional eating, I had to learn the difference between physical hunger and a feeling I did not want to experience.

I was disconnected from my body. As a child, I did not know how to process the anxiety and fear I felt, so I learned to numb out, pretend, people-please, and ignore my emotional experience.

I do not look at that as something I did wrong. It was a way of coping with what I did not know how to handle.

As an adult, I had more capacity to understand my thoughts and process my feelings. But I was still practicing the earlier pattern.

Food helped me avoid feeling. Alcohol did, too. So did drama and creating upheaval that gave me many practical things to focus on instead of looking at the grief, conflict, or pain underneath.

Buffering does not erase the thought

If eating a cookie permanently removed emotional pain, that would be a different conversation. But the thought can keep running in the background.

The feeling requires more avoidance. You have to keep buffering, and that becomes exhausting.

Sometimes the emotion appears in a reaction that seems much larger than the immediate situation. You may become furious at a driver while there is far more going on in your thinking than the moment on the road.

If you never allow the feeling, you also miss the opportunity to find and question the thought creating it.

You become more practiced at avoiding your emotional life instead of becoming more aware of it.

Allowing pain does not make it pleasant

When you decide to feel instead of buffer, you become willing to experience the vibration in your body. You breathe and let it be there.

Without resistance, the intensity can soften. That does not mean pain becomes pleasant. Pain still feels like pain.

But it can feel different from fighting it.

Think about getting a shot. You can know it will hurt and remain still, or become so frightened and resistant that the whole experience grows more difficult. Allowing the moment to be painful is different from requiring it to be painless.

I want you to notice that difference with emotional pain. You can accept that a feeling is here without making its presence another emergency.

Say yes and describe it

Your brain may immediately respond to pain by saying no and looking for a fix. Practice saying yes instead.

You are not saying you love the circumstance or want the feeling to last forever. You are acknowledging the experience that is already happening.

Then describe the sensation. What does the vibration feel like? Where do you notice it? What happens as you pay attention?

Describing requires you to become a witness instead of remaining only at the effect of the feeling.

You can also write the thoughts creating it. Silence, journaling, and coaching have all helped me understand and process pain without immediately trying to replace it.

Allow the urge to escape, too

Along with the pain, you may feel an urge to eat, drink, scroll, call someone, or make a dramatic change.

That urge can also be allowed.

You do not have to obey it simply because it appears. You can experience the desire to avoid the feeling while remaining willing to feel.

Remind yourself that postponing does not remove the work. It can prolong it. You may trade a direct emotional experience for days of avoidance and additional consequences.

You have time to process what is here. Delaying it is not necessarily saving time.

Bring awareness closer to the moment

At first, you may not recognize buffering until afterward. You eat four cookies and only then realize you did not know why.

Use that moment. As soon as you become aware, look at what happened. What were you feeling? What were you thinking before you ate?

You do not have to abandon the practice because you missed the beginning.

As you repeatedly examine what happened afterward, you can become better at noticing during the experience and eventually anticipating the pattern.

Awareness is a skill. If you have practiced avoidance for years, becoming aware in the moment may take practice, too.

Question whether pain is a problem

When you think of every painful feeling as a problem, you naturally want a solution that makes the feeling disappear.

Buffering can look like that solution because it gives temporary relief.

Instead, question the premise. What if emotional pain is part of being alive and something you can process?

People willingly experience physical discomfort when they exercise because they see a purpose in it. You can consider willingness with your emotional life, too.

That does not mean attacking yourself for being in pain. Students of the Model sometimes decide that because thoughts create feelings, having a painful feeling means they are doing the work wrong.

You are a human with a brain. Having a thought that creates pain is not a failure of worthiness or proof that you should know better.

Choose compassion during the experience

I distinguish compassion from trying to make pain comfortable. Pain is not comfortable, and constantly trying to soften it through an escape can become another form of buffering.

Compassion means understanding what it is like to be human while you are feeling it. You can stay with yourself instead of condemning yourself or demanding that the experience end immediately.

That develops trust in your relationship with yourself.

You also do not have to talk someone else out of crying or treat their emotion as a problem you must solve. You can allow them space to experience what is happening.

Capacity can make your life bigger

The result of learning to process pain is not a promise that you will have less pain forever.

You may become willing to do more. You may risk rejection, attempt a bigger goal, or put yourself into an experience you previously avoided.

I still feel fear. The difference is that I am not afraid of being able to process the painful feeling. I know I can be with it.

The next time pain appears, notice the choice to postpone it or allow it now. Say yes, describe it, allow the urge to escape, and bring compassion.

You can let the feeling be part of your life without letting the attempt to avoid it make your life smaller.