Love WellSample

Pretending away the Pain

When I think about how to handle pain, I see myself as a kid in a pool, trying to hold a plastic ball underwater. Eventually the ball slips from my hands and comes up flying out of the water. And more than once, it smacks me in the face.

What you submerge eventually finds its way to the surface.

The deeper it is submerged, the greater the splash.

For some people, it becomes natural to keep that bull underwater at whatever cost, sometimes without even realizing it.

I have met people who seem shallow. They have trouble moving the conversation past weather, food, or football. When you drop down to the deeper things about life, they look at you glassy-eyed as if you’re speaking Icelandic.

They truly have no idea what you are talking about.

For a while this frustrated me in my interactions with people.

In time I have come to have compassion for them.

They hurt someone or were hurt: Deeply.

And so they disassociate. They live a life of pretend.

In The Exquisite Risk, Mark Nepo writes,

“We tend to occupy ourselves with worrisome activities and preoccupations in order to divert ourselves from the necessary task of feeling what is ours alone to feel. Rather than feel our loneliness, we will run nakedly to strangers.

Rather than feel the brunt of being abandoned, we will construct excuse after excuse to reframe the relationship. Rather than feel our sadness and disappointment, we will replay the event to ourselves and others like a film with no ending. It is this cultivation of neurosis and all its scripts that feeds the drama of our bleeding.”

How many of us have failed miserably at something, and rather than own it and grow from it we keep talking about how we didn’t get a break and someone else did and how unfair it was?

You know what? We just keep bleeding. We can’t even begin to heal the wound, because we pretend the wound isn’t there.