Emotional Pain Emotional pain has long been seen as some kind of handicap. People who spend their time in therapists' offices are perceived as kind of sick, weak, weird, not really reliable. In fact these people are the only ones who at least try to do something about it - most others have their emotional issues too, only that they hide them so well that they don't even notice them themselves anymore, and so these issues have all the time in the world to wreak havoc in their relationships, families, professional lives, and their physical health. The intense negativity of emotional pain is what brings most of us into therapy. There are so many terrible feelings that spoil our day - fear, grief, aggression, remorse. We cannot think. We cannot work. We cannot be a good mother or a good father or a good spouse. Sooner or later we decide that we have to do something to get rid of that pain...
Does Pain Have A Function? But what if the pain has an actual function? If we look at the body, we can see this principle at work. Pain warns us if we come too close to a hot plate. Pain warns us about the dangers of taking a knife by the blade. A flu gives us aches all over the body, saying "can you please stop using up energy for silly things like making money, I have to fight a dangerous virus now." There is a message in physical pain. It seems to tell us that something is wrong - but more precisely it tells us that there is something to do - we have to get active to correct our course of action. Avoid the hot plate, take the knife by the handle: the message is "Install better habits!". Stop making money, go to bed until you feel better - the message is "Allow your body to concentrate on fighting the virus!" And so it goes through all areas of life, not physical only, emotional also.
Alarm System This alarm lamp tells a driver to check the engine in his car. He better does not ignore it, or the motor may fly through the hood in another 10 minutes!
What if emotional pain has a useful function, like the alarm lamps in a car's cockpit?
Such is the function of pain. We have learned that much about body pain. Chest pain = heart attack = call the ambulance = survive. Now is not the moment to regret that we have waited too long - we jump into Immediate action! Emotional pain we just try to get rid of - instead of asking for the message it wants to deliver, the warning it is trying to convey. We could simply imagine to talk to a pain and ask "What is your message?" And it could say: "You have lied to your husband - learn to be honest", or "You are physically unfit - go do some fitness training", or another one of a million of possible messages.
Messages In Pain All these messages taken together, it is always "Learn more!" Learn how to take a knife by the handle, learn to use the right type of salt in the kitchen, learn to read food labels, learn to respect others, learn to be patient with yourself, learn how to focus, learn how to relax... There is a lesson to learn in each pain, and it often goes back to the past. Even if we don't believe in life planning prior to birth - there is a big controversy among practitioners about that -, one fact remains: any part of our life that does not really thrive can be traced back to its roots, whether in present time, in our youth, our childhood, our mother's pregnancy, or in a previous lifetime, and a feeling of negativity or pain is the red thread that can lead us to it. Just like here in our "Life Lesson Processing Tree": Pain has an essential function in the big picture.
Life Lesson Processing (LLP) uses emotional pain as the red thread to trace any suffering branch of your life back to its roots in the past.
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