Not Acknowledging Your Pain Might Be Hurting You More
By: Anangsha Alammyan
Tags: Self Improvement, Psychology, Advice, Ideas, Inspiration

The Indicator of Discomfort

As Medical News Today states, physical pain is an unpleasant sensation and emotional experience that links to tissue damage. It allows the body to react and prevent further damage.

Pain on a psychological level can be a similar indicator of emotional anguish. If you are feeling consistently low, maybe it’s an indication that something’s wrong with your surroundings — a way for your subconscious to rebel against your current situation and prompt you to get out of it.

If you turn away from it and only focus on the positive, how would you know there’s something wrong? Ignoring the symptoms and sweeping uncomfortable realizations under the carpet would only mean forcing yourself to adjust to the distress you’re in. If you don’t acknowledge the pain and try to get to the root cause, how can you reach a viable solution?

Here are some ways I’ve adopted to identify the root cause. You can adopt the same to embrace growth:

Don’t fill your head with external stimuli all the time

In other words: don't check your phone each time you’re bored. Sure, podcasts and audiobooks are a great way to improve your productivity, but they snatch away the opportunity to spend time with your thoughts.

There was a time I used to run away from being alone because I was terrified of what demons I’d have to deal with. But in 2020, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: self-awareness comes with a price, but it’s the best (and probably the only) tool for growth.

Yes, it’s hard to listen to your thoughts, but you’ve got to do it to learn what kind of person you are. Without this, no amount of self-help content will help. Silence offers opportunities for self-reflection and daydreaming, which activates multiple parts of the brain. It gives us time to turn down the inner noise and increase awareness of what matters most.

Write what you feel and be honest with yourself

It’s difficult for me to be completely transparent during conversations with people. However, my journal is the friend I turn to for solace. It’s where I write all my thoughts out and am unabashedly honest with myself.

Journaling has cleared my head of a ton of clutter and helped me acknowledge my innermost feelings and desires. You might find some emotions too hard to acknowledge, but remember that it’s your journal. No one else is going to read it. Be as honest and open with yourself as possible. Reflective journaling can be a great tool for self-awareness and personal growth. It can help you prioritize problems and track any symptoms so you can recognize triggers and learn ways to better control them.

Allow yourself to just be

There’ve been times when something triggered me, my immediate instinct was to start binge-watching a show or lose myself in a book. But several sessions with my therapist have helped me understand that such acts will only cure the symptoms, not the root cause.

Instead, my therapist advised me to embrace the sadness. She said it was okay to wallow in self-pity for as long as I needed, but then pull myself back together and move on.

You don’t have to be happy all the time, as long as you don’t let the sadness overcome and take control. A book that helped me come to terms with this is How to Be a Movie Star by TJ Klune. The novel carries such an accurate representation of mental health, the narrative took my breath away. One of the quotes that gave me strength was: