How we can use pain as a catalyst for our transformation

When pain is good for your growth

You probably know by now that we as a species are wired for seeking what is pleasant, what gives us joy, happiness and avoid at all costs what is to the opposite of that, pain, discomfort, rejection, fear etc.

Which is all good, until you realise that the programming, the life experiences cross our wires to the degree that at one point you no longer can tell what's right for you vs. what's wrong for you.

In the beginning of our lives, before our nervous system, our beliefs, thoughts and inner world has been tampered with by the society &by the family we grew up in, we know what we want, we dont second guess it. We know what we need, what's right for us, what's wrong and what we need. As babies, life is perceive as being simple allowing and flowing. When our family begins to tell us no, when they begin to ground us and punish us, dehy &invalidate our needs, we get confused. We don't understand why what we want to do or be is being dismissed as if it's a bad thing. Our internal mechanism is telling us is that it's the right thing for us. We get confused about the intentions of the adults in our lives. We start doubting ourselves and fear creeps up in our souls. We slowly learn to not trust our intuition and inner guidance system because obviously it leads to us getting punished and scolded. The adults in our life seem to antagonize our desires, our natural instincts and our natural needs more and more. They do it through constant criticism, demands, expectations, invalidation and even gaslighting. For the child, what their gut feeling tells them is right is now met with resistance from the mind that says "No, can't do that, you'll only get into trouble". Their brain begins to associate their desires and their needs with negative emotions as a way to keep the child safe from further negative consequences if they were to choose to meet those needs. Let me give you an example.Say we have a little boy that is making autonomous decisions about what he wants to eat, what he wants to wear, what he does after school, what friends he has etc But let's say his mother is having her own personal problems, she is overbearing, having self worth issues that dictate she tethers her son to her, on top of that she is stressed out & her tolerance threshold is very low. When this boy comes back home and tells his mother about the things he did after school (say he loves football and played for a couple of hours and is happy, but his mother hates football and believes its a waste of time), he will be blindsided by his mother scolding him for not doing his homework, criticizing him for not being home early for certain chores, she may even yell at him and withdraw love or send him to his room etc. The boy's nervous system will instantly go into survival response because of his mothers powerful emotional reaction that he was blindsided by. One instance like this can be powerful enough for his nervous system to remain locked into the survival mode if the boy does not find a way to come out of it. And thing is... we never do let the survival mode cycle end and hence burn out of our system, because we don't have emotional literacy to know how to do it and regulate our children into doing so. This is broadly speaking how wounds are created. But it also comes with other effects as well. The boy in our example will inevitably draw conclusions in an unconscious manner about his situation, in a way that his young brain can make sense of what just happened to him. These conclusions are the core beliefs that his mind will store in his subconscious to keep him safe in the future from similar painful situations and that will lead his life from the shadows as a grown man. So some of the limiting beliefs that the boy may come up with are "Doing what I want means I'm a bad person", "Happiness is bad", "I cannot have what I want", "What I think is right is actually wrong", "It's not safe for me to enjoy myself and be happy about my achievements", "I cannot trust myself to know what's right for me" etc. If similar scenarios happen chronically in this boys life and if what he does and loves is being antagonized by his parents, he will, for survival reasons, turn against himself and against what is authentically right for him. If he is being discouraged, overtly or covertly, more than he is encouraged anytime he tries something new, his attempts at autonomy and individualization are punished, he will slowly learn there are consequences for initiating, for growing, for desiring to improve etc. He will turn against himself because the approval of the caregivers is more important than anything else,as he is dependent on them. He does so because the rejection, abandonment, isolation, fear and other strong negative emotions he feels are not something he can manage by himself. A child has to do anything possible to belong in their family at all costs. It's in their biology. Its survival. And so, in such scenarios, belonging in the world comes at the price of the connection to the true self. This boy grows up learning how to deny his whole internal system that guided him as to what is right for him until that traumatic event or multiple similar trauantic events managed to invert everything for him and turned everything upside down and inside out in his mind. As an adult, because his wires were messed with and what is good for him signals to his brain potential danger and what is wrong for him personally, but considered right by the society at large signals safety & belonging, this former boy, now a man, will drift so far away from his soul and true desires, that he cannot consciously recognize them for what they are. Anytime this man is happy now or tries to follow his heart or wants to grow out of his comfort zone, his mind will alert him to the possible dangers (rejection, abandonment, failure etc). Anytime this man will dream of something, his mind will make sure to bring him back into the reality. His mind, his ego that developed a protector personality that is not allowing him to do anything that may be outside of standards and rules actually hurts him now instead of helping him.This protector personality or defense mechanism that developed as a result of those powerful traumatic instances in his childhood that I mentioned earlier, this aspect which kept him safe when he was a young boy from his mother's rage and disapproval by making sure he will always do the right thing to get her love, is now harming him as an adult. How so? By keeping him away from happiness, by keeping him in his comfort zone. Hence by keeping him small. There is pain in evolution and there is pain in not evolving. The choice is always between these two. When the defense mechanisms formed in our childhood is trying to lock us into the comfort zone, we can hardly evolve and blossom into our best version. As in my previius example, if you have been steered far from who you truly are, from your authentic happiness by conditioning from parents who had their own issues to deal with, then you won't and cannot easily tell the difference between what is right for you and what is wrong for you but considered generally right by society. So if you have been conditioned to blindly listen to authority figures and to believe that you cannot trust yourself to make the right call for your life, then you will find yourself in deep agony anytime you need to up level your life in some area. Anytime there is a call for evolution, for betterment, for change and transformation, you may discover you have a hell of a resistance to it. Depending on the depth of the trauma regarding change, free will and knowing what's right for you, you may dread and be terrified when turning your life up a notch is required. Be it a change in jobs, relationships, lifestyle etc. Even though we all have a certain degree of discomfort and resistance to change, as the uncertainty inherent in transformation can feel that way, when it becomes debilitating and affects your entire life, hurting you deeply, then we know for sure that you have a trauma around it.

But because you can only choose between the pain of growth and that of stagnation, you feel stuck. This is a terrible place to be in. I know it because I've been in it for a long time. There is your true self, your soul that wants you to move towards your happiness and achievement and the protector personality that is actually trying to keep you safe from pain by keeping you underachieving, keeping you small because of the meaning you unconsciously gave to happiness, growth & evolution when your were a child. The suffering you're in, if this is your case, comes from feeling like whatever you choose to do, you will end up in pain.

In adulthood, having this trauma translates into procrastination, self sabotaging behavior, coping and defense strategies that prevent you from making the move or the change necessary for that next stage in your life. If you recognize yourself in all this description and you always feel like it's impossible for you to move forward, then I would advice you to have compassion towards yourself. At one point in your life, this defense mechanism that is now hindering your growth was all you had to keep you safe from harm or what your mind perceived as a threat. It served its purpose. Now what we need is a shift in perspective. You need to commit to the self awareness practice of diving deeper into the reason you have this protective mechanism to begin with. What happened in your childhood that taught you that what feels good and right for you opposes what the grown ups in your life wanted for you? Ask yourself. What do you feel you stand to lose if you follow your heart and follow the natural growth and change in your life? What beliefs lie below your awareness, into the shadows? Why is change dangerous? Why is failure dangerous? What about failing makes you not want to begin anything new? What does failure mean to you and how does it feel in your body?Close your eyes and look for these emotions, these limiting beliefs in your body. Where, in which part of your body do you feel they were stored. What sensations to they give rise to? Pay attention and engage your focus into discovering where your past got locked into your body. Get curious about it. Let it speak to you and listen without judging. The process of getting back in touch with your inner world and intuition may be long or may be short, depending on how deeply rooted your trauma is. The shift in perspective can start to happen once you awaken to this realization: you don't fear change, growth or doing what you love. You fear what you make it mean. You fear losing something very valuable to you if you follow your heart, if you evolve and grow etc.What is it. The pain of growth is natural. The degree to which the growth feels painful depends on our willingness or not to shed our old identity around staying small and the meanings we added long time ago. The pain of stagnation is about lingering in the familiar, in the predictable, hence in safety, but at the expense of your expansion as a human being. We will find thousands of justifications, rationalizations and excuse for why we don't grow into our better version. But even tough these justifications are valid, they are void of an actual substance. Evolution, transformation and following one's heart can be terrifying. And that's ok. What I wanted to illustrate here in this video is the reason as to why it is so hard for many of us to easily embrace change when its knocking on our door so that you can understand and have compassion towards yourself when this happens. Growth is painful, but it's the kind of pain that allows blossoming, clearing the space for something new and better to come.

Everything is hard in the beginning. It was hard learning how to walk when you were a baby. But you persevered.

Everytime you fell, you stood up. Now as an adult, you take walking for granted, but in the beginning, it was painful and difficult. Now you just get up and leave without a seconds thought. It's called unconscious competence, because you're so good at it you don't have to think about how to do it anymore. So just like when you learned how to walk, you took baby steps, if you allow change and growth in your life little by little, so as to not feel like its an overwhelming stifling experience that you cannot keep up with, you will be able to change AND at the same time still feel you're in control and that nothing has gone wrong. Finding your way back to yourself and to your inner guidance may be a winding road. Follow what gives you a sense of relief and fulfillment. It is showing you the path to yourself. Reclaiming your inner power, your authenticity, your happiness and your aliveness entail saying yes to the discomfort of growth when it shows up in your life.

In the end, I'll leave you with this: Pain is counterproductive when it ensures your short term safety to the detriment of your long term growth, of your truth and your joy. But pain can be good when it alerts you to the beginning of a new chapter in your life. Knowing the difference is knowing yourself. So which discomfort will you choose? You will always have this choice available for you. It's never too late or never too early.