Why Your Potential Is Buried In Your Pain (And How to Reframe It)
Because we are hardwired to avoid pain, we often overlook opportunities to change the way we think about the things that hurt us. These three insights are designed to painlessly empower you to reframe your pain and reclaim the potential trapped within.
1. If you avoid pain like a bad neighborhood, you’ll also avoid all the hidden gems it contains.
What if that bad neighborhood has some of the best authentic food in the city? You’d probably still avoid going there because no meal is worth getting your car stolen. But you don’t have to go into your pain to get something good from it, you just have to be open to something good coming out of it. Maybe that restaurant delivers. Maybe they cater outside events. If you never look at what the bad neighborhoods of your inner landscape have to offer, you’ll never form a desire to let that good stuff into your life and it’ll be forever frozen in potential purgatory.
Reframe Your Pain: Don’t buy into the bad. Just as some things are too good to be true, most of our fear around pain is too bad to be real. Yes slamming your fingers in a car door will hurt, but that shouldn’t stop you from ever getting in a car again. Pain is not a bad thing. It’s an indicator that there’s a more harmonious way to do what you’re doing that’s meant to stop you in your tracks until you discover how to move forward without hurting yourself.
2. The more you avoid being hurt, the more you force yourself to play safe.
So long as we have the ability to control our circumstances, we have the ability to keep pain at a distance. But the more we play it safe, the more limited we become. By exercising our control to avoid getting hurt, we also avoid taking risks and avoid paths that lead to uncertainty. This reinforces the status quo and prevents us from learning what we’re truly capable of. Sometimes the very things that scare us, are the experiences that will show us we had nothing to fear all along.
Reframe Your Pain: What if pain wasn’t an indicator to exercise further control, but an invitation to open yourself up to easier options? Life doesn’t have to be hard. Pain is here to keep us from putting up with more than we bargained for.
3. The more you avoid hurting others, the more you force yourself to play small.
If you are afraid to hurt others, you will naturally play down to the level of those around you. The better you do in life, the worse others will feel about their life in comparison; so you’ll minimize your accomplishments and avoid sharing or follow through on big ambitions. The more love you share with someone, the more hurt they’ll feel if the relationship one day ends; so you’ll be reluctant to love to your fullest unless you’re sure things will work out.
Reframe Your Pain: In the long run, you don’t hurt people by inspiring them to become more. You hurt them by making it normal to settle for being less. Trading short-term pain for long-term gain is a recipe for enriching your future. Trading short-term gain for long-term pain is a recipe for feeling like your problems are always bigger than you are.
Picture credits:
Rolands Zilvinskis: The Frame
Grace Madeline: The Picture Inside It
There's a lot of wisdom in the idea of reframing pain. It really does help to turn bad experiences into something good. We'd never learn without pain. Overcoming fear is such a big part of that learning experience. In a lot of various ways, it makes you stronger.
Well put.
This is the key right here. The ability to turn bad into good is the difference between being a victim of circumstances and being totally free to author your own life. It's so important, and yet we often just accept pain at face value and run away from what it's trying to teach us.
Yeah, it's perspective that stops you from living as a victim. Might not be able to stop the hardships, but you can change how you respond to it. I wish I'd learned that sooner in life. But I know now, and it helps a lot.
Nice article, this was exactly my problem for most of my life, I'd avoid pain as much as possible. Eventually it got to the point where I was even avoiding discomfort.
What it ended up doing was numbing me out, like I couldn't even feel, I was just trying to avoid it all, even if it wasn't that bad. Part of my spiritual practice these days is locating and addressing pain, just paying attention to it and rediscovering why I tried to cover the pain up
resteemed ya
There's that common theme again: learning from pain. This has been recurring for me all year - speaking to me. Think I'm starting to catch the hint.
I just resteemed your resteem. :P Every time I check my feed lately there's something from you at the top. Always good stuff, too.
Haha I try, I should be on here more doing my part in curating all the good stuff
You do plenty from what I can tell. You should be out there living so you can come back here and write all about what you've learned. ;)
This is really cool. Almost like doing a pain autopsy. I think when I feel hurt by something I often just try to focus on what I do want instead of exploring the negative. It's not until it repeatedly comes up in unavoidable ways that I agree to look deeper. I love your more proactive approach! I will definitely adopt something similar as I look to transform my relationship with pain.
Awesome, ya it has been hugely helpfully. And pain really shows itself in a number of ways too, emotional pain can reveal itself as physical pain or out of line posture(which seems to hide pain), so we can approach our pain from different angles and relieve it just the same. Pretty cool stuff, pain is our friend, just a misunderstood one
Hear, hear!
so nice post i like very much follow up @mohdmohsin thanks.
Hi @joshbillings! Thank you for sharing - worth the click. I will also resteem this. Greetings
Good points, must take them with me........thks
Sorry to have missed this article earlier. I really like your breakdown of the points here.
It is so easy to play into this complacent mediocrity. And I don't mean mediocrity in a traditional production sense, more so when people become fine with being the mediocre version of who they could be. Who they should be.