Dealing with Pain

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I used to be so scared of pain; of being heartbroken, of getting hurt, so I built a wall around heart to 'protect' myself.

From an early age, I took a liking to reading relationship books and magazines, and even though I fell in love with the love shared between two people in most of the romance stories I read, I instead, concentrated on the heartbreaks. "Man hurts woman" and "woman hurts man" became my favourite romance themes and I unconsciously gravitated towards these.

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The result?

I developed a warped view of relationships, missed out on a lot of potentially beautiful relationship with peopke who couldnt deal with my extreme trust issues and my inability to truly let go.

In the words of one guy

"You are like a closed book and I can't deal. "

They say you attract what you believe and see in your heart always and I attracted pain like bees to honey.

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How I Finally Broke Free of my Self-Imposed Prison

It took a while, but I was finally able to free myself from the prison I'd put myself in. To to be free, I had to come to the realization that pain is not an entirely bad thing as t here are good pain and also bad pain

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Good Pain
Good pain is pain that changes you and builds you up for the good. These are pain we can't but go through as we need them to grow.

While they exist, they might cripple us, but in the long run they do more good than harm.

This is the type of pain you feel when you have the courage to walk out of a toxic relationship, even though leaving would initially hurt a lot.

This is also the pain you feel as you watch a business you've painstakingly built slowly crumble. Youcan choose to feel devastated at losing money and time invested into the business, or you could see it as a lesson of how to better manage your next business and succeed.

Bad Pain
Now, bad pain on the other hand, is the pits and no one prays for this. With bad pain you learn absolutely no valuable lesson. This pain comes (deeply sometimes as to cripple you) and you can only struggle to stay above it or you would drown.

This is the kind of pain you feel losing a child or a spouse to death. It fills you up completely and you lose a part of yourself with the passing of this loved one.

How to Deal with Bad Pain

• Understand that in life, no one has it good all the times. Bad pain comes to make us appreciate the good times we've had and still will have.

• Hold unto the memories of the good times. These are pictures you should have framed and hang in the corridors of your heart always.

• Continuing to wallow in your pain will only make you lose a little bit of yourself daily and also lose out in all the beautiful things around you. Hard as it might seem, you should pick yourself up; find a reason (s) to live again.

• While you shouldn't wallow in this pain, you should also give yourself a reasonable amount of time to overcome it. Allow yourself go through the stages of grief fully so when your healing comes, it's whole. Take it one step at a time. You have been hurt (possibly devasted) and you have a right to your pain.

• While it's natural to want to shut people out, you should instead, accept as much love as is given at this time as this will make your healing faster.