Clean Pain, Dirty Pain
In his book Feeling Good, Dr. David Burns says he often gets the following question: “How do you know the difference between sadness and depression?” His answer is that sadness moves through you and depression doesn’t. Depression is static; it sits inside and causes other problems. This is a succinct explanation of clean pain versus dirty pain.
Our intention with mind management is not to become robots who never feel emotions. We aren’t trying to “think positive” or always be happy. The aim is to allow all our emotions, the whole range, because that’s what this human life is about. We will never get rid of all painful or unpleasant feelings, and we wouldn’t want to. Experiencing all the emotions is what creates a full and fulfilling life. (As a reminder, after allowing emotions, the second goal of mind management is to become aware of our thinking and how it affects our lives and to learn methods of tweaking and reframing our thoughts if we want a different outcome.)
So, we want to allow all our emotions, but not let them get stuck inside us. The concept of clean pain versus dirty pain is a useful way to explain the difference and to understand what to watch out for. Clean pain is the primary feeling that comes in real time. When something upsetting happens, we feel sad (or disappointed or frightened). This emotion helps us understand our thoughts and responses to the event. If we allow the feeling, it moves through us (maybe over minutes, maybe over days, maybe longer, depending on the significance of the event), and then we feel better. Allowing emotion feels cathartic and fitting. It’s not necessarily pleasant, but it’s cleansing.
However, most of us don’t like the sensation of negative emotion, so we attempt to avoid it. Ironically, this only intensifies the pain, and then we are more afraid of it, and on the cycle goes. This is what we call dirty pain: resisting the feeling and hoping that makes it go away. Another way we generate dirty pain is by making the primary event mean something bad about ourselves or our lives. We overreact (“I’m the worst mom ever!”), go to the past (“This always happens!”) or project into the future (“Things will never get better!”). Dirty pain is either not feeling the emotion enough (resisting it) or feeling it too much (making it mean something). Clean pain is the Goldilocks zone of just-right: we feel it, allow it to go through us, and then move on.
Resisting Emotions
It is natural for us to resist negative emotions. No one likes to feel bad. We try to push down the feelings, so we don’t have to deal with them. But this is like trying to push a beachball under water. The pressure increases and it can’t be held down forever. Resisting emotion looks like tightening up against it (something we all do instinctively and don’t even realize it) or buffering away from it by eating, using substances, or scrolling through/watching our screens.
You can teach yourself to interrupt this pattern and be more present with your feelings (to feel the clean pain instead of creating dirty pain). When you want to change a habit there are three stages. The first stage is coming back to the situation after it happened. You look back on your day and realize you have been pushing down your emotions. You forgive yourself (because you’re a human, after all), and then mentally get back into that moment and process the difficult feeling (using the 6-step process found here).
After doing this a few times you will enter the second stage of habit change, where you realize you’re resisting in the moment. Once you recognize it as it’s happening, you can take a minute and make a course correction in real time, reminding yourself right then that allowing the emotion is better in the long run.
The last stage is when you no longer resist the emotion at all but simply allow each painful feeling to be experienced as it comes. The 6-step process to allowing feelings is about relaxing into them, knowing you created them with your thoughts but that’s okay, and finding the emotion in your body. Doing the steps allows the emotion to pass through you.
Making Negative Emotion Mean Something Bad
The second path to dirty pain is through creating a hurtful story around the primary feeling. For example, if you’re disappointed that you didn’t get a job promotion and then you follow that with “I’ll never move ahead in this company!” These types of notions add another layer of emotional pain and prevents you from allowing the primary feeling (disappointment).
We move into dirty pain anytime we have a version of the belief “This shouldn’t be happening.” When we think that, we try to push away the bad feeling and we resist reality. This not only prevents us from dealing with our feelings, but it blocks any creative problem solving if we want to change something in our current situation. Negative emotion blinds us. It restricts our vision, literally and figuratively. It’s the emotional equivalent of sticking our fingers in our ears, squeezing our eyes shut, and yelling, “La-la-la-la!”
One of my standard thoughts that gets me into dirty pain is “I’m such a negative person.” If I have an unpleasant emotion, I make it mean that am bad at being happy and that I should be different. This type of thinking sends me into a spiral of difficult feelings (and thoughts) that is much harder to get out of than simply allowing the primary feeling in the first place and moving on with my day.
An Example
One woman who called in to be coached by my life coach, Jody, was struggling with infertility. She had recently had another miscarriage and felt devastated. She said, “I keep thinking ‘This will never work,’ and I picture myself old and lonely and sad. I know I shouldn’t think like that, but I can’t help it!”
Jody explained to her the concept of clean pain and dirty pain and encouraged her to allow the sadness. She said, “Don’t push away your hurt feelings, that doesn’t help. That may send them down deep insider you, but they don’t go away. You should be thinking what you are. This is a really difficult experience. But if you allow the clean pain, the sadness and disappointment, it won’t feel so bad. I know it seems scary to let yourself feel that, but I promise you it will work through you, and you will feel better afterwards.”
Jody then explained how the caller’s thoughts “This will never work” keeps her in dirty pain, also. The woman’s mind wants to keep her safe from the emotional pain of trying again to get pregnant, and so it sends up that idea. But she can use her higher brain to override the default message. She can say, “I’m going to keep trying, even though there is risk of emotional pain.”
Jody further explained, “Your mind is telling you that this isn’t supposed to be happening, that something has gone wrong. But what if that’s not true? What if this is the experience you’re supposed to have? Maybe there’s something in store for you that you can’t even imagine yet. Your brain thinks that certain circumstances can derail what is supposed to happen, but that’s not true. Nothing can get in the way of you having the life experience you were meant to have. You can believe that even when you don’t have a lot of evidence for it.”
Whenever things don’t go as we wanted or expected, there will be some clean pain. It’s okay to feel disappointed, sad, or angry in these moments. These negative emotions are all part of the human experience. Allowing these feelings can permit them to pass through us. But resisting that emotion, building on it with further distressing thoughts, and letting the feelings fester and grow don’t help us. When we’re dealing with a problem, we need to find the clean pain and allow that part, and also identify the ways we are creating dirty pain. That part we can let go.
Try this on: “It’s okay for me to feel disappointed about this situation. I am the creator of my feelings, but I know how to allow all my emotions, the whole range.”
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“Disappointment comes in the gap between expectation and reality.”
