What to Do When You Can’t Make Peace With It
How to overcome emotional pain
You carry it inside you, like a benign tumor. Except it’s not entirely benign. Emotional pain hurts. The source and intensity will vary from person to person, but the symptoms are similar.
Sadness, grief, despair, anger, hopelessness, and regret. To name a few.
No one gets to escape emotional pain. Sooner or later we all experience it. Some of us get off lightly. Maybe we lose our job or navigate a divorce. No fun, but survivable.
For others, things can be devastating. They lose a spouse to cancer, or endure years of horrific victimization.
Traumatizing events may pass, but the memories remain. They feel like a heavy weight, pulling you below the surface waters of your life, into depths of suffocating sadness.
How do we survive emotional pain when we can’t make peace with it?
Ironic process theory
It seems the more we try not to focus on something, we only end up magnifying it. Like when someone tells you not to think of pink elephants, all you can do is think…
