How Naming Your Pain Can Help You Overcome It
I kept my suffering a secret. Telling my story changed everything.
It was only after the call was over that I had the panic attack. A rising heat in my face and chest, a dark cloud closing from all sides of my vision. I began to hyperventilate through tears that didn’t quite know how to come.
The reason for the call might sound innocuous enough. I’m a creative writing student, and I had just shared some of my writing with a teacher whom I knew to be profoundly religious. The excerpts I’d sent her were from a larger book project in which I am trying to finally tackle the feelings I’ve been suppressing for 30 years—my response to being mercilessly bullied for being an atheist for most of my childhood.
I’d made sure to send her only the excerpts that didn’t reveal my atheism. But she sensed there was something more to the project.
“Why are you writing this book? What’s motivating you?” she asked me. It was a direct question. And I choked. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t make myself.
In the past year I’ve realized just how much hiding my true self, and the hurt that motivates so much of what I do has made it impossible for me to let go of that pain. And what I’ve discovered along the way is that the key to overcoming pain or shame is to name it.
Write it. Speak it aloud. Only this will take away its power.
Keeping Secrets & Suppressing Your Pain
“Growing up atheist in America, in this day and age? Come on, it couldn’t have been that bad.”
I’ve heard this before. There have been very few people in my life to whom I’ve dared to reveal that I’m an atheist, and this has been their common response—to dismiss my suffering as minimal. A close friend of mine even referred to it as “light trauma.” But I want to share my story now, not only to model what I’m going to recommend in this article but to give you a picture of what suppressing your story looks like—so you can see if you’re doing the same.
I grew up in a city and a neighboring county in the United States—both in urban and rural environments. When I was in the third grade, a fellow student—let’s call him “Jeff”—found out I didn’t know what God was. (My parents were atheists.) He spread the word around the class and the news was shocking to my fellow third-graders.
Later on that year, I offhandedly mentioned to a fellow classmate that I thought whales might be related to cows; my mother had taught me about evolution and I thought they looked alike. Third-grader logic, ya know? Anyway, the rumor of what I’d said spread again, until the teacher finally called me to her desk and confronted me about whether I’d said it or not. It was clear that she was angry—that it wasn’t an acceptable thing for me to say—so I vehemently denied it.
By this time, the daily waves of shame had set it. I set about “fixing” myself. A classmate taught me a prayer, and I said it every night on my knees, though I never received any sign that it was working—from God or my classmates. Over the summer I set about making myself fit in better, buying high tops like all the other kids had. When I came back for the fourth grade, I pointed out my high tops to Jeff. He responded loudly in front of the whole class: “Yeah, but you still don’t believe in God.”
My family moved one county over the next year. I thought that I’d escaped; that I could start over. No one here would have to know my secret.
It just so happened that Jeff moved to my school the next year.
To summarize what followed into a single paragraph, I have spent a lifetime hiding who I am. I’d learned that whatever people find out about you, they can use against you. The few friends I made through the end of high school, I quickly came up with excuses to push away. I was quick to see betrayal in the smallest infractions. I didn’t dare trust anyone.
“Shame loses power when it is spoken.” —Brené Brown
In many senses, I am still like this. I keep my secrets close. And the greatest secret of all remains that I’m an atheist. While a few kids in high school wore atheism openly as a sign of rebellion, and while many adults now might see it as widespread and even “normal,” I’ve continued to see signs that it’s best to keep my mouth shut. The people who say, “I don’t care what religion you are as long as you believe in God,” as though this is a sign of their generosity and tolerance. The liberal college professor who told me just a few years ago that she couldn’t imagine raising her child without a religion.
But holding all these secrets inside has hurt relationship after relationship for me. I still don’t trust people. I still push them away. I keep an eye out for the moment when they’ll turn on me.
And here’s what I realized: by hiding who I was, I was also keeping secrets from myself.
Acknowledging That Your Pain Is Valid
The suppression of my own pain—the refusal to tell my story—was fueled in large part by the sense that I hadn’t suffered enough to call it suffering.
After all, there are millions of people around the world on any given day that have it worse than I do. And there’s a whole new culture of people on social media who do talk about their suffering, openly, in a way that I never fathomed doing. If they need to talk about it, it must be worse than my pain, right?
The brilliant sociologist Brené Brown, in her book Rising Strong, calls this comparative suffering. And she’s found in her research that all it does is cause more pain:
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that fear and scarcity immediately trigger comparison, and even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked. My husband died and that grief is worse than your grief over an empty nest. I’m not allowed to feel disappointed about being passed over for promotion when my friend just found out that his wife has cancer.”
But when we can’t feel compassion for ourselves, we can’t feel it for others. We start to wonder why they didn’t just suck it up and shut up like we are. We’re trying so hard to bury all our pain—why can’t others? This suppression just generates resentment in the place of compassion, ignorance in the place of understanding.
And as Brown adds, “The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce.”
All this really hit home for me when I told my partner why I was hesitant to call my suffering what it was considering that others have had it worse. He responded flat-out: “That kind of comparison is what psychopaths do.” His father was violently abusive to him and his family when he was a child, and he told me that this was exactly the kind of thing his father would tell him: “You think this is bad? This is nothing compared to the beatings I got as a kid.”
It hit me: I didn’t want to speak to anyone the way his father spoke to him. And that includes me.
The answer, then, is not comparison. It’s more compassion.
There is no limit to compassion. There is no maximum amount we’re each allotted. We should live by the rule that the more compassion there is in the world, the better.
That’s where I turned the corner.
Naming Your Gremlins & Owning Your Story
I’d read Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, a book all about the importance of vulnerability, of opening up to people.
Here’s the TED Talk that first exposed me to Brown’s groundbreaking ideas:
This video changed my life. I went on to read Daring Greatly and by the time I was done, I was fully convinced: vulnerability is essential to living a fulfilled, wholehearted life.
But I just couldn’t do it.
I didn’t feel safe sharing my story, showing who I really was. In fact, I’d come to despise who I really was. I’d turned Jeff’s voice—and the voices of all those other kids who joined in—into my own internal voice, my gremlin. I’ve suffered from depression most of my life, mostly driven by shame around who I am, my failures, who I wish I could be—and the gremlin controlled every conversation I had with myself.
Finally, about six months ago, I’d had enough. I’d seen all the harm my self-talk was doing to me. I needed to make a change.
So I decided to read another of Brown’s books, The Gifts of Imperfection. And in this book, she proposed a radical idea: Name your gremlins.
This is the passage that turned everything around for me:
“Shame needs three things to grow out of control in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment. When somethings shaming happens and we keep it locked up, it festers and gross. It consumes us. We need to share our experience. Shame happens between people, and it heals between people. If we can find someone who has earned the right to hear our story, we need to tell it. Shame loses power when it is spoken.”
My shame has power over me. But I can take that power back. It was a revelation.
Writing Your Story
So how can you share your story, as Brown advises? When and where is it safe to do so, and what does that look like?
In Rising Strong, Brown offers up a solution she calls “Shitty First Drafts”—SFDs. In these writing exercises, you don’t try to be coherent. You don’t try to make sense, to say things the right way or the best way. You simply write out what happened, how you’re feeling about it, and how you reacted to it.
Why do this? Because the process of writing a SFD causes you to pay attention to the story you’re telling yourself.
The story I’m often telling myself in a stressful encounter is that “This person doesn’t like me,” or “The mistake I just made is unforgivable,” or “I’ll never live this down.” It’s a wave of shame. I can only describe it as spiraling: terrible thought building upon terrible thought until one comment I’ve made has condemned me to being a fundamentally bad person. What I don’t realize along the way is that this is only one possible story to describe the situation.
Brown recommends writing down these Shitty First Drafts with the intention of showing no one. Be as childish, as neurotic, as angry, as ashamed, as scared as you need to be. Just put it all on the page.
After you write the facts of what happened and start writing your interpretation of those events, it helps to start with the words, “The story I’m telling myself is …” This opens the path toward realizing that this is only one version of the story. There may be others.
Here’s a great description of Sh*tty First Drafts (“Stormy” First Drafts, for more PG contexts) and how to apply them:
Making Time for Confronting Pain & Shame
I’ve started to put this into practice. When I’m feeling a wash of shame, I first recognize that that’s what I’m feeling, and then I stop everything that I’m doing and sit down to write.
All I do is describe what happened, in detail, and how I’m feeling about it. That’s all.
And somehow I feel better about it all after I’m done.
The effect has been truly stunning. I spiral into pits of self-hatred and shame on almost a daily basis. But when I make the time to name my shame—name my gremlins, as Brown would say—it loses power. It’s as simple as that.
It’s actually not as hard as you might think to do the writing. The hardest thing for me is to make the time. And that’s one of the most important takeaways I’ll leave you with: give your time and energy to writing these SFDs, and you won’t regret it.
In fact, I’ve made a rule for myself: self-care is always a good use of my time. No matter how stressed I am or how much is on my to-do list, my spirals of anxiety and shame always take more energy and time away from me than any amount of self-care could.
There is no limit to compassion. There is no maximum amount we’re each allotted. We should live by the rule that the more compassion there is in the world, the better.
Learning to call my suffering what it is, and to bring it into the light of day, has changed my life already.
Forgiveness & Learning to Love Yourself
Until I started this practice, I never loved myself. I never even liked myself. But all of that is beginning to change. That’s because when I can start having compassion for myself, I can start to forgive myself.
I never did forgive those childhood bullies. And that meant I couldn’t forgive anyone in my life—friends who said something hurtful, people who didn’t live up to my expectations. And I never ever forgave myself.
But you can’t have one without the other. You can’t forgive others without forgiving yourself. I realized that I can’t learn to trust others until I can trust myself: trust that no matter what happens, I’m still going to be a good person. Trust that I’m going to have compassion for and even love myself, despite my flaws. This, in turn, allows me to accept the flaws in others. It opens me up to love and being loved.
I’ve written dozens of Shitty First Drafts by now. And I’ve started to take it a step further. Not only do I write what happened and my emotional reaction. I’ve also started to write a few additional things after these first drafts:
- I’ll write out the compassionate response that I wish someone would say to me; that I would say to one of my friends. This sucks. I’m sorry this happened to you. You had good intentions and it didn’t work out. Everyone makes mistakes. This doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. I imagine that the gremlin in my head, the one that’s always putting me down, is saying these things. I imagine that she’s on my side this time.
- I list out other interpretations of the situation. This is a classic strategy from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: trying to discover moments where I’m “mind-reading”—guessing people’s thoughts when I just don’t know what they’re thinking—or engaging in “all-or-nothing” thinking, where everything is just black-and-white. I ask myself: What would be three alternatives stories I could tell myself about this situation? Then I write them all out. I try to be as compassionate as possible in the process.
- I review my daily gratitude journal. I use The Five-Minute Journal every morning to list out what I’m grateful for, what would make today great, and a single mantra, something I don’t necessarily believe but want to believe, like I am enough. If I’ve already written in my journal that day, I re-read it to re-center myself and stop the spiralling. If I haven’t written in it yet, I drop everything and make my entry for the day.
All of these strategies have enabled me to own my story a little bit more each day—to stop running away from who I am, from my perceived shortcomings and failures. So long as I’m afraid to look at my pain head-on, it controls me. But when I turn around and face it, I control the narrative.
As Brown would say, learning to embrace compassion, courage, and connection is a lifelong pursuit. So it’s work — and I’m still working. But I face each day more energized and empowered to live the life I want to lead and to overcome every obstacle along my journey. Naming my pain has given me agency, power, and hope. I hope it can do the same for you.
I’d love to hear about your strategies for overcoming pain and learning self-compassion. Please share in the comments! Thank you in advance for your generosity in sharing your own stories. 🙏🏼
