When I’m in pain, I’d rather be with the one person who isn’t trying to fix it, judge it or reject it - me.
Today I had a conversation that left me feeling judged. To be fair, the conversation wasn’t about me and I shouldn’t have in any way made it about me because it was a conversation where someone reached out to me who was in pain and needed support. It started out with me listening, asking some questions to get them talking, offer a suggestion or two, let them know I’m always here to listen and to help however I can. But at one point in the conversation, out of pain I’m sure, the person told me that I don’t allow myself to feel things. Which is not true and not fair and left me feeling judged, and to be honest – hurt.
I feel things deeply, but I find that I feel them more deeply and can integrate them better if I process them in solitude and silence. Because I process my feelings in solitude, people sometimes think I am an unemotional person. Which is not true.
I spent the majority of my childhood being rejected in one way or another for how I expressed emotion. I cried a lot as a kid. This was not acceptable in my family, so I was sent to my room when I cried. In my young adulthood, I was married to someone who shamed me for having needs and emotions, calling me unstable, needy and demanding, so I shoved it down. Or at least I tried. Not successfully I might add. I spent the better part of the two or three years prior to my divorce angry and the two or three years it took to finalize the divorce crying from grief. All the shoving it down actually caused me to be pretty emotionally dysregulated. Like trying to hold a beach ball under the water – it just keeps popping up violently.
Now, years later, I’ve learned to embrace my pain rather than fight against it. And I find that I’m angry much less. I cry much less. When I’m in pain, I try to get some solitude so I can feel the pain fully, open up to it and embrace it. Sure, I cry, but I have found that the rage and the sobbing were more about the struggle against the emotions, than the emotions themselves. I’ve learned to make the feelings my friends. Sometimes dark friends, sometimes not. But beloved regardless. I find that it is hard to embrace them fully when I’m with others. I get caught up in their feelings which take me out of my own. They try to talk about it, fix it for me, give me their analysis of it – and sometimes (as today) judgement of it. They tell me I haven’t cried enough, I haven’t felt – or expressed feeling – as they think I should. Sometimes they feel anxious and then need reassurance. So, when I’m in pain, I’d rather be with the one person who isn’t trying to fix it, judge it or reject it. I’d rather be with the person who is not anxious about my feelings – me.
It got me thinking that time and time again I’m shown that we have no idea what is going on inside a person, who they really are, why they are acting as they do. Most of us are doing our best to be the best version of ourselves we can manage - even when all evidence seems to say otherwise. Some people are just trying to stay alive and functioning. I attended a retreat a couple of years ago and over the course of a week, heard person after person’s story of pain and by the end of it my breath was just taken away. I looked around at all these people and thought how amazing it was that they were all still functioning given the burdens of pain they all carried. Life is traumatic, it’s difficult, it’s heavy. We need grace.