Coping with Emotional Pain

The secret to dealing with the emotional pain, to processing that pain and then moving
on, come in two varieties and they rhymed. One is grieving and the other is disbelieving.
Now, grieving is how you handle what, some psychologists call, clean pain. Let me
differentiate clean pain from dirty pain.

Clean pain arises from the events, so if I came up and slapped you that would hurt, clean
pain. Dirty pain arises, not from events, but from our thoughts about events. So the slap
would hurt and that’s clean pain but any thoughts you had that caused further suffering,
like she slapped me because I’m bad, I’m going to be slapped again. All women slap
people, I didn’t deserve to be slapped. This is horrible. Those thoughts create a lot of
further suffering and that, some psychologists call dirty pain.

Now, clean pain must be grieved. If you’ve lost a loved one, you are going to go through
the grieving process and that’s going to be a tumultuous process of anger, sadness, denial,
acceptance. Supposedly they come in a list but actually it’s just a big cement mix of
feelings. So though and that’s just, it happens but if you allow it to happen, without
restraining it, the intense emotions surged in about 90 seconds and then they recede. It’s
interesting to me that, that’s about the length of the most intense contractions when
you’re giving birth, as well, 90 seconds. So if you resist grieving, it can last for many,
many years, as unexpressed or repressed pain, if you allow it to flow, it peaks and recedes
in about 90 seconds. So that’s grieving.

Now, dirty pain, that has to be disbelieved. So for example, I have a son with Down
syndrome. When he was diagnosed, I have to grieve the lost of a normal baby I thought I
was going to have. But I have to disbelieve a lot of things that were in my head causing
dirty pain, thoughts like his life is going to be unhappy because he has Down syndrome.
No woman will ever love him because he has Down syndrome. It’s a terrible thing to be
mentally retarded. These were all things that I had solidly, as beliefs, that were causing
me great suffering and none of them are true. And I had to learn to dissolve those beliefs
in order to be free from my dirty pain.

Fortunately, I had this incredible, wonderful boy to help me. That everything that causes
dirty pain is based on thoughts that need to be dissolved. So grieve what you must and
disbelieve everything that is unnecessary.