By: Iyo_embong

“Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.” – Havelock Ellis

It’s very easy after suffering an incident that caused pain, to just give up and say we won’t ever go there again. Maybe it’s a relationship issue and we just want to crawl into an imaginary shell and hide from the world and the thought of any future romance in our lives. Or it may be a member of our family who continues to hurt us each time we see them and we really would like to just cut off contact with that person, but they are our family so it’s not always the best idea.

Pain can come from many sources and usually it hits us when we have been at our most vulnerable. And in order to get over the pain some time must pass and we will need to feel what we feel until it is gone.Feeling our pain is how we move forward. Shutting down and closing ourselves to future relationships is not the answer if we choose to live full lives.

One way to recover from a painful incident is to practice ACCEPTANCE. We just stop fighting it and asking why it happened, why someone did what they did. What’s happened is done and there’s no going back in that situation to undo or redo. We accept it for what it is.

Another necessary recovery tool for pain is to FORGIVE — forgive whoever hurt us and forgive our self if we need to do that. We may have been equal partners in the painful situation, or perhaps we are angry with ourselves for allowing our self to get in the situation that hurt us. Whatever the circumstance we forgive those who hurt us and our self.

It’s okay to grieve. Don’t pretend like most people do. We can cry and scream if we have to, as long as we don’t turn our pain onto someone else or turn it inward. Grieving is a process that doesn’t fit into a nice tidy little package. We feel what we feel and stay away from medicating our pain with drugs, alcohol, or anything that we would use to keep us from feeling.

Pain comes when we live our lives fully, just as joy comes too.

By: Iyo_embong