Dealing with emotional hurt

Folks, I have fallen off the blogging wagon. Life is full, full and discipline lapsed. But I have been around lots of interesting people this last month talking and listening.

In Trinidad this week where I had the opportunity of a group session with a psychologist thinking through in sketch format the blockages that hinder self-leadership, experiencing life with more joy, less anxiety, bitterness and regret.

The psychologist uses the metaphor of digestion, pointing out the body has complex processes for extracting nutrition and eliminating waste. Well physical waste. The ways in which the body eliminates emotional waste are less straightforward or apparent.

 Human beings are hardwired to react negatively to  injustice or unfairness, that is, until socialisation oppresses us into acceptance, passivity or resignation. Children are the most vulnerable to oppression, even or perhaps especially by parents, all that do this, don’t do that judginess and values contradictions.

While we may be silent, may not speak out or rebel, the body stores experiences of  being unfaired or hurt as memory. Unless we find a way to work through that memory of hurt, to digest it, extracting learning and eliminating the harmful which damages self-esteem,  it continually re-surfaces determining how we feel about ourselves and/or in our interactions with others.

How do we know when we have unprocessed pain?  The psychologist suggests that we can know because when we recall the incident, there is a physical reaction, maybe quickening of breath, tightening in the stomach, chest pain etc.

All that internalised pain restricts the development of a healthy sense of self and blocks the full range of self-expression and development possible. People need to eliminate mental waste, release and get on with life. Sometimes that processing is about forgiving others, whether or not they seek forgiveness, whether or not they acknowledge causing pain. But always, it should involve confronting one’s pain towards resolution.

I am certainly offering up a grave simplification of the session which in any event was rather short.

While the session was going on, I was wondering whether all of that processing is not just too much navel gazing. For sure living in community, in the diversity of humanity brings with it the high likelihood of psychic abrasions, as we rub up personalities, perspectives and profound differences in cultural values.

I am the kind of person who feels one should move on, not dwell in bad memories. I value the capacity to get on with things, damn it! We ought not to live in other’s people’s chaos and inadequacy, ought not to be a belonger to the land of past hurts. But I guess that is not the same as processing and digesting. It is more of an archiving approach.

And as the theory goes, all that hurt is retrievable and usually unconsciously.

A few days down from the session, I think I agree, digesting is better than archiving. Why create a mindfill for psychic toxins?

 

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