Life at Altitude

From Level I: Body Why We’re Limited at This Level Emotional Pain from the past continues to trigger us until we heal it. As we go down this path, there are many obstacles that will test us. Some of the most prominent and challenging we’ll encounter include emotional pain, coping mechanisms, beliefs, ideas, thoughts, ego, self-image, voids, drives, and relationship patterns. I’ve put emotional pain first because of the huge and profound effect it can have on our journey. Since it’s so significant in the healing process, it’s important to first define it. Emotional pain is when a past event’s emotional impact was more than we could bear. We weren’t taught how to address or heal the pain, and as a result, we immediately began to stuff down and repress the feelings. This repression affects us physically and mentally by preventing forward movement and restricting our ability to interact with others. Just imagine if you had a nail in your kneecap. Having this nail sticking out of your body would not only be upsetting, disturbing, and frustrating, but also would make it very difficult to focus on anything else. The same thing happens with emotional pain; in order to keep living our lives, we must find a way to deal with the pain. We’re wired to do this by finding and developing coping mechanisms so that (a) we don’t have to feel it so much and (b) we’re protected from getting hurt again. We do this because the human system naturally wants to heal and repair itself but is blocked by the contemporary belief that we can’t heal ourselves emotionally. So, instead, we cover and hide the pain, thinking the best option is to cope with it. In fact, we’re not only losing the idea that we can heal ourselves emotionally, but also beginning to lose the understanding that we can heal ourselves physically. We’ve begun to transfer the healing from ourselves to doctors and therapists; the truth is that we’re the only ones who can heal ourselves. For example, if we break our arm, a physician may set the arm, but our body must respond to heal it. The same is true of emotional pain. In my work, I’m very good at helping set the context for healing, but no matter how many clients I help, I’m never under the illusion that I heal anybody. Instead, I give people the tools to heal themselves, to recognize the repressed emotional pain that they’re carrying, and to let it go. Another way of looking at emotional pain that’s useful to many people is something I call the hair metaphor. [ADD DIAGRAM- Hair metaphor] In this diagram, everything above the horizontal line represents the conscious world, and everything below represents our subconscious. In this metaphor, the pain is a little hair extending up into the conscious world. That little hair is sensitive; when something in the conscious world rubs up against it, it becomes irritated. For example, if I have some emotional pain (a hair) around rejection, every experience or implication of rejection will trigger my little hair and create discomfort. If we follow that hair down into the subconscious, we find it’s caused by a repressed source of emotional pain. For example, a repressed source of emotional pain could be my divorce from five years ago; if I interpreted the divorce as rejection, I could become very sensitive to rejection in all aspects of my life. Most of the time, I find that when we look deeper into someone’s pain like this, they’ve probably had this same feeling many times. In my example, the pain of the divorce may not be my only source of the pain of rejection. In fact, emotional pain can go all the way back even to conception, and even before. Maybe we came in rejected, unwanted, or as an accident. Maybe our parents wanted a boy instead of a girl, or vice versa. Maybe when we were born, we were judged by a family member, or maybe an older sibling didn’t want another child. These powerful, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt feelings profoundly affect the developing person. Stem cell biologist Bruce Lipton’s work on epigenetics aggregates the scientific evidence that indicates that emotional pain not only affects us mentally and emotionally, but it can also affect our physical development. Emotional pain can happen at any stage in our life, for instance with a group of friends in middle school, a difficult relationship, sexual, mental, or physical abuse or trauma, moving from one state to another, changes in family dynamics, changes in personal health, experiences in school, injuries, pregnancies, abortions, loss of a child, challenges of aging parents. The list goes on and on. No matter when it is or what it is, there’s always a beginning to the continuous repressed emotional pain. By getting at the source of these emotional pains, letting them go, healing them, and releasing the coping mechanisms we associate with them, we begin to free up our lives. These feelings and patterns in and of themselves actually want to go and don’t need to return. I’ll talk more about how to do this in the next section.