We will all experience mental and emotional pain in our lives. This will often come from negative experiences, such as the end of a relationship, death of a loved one, divorce, financial stress, physical accident, loss of a job, loss of your home, illness/disease, relationship conflict or childhood neglect and trauma. But, all are part of life.  

As you start to examine your current issues and struggles, it can be useful to see how they might be a result of these past events.  

Previous painful experiences will influence us to greater or lesser degree, dependent on many factors such as:

• Your stage of development
• Genetics
• Degree of stress and the toll it took on your body and mind
• Accumulative adverse experiences and stress up until that point  
• Context (people involved, level of support at the time, physical, mental and emotional state at the time)
• Your interpretation of the event

Here are six areas to consider when recovering from painful experience:

1) Growth from adversity:

Stressful life events take their toll on your body and mind, and it can take time to repair from these difficult times. Each difficult event, while extremely upsetting and distressing at the time, can give us an opportunity for growth, known in psychology as Post-Traumatic Growth. This is where we can see positive psychological change after a life crisis or traumatic event. It doesn’t deny the deep distress these events have caused, but rather that adversity can yield changes in understanding yourself, others and the world.

2) The power of your mind:

Your mind dictates how you see the world and your subsequent behaviours. It will dictate how you react and respond to stress and uncomfortable emotions, which in turn influences your physical health behaviours and the quality of your relationships.  

Your previous experiences have created your mind; the positive and helpful parts but also the unhelpful parts such as the limiting and untrue beliefs that have been subconsciously planted about yourself and others.  

You can’t change the past, but you can learn to take responsibility for the mindset you use to create your world moving forward.  

3) Stress and coping mechanisms:

Highly stressful events will cause you to employ some kind of coping strategy. This is your body’s way of adapting to the stress. This helps you to function and serves a useful purpose at the time.  

This might be psychological coping mechanisms such a denial, suppression, repression, justification, avoidance, blame or a combination of strategies. These help us cope by avoiding the pain. The issue arises when these short-term coping strategies become long term maladaptive (unhelpful) strategies.  

Ironically by never looking at or accepting the pain from our past, we stay in the chains of the past. We never fully move on, meaning in some subtle ways these previous negative experiences influence our way of thinking and behaving. Again, this is a normal reaction to sub normal situations.  

Pain, stress and trauma is a spectrum. The higher up on the spectrum, the greater the inner wound. The degree of psychological damage is dictated by the factors mentioned at the beginning of the article.  

4) Emotional healing:

To be able to heal, we need to be able to look at our previous painful events and feel the painful emotions that come up. Making the time to do this is important but it can be difficult because it’s uncomfortable and it’s easy to get caught up in the treadmill of life.  

We may have been taught that it’s best to not express our emotions. This is common if you haven’t felt safe or secure enough to do so or your emotions were rarely fully validated as a child. Over time this can cause you to become disconnected from your emotions.  

This will mean it can be extremely difficult to open up and share the vulnerable side of you. Suppressing your emotions may have become a conditioned response to every uncomfortable situation. Constantly suppressing your emotions is like trying to hold a beach ball under the water. It takes a lot of effort, and this can be extremely tiring and stressful on your body.  

As a result, you will be suppressing a key part of what it is to be human. It’s like suppressing your sight, smell or touch and expect to be fully functioning and healthy. To shut down your emotions is to shut down a vital part of who you are. This makes it impossible to express your authentic self and impairs connection and intimacy with others. Our emotions are what makes life worthwhile; they bring excitement, challenge and meaning. They drive and fuel your growth and passion for life.  

It's ok to feel painful emotions. Over time you can learn to express them in healthy ways.  

5) Acceptance:

Acceptance is a vital component of the healing journey. Choosing to accept hurtful experiences doesn’t mean excusing or defending others. It’s not resignation or a passive attitude of saying “it is what it is”.  

Acceptance is an active process that takes time and work. It entails shifting away from judgement and towards compassion and empathy. The intention is to be able to look at the past with open eyes and let go of wishing it had been different. This isn’t the same as liking, defending or justifying. It’s learning to let go or at least start to loosen the grip of the past, so you can see your present life and circumstances for the value it offers you and others. Part of accepting is accepting that it can be difficult to accept what has happened.  

A part of you may want to hold onto the anger, blame, sadness or resentment. While these are all normal emotions, if you become consumed by them, they can cloud how you see your current reality. There is a choice in how you choose to view your previous experiences and the attitude you take towards your current reality. This means taking responsibility for the mindset you use to create your world moving forward.  

Spending time acknowledging the painful thoughts and emotions that come up when you look at these events will help you process what has happened. Opening the page to something that has hurt you is painful. It takes bravery and courage to acknowledge the emotional pain it has caused you and how this influences your current world.  

6) Reflection

You can’t build self-awareness without reflection. A key part of reflection is asking yourself important questions such as:

1) What previous experience do you feel you haven’t fully accepted / brings you the most pain?  

2) What thoughts or emotions come up when you look at this previous experience?

3) In what way has this previous experience influenced your beliefs about yourself or others?

4) How has this experience influenced your actions and behaviours?

Overcoming painful experiences is a combination of behavioural, cognitive and emotional awareness and change. This work isn’t to get rid of the pain from the past. It’s to help you move your life forward in a positive and meaningful direction.

When you hear the stories of people who have overcome adversity in their life, they often put their success, love and fulfilment of life down to their adversity rather than despite it.

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