What is emotional pain?

This is a question that humans must have asked themselves as long as they have been able to think.

Animals suffer emotional pain, too.

It’s not a uniquely human experience.

Birds suffer when their mates die. Dogs grieve their owners and dog companions. I am sure many of you have stories that demonstrate the rich emotional lives of animals.

But what animals most likely don’t do are the things that cause the most pain. They can’t ruminate on what has happened, and

? believe it shouldn’t have happened, nor can they

? believe that it means something about them.

Thinking that something shouldn’t have happened includes:

➛ thinking you could have stopped it happening,

➛ thinking that the perpetrator could have done something other than what they did,

➛ and thinking that someone else should have stopped it happening.

If your lover has left, your mind will conjure up all kinds of alternative realities. There will be mental replays where you did everything differently. Other scenarios where your lover did everything differently. And still others where one or both of you had different parents, different personalities and different life circumstances.

Minds will come up with anything to convince you that the lover shouldn’t have left. Because this implies they are coming back, and that means you get to survive.

When I lost money trading, I wondered if having a better Dad – one that was more interested in me – would have made a difference. Maybe if I’d never read John C Burford’s articles in MoneyWeek, I would never have started …, and on it went … for years.

Conventional therapy might take a moralistic tone. It will see this as blaming others and ‘not taking responsibility’. It will say you are not ‘owning’ your part in this personal catastrophe.

❓

How is that supposed to help?

All it will do is keep you in the past, keep you busy making up reasons why you messed up. It will keep you thinking that if you can work out why you were bad, you can make yourself good in the future.

You are already feeling awful, so feeling worse isn’t the path to feeling better. If that worked, you’d already feel better.

There is a much easier way to stop mind producing the pain of regret, anger, resentment etc. that inevitably accompany the ‘I should have …’ way of seeing things.

It’s to understand that pain is caused by your mind trying to get you into action to do what cannot be done: to change the past.

Even though you know that it’s impossible, some facet of mind doesn’t. It is still back then, when things could have been different. It hasn’t got the good news that it is OVER and you have survived.

When it does, it will stop generating emotions that are directed at undoing what has already been done

This is The Institute for Rapid Resolution Therapy, Inc. (RRT) perspective. RRT sessions are highly effective in freeing you from the pain of ‘I should have …’

#regret #brokenheart #mistakes #failure