most of the time I think I do a prettyy good job of facing my emotional pain and my grief but like all people sometimes I run from it it sometimes it just feels like too much I'm not sure if I can handle it and I duck it and Dodge it at every opportunity there is one particular source of pain and grief that I spent probably over half my life up to this point trying to avoid and only relatively recently did I finally choose to face it when I did choose to face it I found that
I learned quite a few lessons from that experience lessons that I would like to share with you today I'm going to give a little bit of backstory so that you can understand the type of situation we're talking about so that you can see if you think this applies to you or not I'll keep that part brief and we'll focus mostly on the lessons today but here's the backstory when I was younger I'm the oldest of three siblings U come from an attacked family my parents are still together the five of us every summer would spend
quite a bit of time in a small cabin Northern Minnesota and I would regard this as the the happiest times of my childhood that in my grandparents Farm there like a and b um those were the times when we felt most like a family to me when we were all usually doing the same thing and um kind of all on the same page all physically together in the same spot they were they were the absolute highlights of the first 20 years of my life easily but when I turned 13 I experienced my first really significant
Mental Health crisis and I pretty much withdrew from everyone and everything and that included uh refusing to go to Northern Minnesota with my family that summer and the next summer and the next summer eventually I'm going to skip over a whole bunch of stuff here but eventually I slowly started returning by this point we're all either adults or in late adolescence and you know we have other things going on we have relationships we have sports we have jobs we're in college whatever and and rather than all five of us going up at the same time
for a prolong period of time it just kind of ends up being this mismatch of like whoever's available at any given time and for a while that was okay I remember one time it was just me and my dad up there so two out of five and I was looking in the the room we all my me my siblings and I all slept in the same room we had two bunk beds and for some reason I was looking through the closet I found a bunch of old drawings and and like crafts we did when we
were really really little sorry and that was the moment that it that it really hit me that the five of us might never all be together there again and and even if we were we weren't kids anymore and it was going to feel different and I I felt just this like that was the first moment that I realized that and I felt just this immense unbearable wave of grief um I went found my dad and I I think I'm 21 22 in this story and I I told him I wanted to go home I think
we were like three days into what was supposed to be maybe a f- day trip or something I just I could not handle it I could not handle it I wanted to leave I wanted to get out of there ASAP could not deal with those feelings I kind of tucked that away for a while and I I told myself what I thought was true but turned out to not be true I said once I'm married and once I have kids and I start taking my kids here that will fix this you know this won't hurt
anymore when I can essentially like not remake cuz I know it will be different but kind of redo some of this stuff with my own family and like fill in the gaps in my own life which when I say it out loud I realize that sounds like a horrible and ridiculous idea but that's how I was coping with this pain from like early 20s into mid-30s probably and so four years ago for the first time we did it my wife and I took our two children to the exact same cabin that I used to stay
out with my family and I was anticipating that this was going to cure my grief and be this just restorative experience that like renit my soul together and filled in the gaps in my childhood it wasn't um in fact that that pain that I felt looking through those childhood drawings that I stuffed and buried and avoided hit me in the face full force as hard as anything ever has and I spent our entire trip horribly and basically nonfunctional the first time I went there with my family it was it was a disaster it was the
exact opposite of what I wanted I I could barely do anything I literally felt like I was seeing like ghosts of myself and my siblings running around everywhere and it's just it did not work so that's the backstory here are the four lessons since that time that I have learned from that experience that I think may be of benefit to you the first is some pain is in escapable and that is incredibly hard to hear I know you are probably right this very second burying something or avoiding something that scares the crap out of you
to face and desperately hoping that some way somehow you're going to be able to absolve this pain before you have to feel it and unfortunately I'm going to be the bearer of bad news today and I'm going to tell you if it's something that's been there for a long time and something that really really hurts it's probably not just going to go away you there's probably nothing that you can do to just take that out of you without having to feel it and in fact the things that we do to try to escape our pain
often end up making our lives worse and holding us back from what things would look like if we were able to just face it and to just let it hurt and work through that hurt now I don't want to be all doom and gloom here I know I kind of often am but you don't have to do it alone you don't have to do it without resources either like use use coping skills use anything safe and and repeatable um to help you get through that you don't have to just like sit in your pain in
like a dark closet or something like that you like live your life talk about it with safe people do your deep breathing take breaks spend time on Hobbies you know don't just like force yourself to suffer but you you probably are going to have to let it out to some degree and for it to come out you have to feel it at least I did with this and this is just one example that's on my mind today because that's where we just came back from um we've gone there every year since and every year has
gotten a little bit better as I've worked through my grief so that's that's my number one lesson is sometimes you just can't Dodge it sometimes you just have to let it hurt and it's G to suck but you will survive it and hopefully you have help hopefully you have good support the second thing I learned from this is sometimes pain has a lesson not always I do not believe everything happens for a reason um but sometimes things happen for a reason but more bad news just because you learn the lesson from the pain that isn't
isn't going to take the pain away learning from your pain isn't just an escape like going back to point number one the pain may not be escapable even if you learn something from it learning a lesson from your pain reduces the likelihood that you will experience pain for the same reason in the future it protects your future it does not absolve your past even if you understand you have an experience and you're like I know I had to go through that I know I had to learn something from it I did learn something from it
that doesn't stop it from hurting and I see people make this mistake in therapy all the time they think if they can pull some meaning out of what has happened to them that they won't have to face their pain and that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to pull a meaning out of what's happened to you I'm not saying don't do that I am saying don't do that with the expectation that it will take all of your pain away because I don't believe it will it did not for me in my case in this example
my lesson was I need to work harder on my relationship with my family of origin because part of what made that hurt so much that absence of those years that I feel like we should have still been together there is the fact that things at that time four years ago were not great between us we just didn't we weren't like aggressive to one another or anything we just didn't talk that much or hang out that much and so it just felt like this massive shift and I I have been working on my relationships with my
family they have gotten better I am happy about that and I'm glad I've made those choices but it even that did not take the pain away it's it it's something that to some degree might always hurt even though I've learned something from it and that's good segue into number three which is that time does not heal all wounds this is sort of just a variant of number one but it's such a common saying I need to address it directly because the implication of the saying Time Heals all wounds is that if you just bury and
stuff and avoid and numb for long enough it'll just like evaporate and little things do so like this this is one of those things that has a kernel of truth if you like get cut off by someone on tra in traffic on the way to work today and they clip you off like you don't necessarily have to write a journal entry about that right like you'll probably forget about that one eventually that one will just be lost in The Ether of your mind at some point most likely so little things yeah sometimes you can just
let things go and they'll just they they won't be a notable you know source of pain or like a super memorable experience for you but the big stuff grief trauma shame they don't just go away just because it's been some certain amount of time four years ago I was 37 years old and I was grieving something that happened when I was 13 like it happened yesterday it was that wrong it like literally it was as if no time had elapsed between those things so you cannot just hold on until some certain amount of time has
passed and avoid dealing with your pain and think that's going to work and think you're going to be fine all you're doing is you're just delaying it you're just pressing the snooze button on something that's going to keep coming up and keep making its presence known over and over and over again until at some point you allow it to start to come forth and that brings me to my fourth and final point to you which is that it won't always feel the way it does at first that is I think the biggest reason why we
avoid dealing with our pain for such long periods of time decades sometimes it was for me it was decades multiple decades it's because when you get you get a little glimpse of it it's kind of like it's kind of like when you watch a horror movie and you see like a little glimpse of the monster and you're like oh my my gosh like I cannot even your mind starts to fill in the blanks of like what's in the parts that I can't see and how much worse is it than the already horrifying part I already
saw so we get these little glimmers these little glimpses and we're like heck no shut that door cannot deal with that but what you see is the scariest part and that part does not last forever now I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm not going to promise you that it's going to be gone at some point point I I do believe some things stay with us forever to a degree but the way it feels when you first really start to face it when you first start to really let yourself experience that emotion
is not the way it's going to feel a month from now or six months from now or a year from now it's not linear it's not like every day gets a little bit better that's also a lie I am such a pessimist but this is real this is just how emotions work what it's actually going to look like it's kind of G to look like a 401k you know what I mean like there's going to be spikes and valleys there's going to be times when it feels worse like like the worst pain you felt in
the past two weeks and you're like where did this come from I was better with this yesterday now it's horrible again and then there's going to be times when you're like huh it doesn't bother me that like it's still there it doesn't bother me that much today and it's going to be up and down it's G to be kind of all over the place but the general trend is that as you start to let yourself feel and process what you've been through and what you're feeling the general Trend like if you average it out is
going to be downward meaning less pain over time because another thing I hear people say a lot in therapy is that they don't want to open that door because they think that feeling is going to last forever and this is the most optimistic thing I'm going to say in what's probably a pretty significant Downer of an episode which is it doesn't feel that way the whole time that that feeling you get when you first open that door the feeling I got when I first found those drawings like obviously you could tell when I was talking
about it with you earlier today I still have some feelings about that it still hurts there's still some sadness but it wasn't like it was four years ago like I was a sobbing mess I was like a ball on the floor who could not speak and now I get a little choked up for a few seconds it still hurts but not like it did then because I've faced it because I've let myself feel it because I've worked through it and that's what you have to do sometimes you have to let it hurt and it's going
to suck and for a while it will be every bit as bad as you think it might even be worse for a little bit but it won't stay that way get help whether that's a friend a family member a therapist do it with support because it's a terrifying thing to do alone do it with help but let yourself feel let yourself start to work through this pain so that you don't have to be haunted by it for the rest of your life because that's actually worse as someone who has done both I mean not the
rest of my life because I'm not dead but as someone who has dodged something for the majority of his life and has only recently started to face it there's pros and cons to each approach but facing it is better overall for so many reasons I hope that this little talk today has helped you take the next step in facing your own pain I will see you next time take care
