Let’s talk about pain. And more importantly, let’s discuss how to dissolve pain… The climate we grew up in affected us—it was like perpetually receiving a minor shock… We suffered and believed our suffering was unchangeable. And this conditioned us to create defenses—highly destructive defenses…
We repressed the original frustration and pain we couldn’t deal with, and we put it out of our awareness. There, it smolders in the unconscious mind… Our defense mechanisms of aggression, submission and/or withdrawal fully developed… Our images are also a form of defense, designed to fight against painful experiences by erecting a rigid wall constructed entirely from wrong conclusions…
For those of us who have opted for the pseudo-solution of withdrawing, we’re defending ourselves against being hurt… To be sure, if our strategy is to make ourselves deliberately weak, we are actually wanting to lord ourselves over others… It’s plain to see that being weak is hardly harmless. It doesn’t hurt anyone any less than being outrightly domineering…
In every case, we hurt others while also inflaming our own wounds. Because thanks to the law of cause and effect, hurting others has ramifications for us. There will be consequences. So, not only have we done nothing to calm the original pain, we’ve invited more of it… Rather than abandoning our limping pseudo-solutions, we wrap them into our idealized self-image. Here, the agenda is to make us feel better than everyone else…
Since the nature of the idealized self is falseness and pretense—we act perfect since we can’t be perfect—we feel alienated from ourselves, from others and from life… We’ll come to realize that pain feels far better than being alienated from ourselves and feeling numb…
Once we’ve gone through all this, emptying our inner well of what is old and immature, then constructive patterns can find a solid foundation… Whatever we must travel through is a growing pain that brings us to our final destination: a strong, self-reliant, full life. In the end, the payoff is actually worth all the effort… Once we learn to cope with mishaps and missteps, they won’t have the power to break us…
But what hurts so much presently is really the pain of not feeling fulfilled now. And this is a direct result of our unsuccessful patterns… A word of caution, though, about what we’re going to find. That beneath all our various “protective” layers is a pool of unmet needs that we know nothing about… Realize, it is not childish or immature, by itself, to need to be loved. It’s only so when we refuse to grow in our ability to give love. For then we lock out and cover up our real need to receive love…
We can now see that no unkind God is punishing us or neglecting us. We have brought our problems upon ourselves through our own unrealistic attempts at running away. If we did that, we can do something different.
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Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #100 Meeting the Pain of Destructive Patterns
