Pain as a Powerful Catalyst for Self Awareness and Growth

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay 

When my children celebrate their birthdays, these have so far been a poignant moments for me as I revisit the memories of their birth.

Ten years ago this week, the midwife had assessed me as being in early labour and – based on my prior experience – I knew it could take a while for anything to happen. So I decided to take a short walk around the neighbourhood. “Walking” might be stretching things, it quickly became more like a slow collection of steps then a standstill as various states of contractions and breathlessness passed through me; it turned out my labour was more advanced.

I asked my walking partner to slow down, “Stop whining” he said quite seriously.

That right there is a break point, the break point from my perspective. Yet, duty prevailed with children in the mix, and life carried on. But I can see now that rage and resentment simmered below the surface, turned in on myself because I was too distracted, busy trying to be a patient and present mother, to do anything with someone else’s crazy behaviour other than turn it in on myself. 

Fast forward ten years and I have just emerged from a rather stressful separation, marked by fifteen months of nasty lawyer’s letters. There was no reasonable discussion, just paranoia and projections and an inability to hold my rights in equal regard. Now I have kidney pain, possibly the third crystallisation of all that emotional toxicity.

Of course it’s not healthy to hold onto that kind of anger and resentment, and with the separation now in the rear view, the cycle has moved to grief.

How could I have let this happen? What could I/should I have done differently?

Then I caught up with my osteopath. She has been treating me on and off for a number of years. She knows my body and my situation very well and, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel compelled to dive into the details of the affronts that had landed in my inbox. I did say that everything was now settled, but I didn’t feel any energy towards telling her about the nasty crescendo that preceded it.

Instead I was focused on sharing what I’m doing now and what my plans are for the future.

What I am doing now is learning from what has happened. Learning about what my own needs are, and how to take responsibility for those. I’ve always been too focused on sorting out other people’s issues and, as I said to a client, when things happen to us that are outside our control, it may not always be our fault but it is our responsibility.

By letting others shoulder their own responsibilities, it gives both them and us the opportunity to step into our respective power and potential.

After my mum died at the end of 2017, finally losing the battle with cancer that had become more and more debilitating and heart wrenching with each month that passed, I returned from two gruelling trips back across the world – firstly to see her before she slipped away from us and secondly to attend the funeral and spend time with my family.

Most gruelling were the responsibilities I shouldered around organising the trips, the children and all the many details and logistics, all with no real emotional support and little practical help from within the relationship. Right after that I had my first stone.

If you’ve never had a kidney stone, it’s agonising as it descends down the ureter (the thin muscular tube that connects the kidney to the bladder) but, like anything, it hurt much less once I understood what it was and what was happening.

Those trips had been a peak of frustration and grief, the precipice of burn-out mixed with the resentments of my life situation and two young children to look after.

The second stone appeared weeks after a stressful family vacation a couple of years later, both situations where there was no escaping the resentments I felt towards the circumstances I was in.

It was with mixed emotions that I received the words “I want to separate” last year. On a personal note it was a huge relief (though I hadn’t known then what was going to ensue in order to disentangle the details of our lives), but the strong sense of duty towards our children remained and I knew there was a long road ahead supporting them emotionally as they learn to live in lives that are now divided.

Children need both parents, regardless what those parents may think of each other. So there is no shutting that other person out of our lives entirely, regardless of how we feel we’ve been treated.

What there is though is the opportunity to make sure I don’t give away my power like that ever again.
In the years leading to our separation I started to understand developmental trauma, relational dynamics like codependency and enmeshment, and learn about things like insecure attachment and hyper attunement, as well as the importance of having and holding healthy boundaries, and how to do that.

My osteopath and I reflected not only on the huge gift of the beautiful children that came from that whole chapter of my life, but the deeply poignant life lessons. We laughed as we both came to the same conclusion at the same time, that I perhaps was pretty stubborn to have needed such a painful life lesson.

But I also feel we are all just playing our parts in a way. There’s really no point in harbouring resentment and grudges, certainly I do not need to give away any more of my personal power, but neither do I need to punish myself by carrying the pain of what’s already past and done. It is what it is, it served a purpose, and I am wiser as a result.

Even if a third kidney stone does eventuate, I feel it’s the last crystallisation of that painful extraction process. I fully intend to ensure I’m not repeating the mistakes of the past, instead I am thankful for the lessons and all the new things I’ve learned about myself and life. Most importantly, I have used it to step into more of my potential.

What painful things have happened in your life and in what ways have you changed your thinking and behaviours as a result? Are these adaption’s serving to shrink away from your potential or to grow into it?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Mankind’s Great Summons: Turn Your Pain Into Medicine and Heal the World, What Resentment, Frustration and Pain Have to Do With Your Boundaries, The Inevitable Pain of Returning to Love After Years of Abandoning Yourself and Get Emotionally Healthy - Is It Time to Break the Chain of Pain?. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.