When we stop telling ourselves that life has it in for us, and start believing in the possibility that the universe may, in fact, be on our side, we often only then start really to feel pain. Many people start to feel this pain, are afraid of it, feel nothing has worked, and then give up.
Why do we only feel our pain more as therapy progresses? Because the negative mantra had become an anesthetic, dulling us to the pain, but also to joy and possibility. As we abandon our conditioning, we have no more defense against that pain, which must rise to the surface. What is important to realize is that the pain is frozen material from the past – there is nothing causing such pain in the present, you are only becoming more aware of what is already there and has been hiding from you. Such pain has stayed below the level of consciousness but it is not for that that it has had any less effect on your emotional and physical health. By continuing to anesthetize yourself you pay a heavy price – those mechanisms that are at work in your body continue to undermine your well-being, and at the same time you give up on a lifetime of joy because of the fear of some past moments of pain.
The pain of therapy only seems unbearable, it is not in fact. When we were more ignorant of neurobiology, we used to imagine that pain was something objective, relayed by simple causal channels in the body. Now we know that certain kinds of pain are largely an ego construct, and not just emotional pain but chronic physical pain too. Pain expresses dissonance between current state and comfort state, which is a combination of physical and psychic elements, and regardless of whether that state of immediate comfort is in fact in our long-term best interest, pain prompts us to return to it and to keep returning. We need to respect it and be gentle with ourselves, but we also need to unmask it and challenge it. Many activities we recognize as desirable and may even enjoy in fact generate transient pain. We may even enjoy pain for this reason – it proves to ourselves that we have achieved something. In any case, we need to be aware that pain is only a signal, it is not a threat (or at least not below very high thresholds). It is up to us how we respond to it. Emotional pain will go away if we return to our old comfort state, but it will also go away if we get comfortable in our new view of the world – and that seems a much better option.