Anesthetizing Yourself In The Face Of Pain Means Giving Up Love

If there is something that we avoid feeling, fleeing prisoners of fear, it is undoubtedly emotional pain. We fight not to face situations that are painful and we end up anesthetizing ourselves in the face of emotions. What happens with this anesthesia is that it is global and has its consequences.

Have you felt your difficulty to love, entering a state in which you do not know if you really have the capacity to feel love? Don’t worry, this is also common for other mortals. It involves a state of confusion, with a fear as a background at the possibility of becoming insensitive.

But fear not, you have the ability to love and you have simply had to build a wall to defend yourself from all the possible dangers and fears that invade you. All your alerts have been turned on, they are based on the experience of other painful situations, and consciously or unconsciously you try to prevent them from happening again.

Avoiding suffering and pain

Although suffering and pain are not the same, we try to avoid both experiences. However, avoiding pain is not a good idea, since it is a natural process through which we have to go through situations that sadden us or cause us discomfort. All of us, at some point, have been through suffering and nurtured it, when all we had to do to get rid of it was surrender to pain for as long as we needed.

Pain helps us to grow and develop, and suffering to stagnate. That is why it is important to differentiate one from the other. Since entering the pain means experiencing the experience, feeling the emotion, to finally let it go and release it naturally.

Suffering appears with the denial of pain and with emotional distancing. We prevent our wound from healing and healing, we stagnate, turning our pain into unnecessary suffering. Giving ourselves permission to feel pain, without necessarily recreating ourselves in it, allows us to face the experience and move on, as well as preventing us from stagnating in suffering.

Disconnection by protection mechanism

There are moments we go through that could have been so painful, that they have made us develop a specialized mechanism to disconnect from our emotion, from our body, and cool down to avoid entering where we already suffer. This can even lead to dissociation, when we are not able to accept reality due to the emotional impact that it supposes.

When there is the possibility of an unpleasant situation similar to the one we have on file in our history of experiences, our survival system protects us. In the back room of that artificial protection hide our most anguishing fears, such as the fear of abandonment, loneliness and rejection.

This avoidance and cooling to experience certain situations that put us on alert, may be determining our lives:

• Avoiding the risk of loving.
• The insecurity of trusting those around us.
• To relate with caution staying in the superficiality.
• Maintain relationships in which we are mainly interested in what we can get from people, using them as instruments for our purposes.
• Create a hostile universe, in which survival and competitiveness reign.

• Lack of self-confidence : pleasing, seeking recognition, and avoiding expressing one’s own needs.

Emotions and feelings are our compass

Emotions and feelings are all we have, without forgetting that we are human we have no choice but to surrender to the experience of living. Which means daring to be able to experience pain, if we want to fully feel love.

These sensations -feelings and emotions- are our precision compass, since they tell us how we feel at all times. They allow us to know that we are not empty shells, but rather that we are enriched by an extraordinary internal world. A cosmos in front of which we have two options: make the most of it and abandon ourselves and surrender to experiment or cut off any relationship with it.

The choice to show yourself vulnerable or protected depends on you and on no one else, and to take the step and dare to dive and swim following the course of the river of life or, on the contrary, you stay on a shore watching how the current passes by. Without you being a participant, without taking advantage of the possibilities that only dedication to the experience is capable of bringing you.