How to Heal Pain

Don’t shout. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t use that tone.

Children should be seen and not heard.

This is the roots of conditioning. We learn early what’s expected of us and how to comport ourselves so as not to cause a disruption or bring attention on ourselves.

I shouldn’t be so presumptuous. This was my experience. It may not have been yours.

Some people are conditioned as children that they can express however the desire. They can shout and scream and say what they feel. Be who they are.

Others of us, not so much.

Smile. Look happy.

Anything else is not welcome.

Our culture, in general, doesn’t tolerate expression of emotions very well. Especially the difficult emotions like grief and anger. Especially from women.

Women who expressed their emotions were called lunatics — from the root luna, the word for moon, which symbolizes the feminine. Lunacy also comes from this word.

So we learned to suppress, and depress, our emotions. We stifled the screams, and put on a happy face.

That messaging continues to the present day, although these days I’m less open to receiving it.

I’ve learned the consequences.

What happens when you don’t express how you feel, when you suppress it and depress it?

It gets bottled up inside you. Held by the body, it eventually turns into physical pain. It stifles movement and expression.

Some days, it hurts to walk and it hurts to sit. I feel trapped in my hips, my shoulder, my knees and ankles.

My body is in pain and I’m angry. Or maybe the pain is a reflection of the anger that has been stuffed down for so long. This is how it works. The body is a mirror of what is happening within, not the cause.

I want out. Out of pain. Out of the stagnancy of the trapped emotions.

To release the physical pain, the emotion must release.

The sound must emerge.

The screams and shouts must be unleashed.

To move freely without pain we must release what we’ve been holding and suppressing.

The soul must express.

Re-examine all you have been told … dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. — Walt Whitman