Throughout this Venus retrograde cycle I’ve been exploring the different factors that cause me to limit my visibility.
A 2016 research study by Dove Body Wash revealed that 85 percent of women opt out of life events because they don’t like how they look.
In addition, a recent study revealed that 70 percent of female athletes quit their sport because they don’t like the uniform options.
From my personal experience and through my work with clients, I have realized that it’s not only a dislike of our physical appearance that can keep us from participating in life.
A less discussed component that holds us back is how we feel in our bodies.
One of the factors that gets less attention is pain. For myself, and for clients I’ve worked with, pain can often be one of the biggest factors in keeping us in hiding, even when it appears to be unrelated to my work or whatever I desire visibility for.
True to the nature of this dynamic, the ways that pain can keep us in the shadows doesn’t get much visibility. Even as we talk more openly about body image and appearance issues, the role that pain — in all its forms — plays in keeping us small gets little attention.
Why Pain Remains in the Shadows
Even though its well documented that physical pain costs billions of dollars of lost productivity among workers, the “under the hood” process that links pain with resistance to showing up are not explored.
Perhaps one reason the topic of pain remains in the shadows is that it can sound crazy. I’ve done a lot of work to untangle this in my own life, one certainty is that this isn’t a linear process.
For example, you might assume that back pain would interfere with a person’s work if they had a physical job. The connection between physical pain and knowledge work or creative work is less obvious.
Here is the best simplification I can offer you to explain this dynamic:
When I don’t feel good in my body, then I don’t feel good about my body. When I don’t feel good about my body, then I don’t feel good about myself or my work. When I don’t feel good about myself or my work, I don’t want to promote myself or my work.
3 Ways Pain Impacts Your Work And Visibility
Here are three ways pain can impact our work and our efforts to be visible in our work:
(1) Nervous System Bandwidth
In over-simplified terms, what we call “pain” is a sensation that feels too intense to manage. It is a nervous system signal to us that leads us to find safety. In fact, pain is a necessary survival mechanism for the body.
For example, if you didn’t feel pain, you wouldn’t have the impulse to remove your hand from a flame, or to avoid other situations that are legitimately dangerous.
The problem is not with the sensation but with how we manage it. I think of the nervous system as bandwidth. All the signals and sensations in your body need to share the nervous system’s bandwidth to do their jobs.
Imagine trying to stream a movie in a building where everyone is on the wifi at the same time and the networks are clogged. Not all signals can get through.
When pain floods the nervous system, it occupies a lot of bandwidth, leaving little space for coherent and creative thoughts, and focus and attention on other tasks.
Sometimes when I try to work while in pain, it feels like I have a monkey on my back tapping my shoulder every few minutes to remind me it needs my help. It’s hard to get anything done in those moments.
Pain is like a cloud that descends over our cognitive processes and emotional clarity, fogging up everything and preventing us from focusing on the task at hand.
Of course it’s hard to focus on work when in pain. Which makes me not feel good about my work, which makes me not want to promote it.
(2) The Stories You Tell About Your Pain
The second factor that leads to hiding is the meaning we give to pain.
In myself, I’ve noticed that when my body is in pain I go into a web of entangled stories. Some of these stories feel true and real — I may even have evidence to “prove” their truth.
These familiar stories all lead to one core belief:
I can’t trust myself or my decisions.
And if I can’t trust myself, how can anyone else trust me?
All the more reason to hide away.
The reason I can’t trust myself is because I’m disconnected from my body, where I experience pain. And I’m living in my head, where it feels safer.
The problem is that truth and wisdom live in the body. If I avoid the pain, I end up in a cycle of self-doubt, indecision, and second-guessing.
When I am in physical pain or discomfort, I believe that I cannot trust myself because I don’t have unimpeded access to the wisdom of my body.
(3) Fear of Being Seen in Pain
The third factor contributing to the link between pain and hiding is the fear of being seen in pain.
Our culture associates pain with weakness. The story we hear from an early age is that people in pain are ineffective, lack capacity, lack resilience, aren’t “tough” and lack other traits we associate with strong leaders.
The story goes: if I am in pain, I will be unable to help others. Or, they will perceive me as being unable to help them.
Have you ever heard anyone in business say they want to project an image of their pain?
We expect people to project their strengths, to lead with the thing that shows their skills and how they’ve overcome their obstacles.
Creating Awareness
There’s no easy or simple solution here. The first step to unraveling the problem of pain is to create awareness of the dynamic and let ourselves see that this is an issue.
The pain need not be related to the place we are hiding; that’s because pain is a pervasive factor.
Pain is a lens that distorts reality. When the body is in pain, everything is distorted and magnified.
Risks feel more risky. Rejection looms larger.
The consequences of failure feel more significant.
And the stories we tell about what the pain means loom true and real, even if a part of us knows they are not.
Identifying the ways pain is holding us back, and the stories and beliefs we connect to pain, is a first step in the process of healing.
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