Pretending Away The Pain

I have some health problems and I there is no doubt about it, I can feel the pain in my body, especially in different weather conditions.

However, if you ask me if I have any areas in my life I experience pain, I will lie to your face. In fact, the biggest heart break and the area I face the most pain has to do with my immediate family. I don't know where it went wrong or why but the one thing I do know is our parents didn't raise their kids to be hurting each other by words or deeds.

But here we are. Sibling' s in an all out attack with each other and I can't change a thing except for taking the hits they shoot my way and pour my heart out to the Lord in hopes things will get better.

I don't talk about it much but the pain is real. In fact, if I dwell on everything that has gone down with  my siblings, that pain is more overwhelming than the physical.

You see, I can take pain medicine for the physical but only my God can heal the inner and will in the coming day's.

God Bless.

Pretending away the Pain

When I think about how to handle pain, I see myself as a kid in a pool, trying to hold a plastic ball underwater. Eventually the ball slips from my hands and comes flying out of the water. And more than once, it smacks me in the face. What you submerge eventually finds its way to the surface. The deeper it is submerged, the greater the splash. For some people, it becomes natural to keep that bull underwater at whatever cost. Sometimes without even realizing it. I have met people who seem shallow.

They have trouble moving the conversation past weather, food, or football. When you drop down to the deeper things about life, they look at you glassy-eyed as if you’re speaking Icelandic. They truly have no idea what you are talking about. For a while this frustrated me in my interactions with people. In time I have come to have compassion for them. They hurt someone or were hurt. Deeply. And so they disassociate. They live a life of pretend. In The Exquisite Risk, Mark Nepo writes, “We tend to occupy ourselves with worrisome activities and preoccupations in order to divert ourselves from the necessary task of feeling what is ours alone to feel. Rather than feel our loneliness, we will run nakedly to strangers. Rather than feel the brunt of being abandoned, we will construct excuse after excuse to reframe the relationship. Rather than feel our sadness and disappointment, we will replay the event to ourselves and others like a film with no ending. It is this cultivation of neurosis and all its scripts that feeds the drama of our bleeding.” How many of us have failed miserably at something, and rather than own it and grow from it we keep talking about how we didn’t get a break and someone else did and how unfair it was?

You know what? We just keep bleeding. We can’t even begin to heal the wound, because we pretend the wound isn’t there.

-Author Unknown