Observation: Pain becomes healing (if you let it)
You guard it, the body heals it
When you burn yourself cooking, the pain carries useful information: This finger needs to heal, protect it.
You’re not in charge of the healing; your job is to obey the warning. As long as you stay out of the way and prevent additional injury, the body will take it from there far better than you could ever hope to.
Emotional pain runs on a similar system. Challenging feelings aren’t a malfunction, they’re a signal that something’s off balance. The instructions are the same: Mind this, adjust your behavior to let healing do its thing.
Our job isn’t to do the emotional processing itself. That gets organically taken care of by the system, which is far superior at it than we could ever be. We just have to make sure we don’t grab the hot pan again, or keep picking at the wound.
When emotional pain comes, overcome habit and feel it without either flinching away or giving in to despair. Meet it as it is. Don’t keep acting as if it’s not there, and don’t be incapacitated by it. Keep living, making proportional allowances for its (temporary) presence.
Protect it, and the healing will take care of itself.
Exactly right. Although, with a real burn, staying out of the way is easy. You just don't touch the pan again. With hurt feelings, the body tightens up on its own. That tightening is another way of picking at it, and most of us don't even notice we're doing it. Same instruction you gave, just one layer down. Let the tight part go, and the healing does the rest. 💕