Building Walls to Keep Pain... IN -Teal Swan-

♪ Intro Music ♪

It's common for people who have been hurt

to build walls between themselves and others.

These walls are designed to keep Hurt out,

but the downside to them

is that they also keep positive-feeling things

like Love and Happiness out.

Many experts talk about this kind of Wall,

but the Wall I'm gonna talk to you about today

is a different kind of wall -

one that's erected by people who are hurt even worse.

This wall is designed

to keep positive-feeling things like Love, out -

but to keep Pain in ...

There are two kinds of people who erect walls to keep Love out.

The first have been hurt by their connection to other people.

For this kind of person,

things like enmeshment and unhealthy co-dependency

and guilt-traps made love painful.

They don't wanna let love in

because letting people too close

means getting used or hurt by them.

They have suffered from incoming boundary-violations.

The second kind of person who erects walls to keep Love out

has been hurt by the withdrawal of love by other people,

and the loss of happiness.

Their lives have been tormented by loss.

They experienced the loss of love and support and happiness.

They see happiness and love and support

as transient and unpredictable.

It is taken away just as easily as it is given -

and the trauma of losing it

makes it smart to not become attached to it at all.

People who are in this category

cannot receive love and cannot trust happiness.

In fact, to them, happiness and love do not feel real.

What I wanna focus on for this episode,

is the *other* feature of this wall.

Not the feature that keep Love out,

but the feature that keeps Pain in.

I know what you're thinking -

Who on earth would build a wall to keep Pain in?

The answer is - a great many people, for a great many reasons.

Multiple studies, (including a very famous study

from the University of Oslo in Norway)

prove that Pain is experienced as pleasant

if something that is expected to feel worse (or more painful)

has been avoided.

The Subjects in the Pain Studies that were prepared for the worst

felt relieved when they realized

the pain was not going to be as bad as they had feared.

In other words,

a sense of relief can be powerful enough

to turn an obviously negative experience, like pain,

into a sensation that is comforting, or even enjoyable.

You can apply this idea

to each of the following reasons

why we might hold on to pain.

I gonna list some of these examples for you now.

No.1: The most common reason why we would let Pain in

and keep it close to us

begins with a Dynamic in childhood.

With all people, we learn quite quickly

(because of the way that we're raised)

that children who are bad are punished

and children who are good are rewarded.

Now when you're younger, Love is the same as Survival.

We feel as if abandonment means death.

So we have to keep Love

more than we even need food or water.

So what we're risking by being bad, is death ...

If we had parents that were hands-off

and ignored us when we were happy or, even worse,

if we had parents who were threatened by us feeling good -

parents would become irritated with our energy-level

when we were happy,

or who would stop our play to make us do chores,

or who seemed perturbed by the fun that we got to have,

or, even worse, who actively punished us when we felt good -

we got the message that feeling good means being bad.

And, by the same token,

if this family that we came into

shows a great deal of attention and support

when we're feeling pain or when something's going wrong,

we learn that there must be goodness or virtue in pain.

Being bad means being unloved and thus ultimately dying

and so we began to see feeling bad as good,

and feeling good as bad ...

Now before we pin this Dynamic on parents entirely,

let's take a closer look

at the real culprit behind this particular belief -

it's Religion.

Take a look at the religions around the world.

Take a look at just how many of them propagate the idea

that there is some kind of virtue in suffering,

or that the person who suffers the most, is somehow, 'good'.

I wanna give you an example

of how this particular dynamic plays out.

Some years ago I had a client whose mother was devoutly Catholic.

So already, before her child was born,

she had some kind of idea that there is virtue in suffering -

just like Jesus Christ did on the Cross.

When my client was young and she would play and laugh,

her mother would be consumed by the fury of not being considered.

She would become aggravated and send her to her room,

or remind her of something that would make her sad.

However, when she skinned her knee, or got sick, or was bullied,

her mother would hold her on her lap and give her a treat.

Remember that our brain is linked Being Loved to Survival -

needless to say, the only way for this child

to remained loved, and therefore, alive

was to be unhappy and hurt.

She began to gravitate towards situations that made her unhappy

and towards people who hurt her

and even began injuring herself

in the subconscious attempt to be good and therefore, loved.

All the way into adulthood,

she believed that only hurt people deserved to be happy

and be loved and supported.

Her Good-is-Bad and Bad-is-Good Wires were so crossed

that she came to me fresh from 7 years spent in an institution

for self-harm and multiple suicide attempts.

This pattern is especially common

if we grew up in homes with a narcissistic parent.

Remembering, of course, that a narcissistic parent

will never recognize themselves as such

and will almost always identify with the exact opposite -

being a completely selfless giver,

and making you feel guilty for it.

#2: Another reason why we might build a wall

that lets Pain in and keeps Pain in

is because we feel like we have to remember

an aspect of ourselves that we lost ...

When someone we love dies,

we feel like we're betraying them

if we move on or we get happy.

The same idea applies to ourselves.

When we feel like some aspect of ourselves

was so traumatized that it was lost -

we feel as if it is somehow self-betrayal

to move forward, to move on, and to be happy.

#3: Another reason is that we might feel

like pain is the only thing that we can count on.

We all want a sense of stability and a sense of security.

We gain that security, for the most part,

through a sense of certainty.

The basic human need of Certainty, simply put,

is the certainty that we can gain pleasure and avoid pain.

But if we get hurt so often, and disappointed so often,

that we feel as if it is impossible

to be certain that we can gain pleasure,

we turn the tables ...

We hold on to the only certainty that we have in our lives

which is Pain.

In our lives, Pain is certain,

so it feels more real than happiness or love.

The very knowledge that we can count on it

or even choose to consciously perpetuate it

makes us feel a sense of relief.

How sad is that?

The only certainty we have of feeling good

is the feeling of the predictable certainty of pain.

We see this so often

in people who have been disappointed

again and again in their lives.

We keep ourselves low to avoid the climb and the inevitable fall.

Pain is safe because you may be hurting always

but you aren't losing anything.

You aren't crushed by the loss of happiness or love.

#4: Another reason why we might build a wall

which is designed to let Pain in and keep Pain in

is because we have learnt to distrust

good-feeling things so much

that conversely, we have learned to only trust

negative-feeling things.

So often in our lives,

we're surrounded by people who like to sugar-coat insults.

The compliment opens a person up

so that the insult gets in deeper.

If we had people in our lives who maintained this habit,

Good was used against us - we started to distrust Good.

We learned that the Good was not really genuine.

I spoke about this pattern of Good being used against us

in my YouTube video titled "How to Receive".

If the people in our lives use Love as leverage,

Love & Happiness come with a side-dish of guilt, duty and debt.

For this reason,

we feel the only thing we can trust is Pain.

#5: We use Pain in order to feel safe -

we use it like a kind of buffer.

Not only does it prevent us from feeling loss

and prevent us from feeling shock,

it also acts like a cushion.

Just look at the society we live in -

one of the most common sayings we have is

'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger'.

And, some of us, take this deeply to heart.

We try to experience so much pain

or to pad ourselves with it,

or accept so much of it,

that we become strong enough

that we're impermeable to future pain.

We're trying to develop an immunity to pain.

Pain can also increase our self-worth.

Heroes have to endure extreme pain -

so we can keep pain in and propagate it

so that we're seen as heroes, by others.

#6: Another reason that we might let Pain in, and keep Pain,

is that we're trying to cry 'Mercy!' to the Universe

when It's hurt us again and again.

We can use our pain like a white-flag

that prevents other people from hurting us.

The idea is that if I'm already hurt,

you're less tempted to hurt me.

#7: Another reason why we might let Pain in, and keep Pain in

is if we're trying to avoid blame or negative responsibility.

If you're exhausted or alone

and don't want to take responsibility for yourself

because of what taking responsibility for yourself

might mean to you -

Pain can be used as a scapegoat for responsibilities.

We might think that we have to be in pain

for others to help us,

or be kind to us,

or give us things,

or let us off the hook,

or take responsibility for us.

Pain can be a powerful excuse.

We feel terrible about ourselves when things are our fault,

especially if we were punished for things

that were our fault when we were young.

When we don't take responsibility

for things that caused us, or other people, pain

we get to feel good about ourselves, still.

We can use pain as a good way to maintain our self-esteem

by excusing ourselves from the responsibility

of things we did to ourselves or others

in our past.

#8: Another reason why we might let Pain in, and keep Pain

is because we feel the sensation of relief

(or our good-feeling emotions)

as the result of the removal of pain.

The relief that occurs

when something that causes acute, intense pain is removed

is enough for those of us who are struggling

with extreme levels of emotional or physical pain

to deliberately let pain into our lives,

or cause ourselves pain,

so that we can feel the relief of that very same pain.

Self-injurers are particularly at-risk

for this attachment to pain.

I'll give you an example:

Say that I was to give you a phone call

and tell you that your house is being re-possessed.

Then, 15-minutes later, I was gonna call you again

and tell you it was a mix-up -

the papers just got placed in different places in our office

and it was all a big mistake.

You would feel the sensation of relief

not because I've actually given you good news,

but because I removed the bad news.

Sometimes, if we experience pain in our lives or let it in,

the rest of our life seems to feel good by comparison.

We actually feel the relief of experiencing

what was previously experienced as painful

because now, it feels good, by comparison.

#9: Another reason why we might let Pain in, and keep Pain in,

is if we were the 'Identified Patient' in our families.

The Identified Patient (or the 'IP') is someone within a family,

usually a child,

who is unconsciously selected by the family

to play out the family's internal secret conflicts.

This serves as a diversion

from the rest of the family members' own pain.

The IP is the split-off carrier for the family's disturbances.

Simply-put, the Identified Patient

is the scapegoat of the family -

they are the family 'problem'.

The IP is seen as the cause of the painful feelings

of the other family members.

The IP-child is usually the one whose own personality structure

is the most invalidating to the personality structure

of the parents in the household.

Basically, the parents are faced with a decision -

either they have to face the negative emotion within themselves

and the aspects of themselves that feel invalidated,

or, they have to turn against the child

and pin the problem on the child,

saying that the child is the reason that they feel so bad.

By making the child the problem,

they get to see themselves as the victims

and as the philanthropic helpers,

and thus avoid facing and dealing with their own problems.

If you suspect that you may have been the IP in your family,

I suggest doing some serious research

about the Identified Patient Dynamic.

If we were the Identified Patient,

we've got some very difficult things going on,

relative to Pain.

The first is: that our earliest identity

is the identity of something being wrong with us

and the identity of being in pain.

The second is: is that our family relies upon us

being the problem - that's the only way

that they get to avoid their own internal conflicts.

Our family depends on us staying

in the role of the Identified Patient,

because the family structure will unravel if we don't.

If they have to face their own shadows and pain

and stop projecting it onto us,

they will be miserable and in pain.

After all, we are the ultimate scapegoats.

Our family wants to keep us that way.

They quite literally will do anything,

including hurt you and abandon you,

to keep you in this role

so they can avoid their own pain.

So, isn't that funny?

To keep their love and support,

and keep the family together,

we have to keep hurting and keep having problems.

We're hurting so that we can be loved.

If you suspect that you might have built (subconsciously)

this 'wall' in your life,

which is impenetrable to love and support and happiness,

while on the other hand lets-in pain and insults and injury,

I want you to ask yourself these questions:

No.1: Why do I *need* to be in pain?

No.2: What would be so *bad* about being loved?

No.3: What would be so *bad* about being happy,

or feeling good?

If we have built this kind of wall in our life

that lets pain in and keeps pain in -

the first thing we need to do is to recognize

that this was an extremely intelligent way

for us to cope with the pain and trauma

that we experienced earlier-on in our life.

This is not a mess-up on our part.

It's something we did for survival.

Just the awareness that we have this kind of wall

between ourselves and others,

puts cracks in the wall

so it can't stand as strong as it once did.

The second thing we need to do is to let good-feeling things,

like happiness and love, into our life.

But for those of you who have a difficult time

letting positive emotion in,

I want you to watch my YouTube video titled: "How to Receive".

Another video I want you to watch is called:

"How to Raise Your Frequency and Increase Your Vibration"

If you let in positive-feeling things little by little

the positive emotion will begin to dilute

the negative emotion within you so it doesn't hurt so bad.

The third thing we need to do is to make a choice.

We need to make a choice about whether we are ready

to really face our painful emotions,

to sink into them and to integrate them into our Greater Being,

- to become whole.

Or, whether we are not ready to do that

and instead wish to dis-identify from negative emotions.

If the decision is to integrate those negative emotions,

I want you to watch my YouTube video titled:

"Healing the Emotional Body"

where I explain exactly how to integrate these negative emotions.

The next thing we need to do

is to fall out of love with Pain

by seeing all the damage that it's actually doing to our lives.

And then, re-sensitize ourselves

so that we can feel those positive emotions when they arise

and then, follow our Joy.

We need to develop strategies to help our self feel safe.

The pain has now become 'safety' to you.

Find other methods for making yourself feel safe.

Make a list of things that help you to feel safe,

and pin it up in your house

and when you feel unsafe go to that list

and pick something off of it to do.

If we can, we need to take advantage

of Somatic Therapy Techniques.

When we are de-sensitized to Pain because we let it in

and keep it in,

we are disconnected from our bodies,

we're disconnected from the Truth of Ourselves.

We spend our time in a disembodied state.

The fifth thing we need to do is to dedicate our life

to the practice of softness.

Every decision that you make

needs to be made according to the question

'Is it Softer or Harder?'.

For example:

Quitting my job - softer or harder?

The immediate-answer is the correct one.

We can do this on the level of thought,

on the level of speech,

on the level of action.

Is this thought I'm thinking, softer or harder?

Is this thing I'm saying, softer or harder?

Is this thing I'm doing, softer or harder?

We need to consciously choose the softer path.

We need to recognize how we're keeping Pain close to us

by maintaining hardness towards ourselves and towards the world.

And we need to make different choices

so that we can become softer instead.

The sixth thing that we need to do is to look back

over this itemized list of reasons why we might build a wall

which lets Pain in and keeps Pain in.

And, in each scenario, we need to look for the un-met need.

If we can find different ways to meet those needs,

we can let go of the pain-strategy that we are currently using.

Also, take your answers that you gave for the three questions

which I asked previously in this episode -

and do the same process.

Discover, out of your answers,

what need is actually being met

by holding on to Pain and by keeping Pain -

and find different ways to meet those needs

so that you no longer need that pain-strategy anymore.

If you are a person who can't seem to stop suffering

you probably feel like something is wrong with you.

You have also probably heard people say

that you must like being depressed,

or that you're mentally ill,

or that you have bad karma ...

I promise you that none of this is the case.

All that has happened is that your life experience

has caused you to hold on to pain

in order to prevent even worse pain.

In your life, you are driving forwards -

you cannot help but do so.

But if you're using pain to prevent future pain,

you are driving with the parking brake on.

It is cruelty to expect yourself

to simply let go of the parking brake -

after all, it is what has been keeping you safe for so long.

But the energy it takes to keep that parking brake on,

regardless of how safe it has made you in the past,

is preventing you from living a new life.

I promise you that if you will learn

how to release that parking brake

- release that attachment to pain -

more and more each day,

you will soon be living a life

which feels so much better than this.

Have a good week ...

♪ Outtro Music ♪