– What’s wrong with you?
– I’m scared, my palms are sweating, sometimes hot and cold.
– What are you afraid of?
– Pain. I heard her talk about deadly diseases. But I’m afraid of something else, I’m afraid of pain. I’m afraid to be in a state where I know that pain will “come” soon.
And then I thought, there are often situations in life when you have to endure pain.
I stop fearing pain when I stop resisting it, when I accept that it cannot be avoided (often in order to relieve it in the future, it is necessary to experience more intense pain right now, for example, various medical interventions or physical exertion for the desired result later), and in psychotherapy it works the same way. Then some time before it or immediately after it, life changes. The pendulum of feelings swings with ever greater amplitude.
At one end, it binds you with fear, prevents you from breathing in, looking in all directions, to take any action, but at the other, the fullness of feelings takes your breath away, freedom becomes intoxicating, and life itself is brighter in all parameters. And it turns out that the tighter the spring of fear was compressed, the more force and energy it flies out. So pain makes my life more conscious and juicy, makes me notice it, as it were. It makes my life when I let it be, when I accept it as a part of the inevitable and it is not bad and not good, not a guide to action and not an idea to contain and endure everything in a row, it is just one of the ways of meeting this kind of reality.
