The Two Keys to Healing:

Letting Yourself Into and Out of Pain

We need two traits to overcome chronic unhappiness: the ability to let ourselves into our pain, and then the ability to let ourselves out. Those who struggle to let themselves into their pain practice repression to avoid the depth of their feeling. They rationalize away the need to express their feelings. ‘Saying how I feel won’t change anything.’ They minimize their suffering. ‘No one had a perfect childhood.’ They act like they are the villain. ‘I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings by sharing mine.’ This is all gaslighting oneself.

This is how we avoid the pain that comes from facing ourselves. Those who never let themselves into their pain never let themselves out. And yet, many who do let themselves in don’t go on to let themselves out, either.

Bitterness is a way of saying: I let myself into my pain years ago, and I cannot find my way out. Some believe pain is a labyrinth they cannot find their way out of. Cynics believe pain is not something wrong so much as the world they live in. Once you normalize suffering, you denormalize happiness. Such people let go of their happiness long before they let go of their lives.

It is hard not to let go of the past when we insist life wronged us. But ‘you are the only one keeping score.’ Life is not snickering at you, piling up all the missing love and unfair pain. Life is not comparing you to other people or how you might have turned out if life had been fair. It is all your fantasy of the love that is missing in life whereas in reality, you are focusing on the you that is missing in love. That fantasy drains your life-force from the change you might have become to the stasis to which you succumb.

Some bitterness comes across clearly whereas for others, it manifests as low standards. The belief that marriage is stagnant or a compromise that survives on inertia. The belief that pleasure and gratification keep us going between the drudgery and disappointment. The belief that we are not failing at being ourselves, but that life is simply this. The slave with no master other than the absence of love.

Those who do not let themselves into their pain pay for their avoidance with anxiety. They are never comfortable being themselves because they never are themselves. Those who only let themselves into their pain mistake pain for life, as if suffering is what we were meant to do.

The willingness to both accept and let go of suffering may be akin to forgiveness, forgiveness of ourselves. After struggling with the concept my entire life, I defined forgiveness:

The ability to accept that something happened, and that it is no longer happening.

The former lets us into our pain. The latter sets us free.

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Also read ‘My Greatest Fear is not being Worthy of my Suffering’ and The Master and the Slave: Your Internal Dialogue.