Summary

The article posits that emotional pain functions similarly to a parasite, seeking to sustain itself at the expense of its host's well-being and capacity for love.

Abstract

The author of the article compares emotional pain to a parasitic entity, emphasizing that it operates with indifference to the host's life experiences, such as love, personal growth, and meaningful connections. Drawing from personal experience with a client suffering from schizophrenia, the author illustrates how pain can manipulate one's thoughts and actions, much like a parasite influencing its host. The article suggests that pain is not merely a byproduct of past traumas but is an active force that seeks to perpetuate itself by creating an environment conducive to its survival, often at the cost of the individual's mental health and relationships. The author warns against allowing pain to control one's life, advocating for a balance between acknowledging pain and not letting it dominate one's existence.

Opinions

Emotional pain is depicted as an autonomous force with its own agenda, akin to a tumor or intestinal fungus like candida, which thrives on certain conditions within the host.
The author believes that pain can create self-fulfilling prophecies by influencing one's beliefs and behaviors, thereby ensuring its continued presence.
Pain is seen as capable of manipulating an individual's consciousness, will, and desires to maintain its hold, often leading to a cycle of self-destruction.
The article suggests that while acknowledging and integrating pain is important for personal growth, there is a distinction between listening to pain and being controlled by it.
The author argues that chronic pain attempts to close off the heart to love, falsely presenting itself as a protector while actually preventing genuine connections and healing.
The piece implies that those deeply entrenched in their pain may struggle to differentiate between the pain itself and the love that could heal it, often viewing love as the source of pain.
The author emphasizes the importance of not making a religion of one's pain, which involves recognizing when it'

Your Pain is a Parasite that Controls You

Your pain does not care about you. It does not care if you love, remember your soul, make love, live a meaningful life, smell a flower, hug a friend, find a purpose, express a freedom. Nothing. It doesn’t care if you abandon yourself or sabotage your dreams. It doesn’t care if you scream your misery or fade away in silence. It just wants to happen.

Pain is like the tumor that killed my father. It, too, just wanted to happen. It didn’t care what it would be like for me to bury him as a boy. It didn’t care that it would turn me into a therapist decades later. It didn’t care whom it helped or hurt. It didn’t care that, by killing him, it killed itself. It just wanted to happen.

When I first became a therapist, I worked in Skid Row, where people had been homeless, traumatized, addicted and miserable longer than I had been alive. The pain I was treating was older than me. The pain had its own life.

Even when we changed the world the pain had shaped, when I would house a chronically homeless client, they would often sleep on the floor of their home ‘because the bed is too soft.’ Perhaps love was too soft. The pain wanted to happen even when it didn’t have to.

I remember my schizophrenic patient whom I had gotten sober, whom I had gotten housed, whom I had gotten a job. I remember how he stopped taking his meds, decompensated, and nearly lost in a few days everything we had gained in a few years. When I asked him why he quit his meds, he said,

The voices told me to stop taking them.

Right then that I knew Jung was right: Subpersonalities (constellations) within the individual act as if they are their own entities, even at the expense of the rest of the personality. His sickness spoke to him and intelligently commanded him to get off his meds. His sickness reshaped the environment of his psyche so that it could thrive. It was the closest I had seen schizophrenia come to demonstrating self-consciousness.

Your pain is not only the byproduct of unresolved trauma or lack of love or childhood baggage. It is alive. It is alive and seeks life: your life. It is as determined as you are to live, can only live insofar as you do not. So, you are not your pain. You are what lives when your pain does not. This is why your pain is a parasite.

Parasites are next level. They are not only passive entities that suck life-force. That’s the obvious experience of them — what you know they take of you. They are purposeful entities that steer your consciousness, your will, your desire. They whisper the beliefs they need you to have and make them feel real — the beliefs that allow them to stay and grow and inhibit love.

You see this truth in the body just as you do the mind. Candida is an intestinal fungus that thrives on sugar. It doesn’t just hope to consume sugar, but can make you crave it in such a manner that you overconsume it to the point of ruining your health. And never will you say, ‘I’m experiencing a desire guided by my parasite.’ You will instead say, ‘I need more of the shit that toxifies me.’

Just as candida is a naturally occuring element of your biome that can function as part of healthy GI tract, feeling depression and anxiety is an important part of integrating your wholeness, owning your shadow and listening to your pain. But listening to, and being controlled by, are different paradigms.

Depression and anxiety create beliefs we espouse as self-fulfilling prophecies. They thereby create an internal environment in which they thrive, just like candida, only, the internal world is your mind.

The mind needs to give its time and space for pain, for tears, for suffering. We need to give ourselves permission to enter our pain; otherwise, we are bypassing. But we need to give equal permission to ourselves to leave our pain; otherwise, we are bitter, inured, and make a religion of our pain. The priest and priestess of their own chronic suffering know their rituals, their spells, their possession.

The therapist will then come across as naive in believing love can heal when [the parasite whispers] love is in fact the source of your pain. For those sufficiently parasitized, there is no distinction between love and the pain that comes with love. Hence the fear of pain and the fear of love become conflated until those who would heal you appear to be those who would hurt you.

The belief that avoiding love by clinging to one’s pain is wise comes from pain feeling more real than love. In The Matrix, the illusion passes for reality by being vivid, believable, and reinforcing its own norms. Pain does the same to us over time. It whispers—

no one can love you;

love never stays;

you don’t deserve love

—and then reifies itself through self-fulfilling prophecies:

I told you it would end badly. It always does. You can’t trust love — just me. Trust me. Trust your pain. I’m real. That’s why I stay when everything else goes.

This is the danger of the parasite beyond the suffering it causes. The parasite commands what staves off life and love— and calls this loveless life the only reality you can know.

If the parasite tells you there is no love in the world for you, you had better believe the parasite has no love for you, and is teaching you to have no love for yourself. Once pain becomes chronic, it attempts to hermetically seal the heart. It tells you it is keeping pain out by closing the gates to your heart, when in reality, it is keeping love out.

Your parasite anoints itself as the gatekeeper to a love it will never choose.

Also read Childhood Trauma Teaches us What Love is, The Master and the Slave: Your Internal Dialogue, Love in 4-D and What we do with our Pain.

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