Do you ever feel like a lab rat running a maze looking for wherever they store the mythical pile of cheese. On lucky days you wander to a maze corner and fit a bit of cheese! Other times you wander and wander and find nothing. You feel cheated at what life has not offered you.
This enjoyable cheese finding days make you feel like you deserve cheese all the time or GOSH DARNIT this maze flawed. Your life is flawed. Life is tough! Your brain isn’t built for continuous pleasure, but it is built to seek it. We put ourselves in a bind when we’ve been chasing happiness so long that we refuse to accept that pain is part of life. We feel cheated.
Russ Harris, a British therapist said, “If you go through life trying to be happy and ignoring pain, the greater the risk you have of being unhappy.”
Here is one of the wisest lessons you can hear: LEARN TO ACCEPT PAIN.
Not, learn to avoid pain. Not, dismiss and hide pain. Not, fight and berate yourself for the pain. Accept the pain. It is important to be able to clear a space big enough to hold it, experience it, and connect with it and yourself in the present moment. Learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. It seems counter intuitive to stay with the pain hoping it will pass quicker, but that is just what happens.
I should be clear. I don’t mean, dig into the pain, worry about the pain, then think about the pain all the time. I mean treat the pain like it is an itch. Give it a little scratch so the little itch can go away. But be careful, if you scratch and scratch all day and you will give yourself a bleeding scabby mess.
My favorite quote from, “Tuesdays With Morrie,” illustrates this perfectly.
“Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, ‘Alright, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is.’
“Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely—but eventually be able to say, ‘Alright, that was my moment with loneliness. I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.”
One of the major tasks of those seeking pornography counseling is to learn to engage with their emotions instead of escaping them and coping with a false form of comfort. Learning the skill of acceptance is a good place to start. Learning to accept means giving up the struggle you have with your pain. Acceptance means that your main goal has gone from ridding your life of all difficult emotions and situations to knowing that is impossible. Acceptance is decided that even though you have difficulties, you can still build the life you want.
Acceptance is saying: “I don’t like it, I don’t approve of it, but I accept it is in my life.”
Acceptance is saying: “I am not comfortable, but there is room for this in my life.”
Acceptance is saying: “I don’t want these feelings and experiences, but I accept that life is a full gamete of good and bad.”
