You Can’t Ignore the Pain Once its Outside of Your Own Head (and that’s a good thing!)

For those that have long avoided therapy, they often voice difficulty understanding how talking about their pain is helpful. Author Gary Zukov outlines it well here: "There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again." In therapy, when we narrative the hardest parts of our experience in front of another, it sheds a light upon how painful a life you’ve been living. It motivates you to actually do something different once your hurt is heard and felt. When you say it all out loud in front of another, someone you don’t need to defend yourself with, it becomes easier to acknowledge that what you’ve been doing isn’t working. It allows you the freedom to admit what is going wrong in order for you to feel comfortable actually addressing it without shame.

"There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again."

~ Gary Zukav