When pain intrudes unexpectedly, our ‘reality’ gets shaken up.

Pain or painful episodes can be the result of common life experiences, accidents, personal relationships, illness, disappointments or extraordinary experiences like violence, abuse, terrorist attacks, war or natural disasters.

I recently did a presentation on Trauma and Recovery and one of the interesting comments made by an audience member was- "This (the process of recovery) is interesting because it’s relevant to any painful event - How many of us took 10 years before we could say we were over a bad highschool experience? If only we had some different skills or tools back then!"

What various traumatic and painful events or situations show is that the external world is not always controllable – regardless of how much we know or what resources we may have.

If someone has a painful experience, the scope of the perceived control tends to quickly shrink from a large umbrella outside of ourselves to a focus on our internal world.

We hear people explain in words what happens to them:

- I felt like I was kicked in the stomach
- My world fell away
- I wanted to curl up in a ball
- I’m so disoriented -I can only see with tunnel vision
- In a world of my own
- No one else could ever understand

Pain may have begun on the outside, but it lives on on the inside in the form of painful memories, difficult emotions, negative thoughts, unpleasant urges, and/or automatic reactions.

That is often the problem and how people find themselves stuck – they get stuck in the internal scope of where the pain lives on. The initial event is likely not still occurring as it was a moment in time - and so the suffering is in the ongoing pain that is related. Hence the phrase "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional."

In my practice, I teach that a life is to be lived with a past exactly as it is since we have no ability to change it, but with a future as open and broad as your deepest core values.

When we learn to feel feelings as feelings and think thoughts as thoughts, instead of turning them into destructive behaviour we can learn that feelings and thoughts alone cannot hurt us unless we let them. They are just feelings and thoughts.