But… how do I stop the pain?

This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)

This is the most common question I get. I asked myself that same question a million times. The funny thing is that at this point I don’t know when I asked it the most, when I was living in an unhappy relationship, or when I was at the beginning of the divorce process. It’s strange, because I made the decision to get a divorce in order to put a stop to a very painful situation, but for a moment the remedy felt worse than the wound itself. 

When we go through a difficult situation, we center all of our attention on that particular problem. We focus our energy so much on the pain that it is really hard to detach from it. Emotional pain is hard to deal with. No pill can alleviate it, and it is so intense that sometimes it seems impossible to stop thinking about it.

The ugly truth is that the emotional pain we face in difficult situations like divorce does not disappear magically. I know, I know, you were really hoping for me to give you a secret trick to make it go away. But that’s why I started the sentence by saying that it was an ugly truth. However, don’t get discouraged yet. Even though there is no magic pill or trick, the emotional pain you feel so intensely has a purpose. It was not sent to you by mistake. It was sent to you to teach you something and to make you grow. 

I am going to be brutally honest about a situation I went through a few months after I started divorce proceedings. This is not easy to write about—it feels similar to taking all my clothes off in a stadium full of people—but I really want to let you know it does not matter how deep your pain goes, you will overcome it and you will know its purpose was to make you stronger.

As I’ve said before, the divorce process is full of ups and downs. One day you are absolutely sure about your decision, and the next day you find yourself looking for couple’s therapy online. That is normal. A couple of months after we started the legal proceedings, I was feeling sad and checking Instagram (really bad combination), and I saw a story he posted.  He was in the restaurant where he given me my engagement ring… with a woman. And they had added a little heart to the picture (this was before I decided to take a vacation from scrolling through social media). I felt horrible. Even though I knew he was the type of free soul who really enjoys female company, I was devastated. I started calling him, and of course he didn’t answer. 

I was really hurt. I cried and screamed with anger and disappointment. I can’t really tell you why that particular picture hurt me so much when I went through far more horrible things while I was still married. But it hit me. I was in such a deep, strong emotional pain that I literally beat myself up physically to see if that pain would overcome the emotional hurt. I ended up with bad bruises all over my legs and abdomen. I am not proud of what I did, and that was the first and last time I did something like that. I am being brutally honest because we all have that time when we hit rock bottom and we react in ways that don’t make any sense.

The physical pain did not help at all, but feeling so horribly ashamed of myself scraped me off of rock bottom. I promised myself I would never ever let any external situation make me lose control again. During the time I had the bruises, I let them remind me that I needed to heal from inside out. I asked God to forgive me and to guide me during the healing process. I trusted God in such a strong way that by the time the bruises disappeared, I was able to do something for my ex-husband that to this day I think is the most selfless thing I have ever done in my life. But I will tell you that story in a later post. 

Please do not beat yourself up! That wasn’t fun, and I’m not proud of it. I just wanted to point out how far pain can take us when we let it dominate the game. I wish I’d known meditation back then, the way I practice it today. It would have saved me from that horrible moment. This is the reason I am writing now: I want you to know you can use many available tools to transform a painful process into a growing experience. You don’t need to become a meditation expert. You just need to be open to working out your awareness muscle.

So, to answer the question about how do you stop the pain… you won’t stop it. You will heal through it, and you will grow from it. Now the one thing you can control is the amount of time you let the pain dominate you. That timeframe will be based on how well you work on your awareness muscle. The more aware you are, the less the pain will control you. It is up to you to decide you want to be in control.

Love,

Irene