What your insecurities & pain are trying to tell you
What if emotional, physical or even spiritual pain is simply there to guide you.
Think about it for a moment, why does pain even exist? It keeps us alive right? You learn that fire is hot and it hurts, so you avoid it when you see it. You feel fear when you look down at the possibility of falling — you’ve fallen before, gravity + concrete hurts. Bad.
Yet when it comes to emotional pain, as a society we mostly ignore what its trying to tell us. Simply reacting to the emotion, often with more of the same emotion.
i.e — “I feel sad that I feel sad all the time.”
or
“I’m so upset at myself for being upset”
What if it was simply a clue? A hint perhaps, towards your better self. Something that you COULD do, within your power.
Maybe there is a part of you that is subconsciously sabotaging yourself from any of the success you truly want? Or maybe you spend so much time and effort on suppressing your emotions that you no longer even recognize what you are feeling!
Back to the point.
Let us use insecurity & anxiety as examples.
How is insecurity useful? It usually shows us an area of our life that we KNOW we need to work on. We can crumble, or use it as motivation.
That dude your girlfriend works with has massive arms, insecure about yours now? Go work on that.
Insecure about your financial situation? Get some help, come up with a plan and execute. — that simple. Clarity will come through action, focus on your why & what. The how will reveal itself over time through focused, consistent effort.
Yet, the tendency people have when it comes to these “negative” emotions (perhaps we should really call them signposted signals) is to shut down, close off and distract themselves. Creating an endless loop of seeking external influence on your internal world.
This will simply lead to more insecurity down the track!!
What about anxiety Tyrone?
My favorite of them all, suffering over something that hasn’t happened yet and maybe never will.
Creating dream-like scenarios in your mind about what could go wrong, the problem here is that the brain hardly recognizes the difference between a real problem, or you simply imagining a problem. It registers in the mind/body as almost identical!
How damaging then is it to do this consistently?
Very.
Yet, its also trying to tell you something. Your anxiety wants you to be prepared, ready for anything and certain of the outcome.
Although we can never be truly certain of an outcome, we can be certain we have done everything in our power to be prepared. Whatever preparation means to you.
Side note, meditation will also help with both of these if it doesn’t go away with a simple re-frame like above.
Anyway, all I want you to remember is this.
There are no BAD emotions.
They are all telling us something, if we listen close enough — the painful ones are the ones that teach us the most.
