Powerful Step Toward Feeling Better
One reason clients often seek out life coaching services is that they feel bad and, frankly, they’re tired of feeling bad. I can relate. For decades, I had a fog of anxiety that used to follow me wherever I went. In fact, I’d grown so accustomed to this fog that I almost stopped recognizing it was there, except for the fact that I had an unrelenting knot in my stomach, inexplicable health issues, and difficulty staying present.
I knew I wanted more joy, peace, and freedom, but how could I get there when potential catastrophes lurked around life’s hidden corners? I was suffering and didn’t even know how much my own thoughts and actions were contributing.
My ‘aha’ moment came when I discovered the powerful differentiator between what psychologist Dr. Steven Hayes calls “clean pain” and “dirty pain.”
Clean pain is the pain we experience in response to an objective life event. Some examples of clean pain include the loss of a loved one, a loss of a job, or our own lost faculties due to illness or disease.
Clean pain is the cost of living a full, beautiful life with people and conditions we love. We experience losses that must be grieved, but this has a different feeling than dirty pain. This past summer, as I sat at my stepfather’s funeral, I felt sadness, but I also felt a mystical sense of wonder and connectedness to both him and the wider world. The tears felt more like a cleansing bath than a toxic waste dump. It was clean pain.
To move through clean pain, we must grieve. But the key is we must grieve; otherwise, we can get stuck in a repeating loop of unprocessed emotions, which can ultimately become a dirty pain factory.
Dirty pain, on the other hand, is a byproduct of the subjective thoughts we have about our life experiences (including about our clean pain). It’s the meaning we might assign past life events, our messy interpretations of current life experiences, or even our catastrophizing of future life outcomes. Examples of dirty pain could be thoughts like: “I wasn’t a good grandchild,” “I’ll never find a relationship that’s as good as my sister’s marriage,” or “I am going to die alone and broke.” Dirty pain are unpleasant thoughts that quickly become painful feelings.
To move through dirty pain, we must identify it as such and then challenge it. As New York Times bestseller and life coach Dr. Martha Beck points out, clean pain must be grieved, and dirty pain must be disbelieved.
To determine if what you’re experiencing is clean pain or dirty pain, and whether you need to be grieving or disbelieving, ask yourself this question:
Is the emotion I’m experiencing directly connected to an objective life event, or is it subjectively related to a story I might be telling myself about the event?
You will be surprised at how often the answer to that question will be, “dirty pain.” Of course, arriving at that answer is not going to magically make the pain go away. But as you work to identify these painful thoughts—and learn helpful tools for countering them—you’ll find you start feeling a lot better. Will future dirty pain thoughts still show up? Sure. But when they do, you’ll learn to hold them a little looser, believe them a little less, and release them a little more easily.
For more information about working with me and learning ways to clean up your dirty pain, check out KyleaAsher.com.