Topic: How to handle pain in relationship
ERP 140: How Pain And Suffering Increase, And What To Do About It
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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 140 – How Pain And Suffering Increase, And What To Do About It.
Before we get started, join me if you will and just taking a deep breath in, and a deep breath out. Just inviting you to join me in setting the intention for today’s conversation as we open up our minds, our hearts and our souls to essentially contemplate relationship skillfulness, so that we can be more prepared, better equipped to navigate intimacy, so that we can have more fulfilling, meaningful, thriving, authentic partnerships.
My goal is to provide you with principles, tools and strategies for you to practice in your life and in your relationship, so that you can be more successful in cultivating deeper connection, more thriving intimacy, and a long-lasting partnership.
In addition to the podcast, I also have resources and services that you can learn more about on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com. There you’ll have an opportunity to learn about relationship coaching. Also, I have programs, and all of this is designed to help you deepen in your practice, your skillfulness, so that you can achieve the competency within your intimate relationship.
I am very excited to share with you today’s episode – again, “How Pain And Suffering Increase, And What To Do About It.” Last year – or I believe it might have even been a year before (I don’t recall), I came across a TED talk. The title “The Value In Pain And The Pain In Value” by Lode Dewulf – I highly recommend watching the video or listening to his talk. I think he does a brilliant job in describing and giving us some mechanisms to orient how we complicate the experience of pain, and essentially add more suffering to the experience.
Today I’m going to share with you a little bit about his philosophy and his mechanisms, and I’ll also be sharing with you a little bit about his personal experience that relates to physical pain, and then we’re gonna shift into how this relates to relationship pain, because truly he’s describing that this mechanism applies to all types of pain.
I’m also gonna be sharing with you about clients that I’ve been working with – a couple – and how they have really done a breakthrough transformation in the way that they deal with their pain. That has ultimately allowed them to experience a profound shift and opening up a whole new level for their relationship and the intimacy they both long for. I believe this is gonna be a two-part episode, so today will be part one.
Okay, going back to the TED talk, The Value In Pain And The Pain In Value. Lode talked about how in life we are exposed to pain, and essentially we are pain training curriculum, and he reminds us that from a very early age we’ve experienced all types of pain… Physically, whether or not we go to the dentist office, we fall off a bike, we strain a muscle, break a bone, or even get surgery. He references mental pain, or emotional pain, where we will be confronted with failure. Or the experience of feeling blamed, or shamed, or even bullied. And then the heartbreak of losing someone we love.
I’m gonna quote him here. He says “Why is it our best way and often only way of dealing with pain seems to be avoidance? Pain is that big elephant that lives in most rooms of our life, and that we prefer to ignore or suppress. No wonder then that the business of pain suppression is big business.
In 2015 alone over 300 million prescriptions for painkillers were written in the world for a total cost of 24 billion US dollars, making painkillers the second-most prescribed class of medicines after anti-cancer drugs. Strikingly, 95% of that consumption is in the United States and Europe, with U.S. taking the vast majority.” He says that’s not even accounting for drugs and alcohol, and he makes the point, essentially, if we can afford it, we’re trying to buy our way out of pain.
Sure, none of us like to feel pain. In fact, I believe we’re wired up to avoid pain, so to his argument, I think actually the survival part of our being, the evolutionary part of our species is attempting to protect ourselves, avoid pain… Yet, what he’s really inviting us to do is to be more conscientious about our process in the way that we relate to the pain is a huge difference maker in the amount of pain we actually experience… Be it the intensity level, the duration and the frequency.
If we can orient the way we relate to pain differently – which I’m about to go into in a moment – that we can actually increase the positivity of our experience, and that we will feel more healthy, we’ll have better relationships, we’ll feel more at peace, despite even experiencing levels of pain… That we’ll be able to grow… I mean, the list goes on and on. A little later I’m gonna share a couples experience that really illustrates this point nicely.
To give us a foundation of how he’s describing some of what’s operating in our way of relating to pain, I’m gonna describe one of his teaching tools. It’s a diagram, and if you’d like to get a visual of this, I took a screenshot of the diagram that I will describe here… If you wanna access that, visit today’s show notes on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com, click Podcast and find all the episodes there. Today’s episode, again, is 140 – How Pain And Suffering Increase And What To Do About It.
Lode invites us to think about how we orient ourselves in time, and to do this, he has a visual. It’s essentially a circle in the middle, with a horizontal line and a vertical line going straight through it. It almost looks like a target scope, where you have your circle where your target you wanna aim, and then you have your straight line across, and then you have your perpendicular line going up and down.
The bull’s eye, the target represents the here and now, whereas the left side represents what’s in the past, and on the right side represents the future. And all along, he’s describing how we assess what we like and what we don’t like… And that is on any continuum of time – we can reference the past and point out what we didn’t like and what we liked… And we can anticipate future events in the same way – what we want to experience, what we’d like to experience, and what we hope not to experience.
In looking at the diagram as a whole, if you were to imagine to put a box around it, it essentially would have four quadrants. I’m gonna go into that in a moment, but essentially he’s saying for each quadrant we can create a tremendous amount of pain for ourselves. Yes, there is pain for sure, but the way we relate to it – we compound the pain by the way we relate.
His personal example – he didn’t go into detail around what was going on with his right foot, but he had something going on and he elected to get surgery. After the surgery was complete, he realized something was right; something was not right, and he was feeling a lot of pain. Unfortunately, as time went on, the pain did not lessen. In fact, he experienced unpredictable amounts of pain. It would come on in waves at different times, and he was not able to predict it. The intensity level as far as how intense the pain would be fluctuated, and also the amount of time span that he would feel the pain, the duration, would be unpredictable.
He sought help from many medical professionals, all of which gave him the similar outcome or assessment – that they were not able to help, and unfortunately, he was faced with learning how to live with the pain and also using pain medication.
He described feeling miserable in those years of his life. He said over two decades the pain was his regular unwanted, unpleasant companion, and anyone who’s ever experienced some level of repetitive, frequent pain, knows that this can be life-altering. It can basically preoccupy us as we try to mitigate the pain, work with the pain, try to avoid the pain, and we try to get some sense of relief… And it can be a tremendous amount of suffering.
So as we lay out his example of having pain in his right foot, so referencing again the visual, the diagram, the teaching tool of seeing the here and now as the target in the very center of the diagram, and then you have four quadrants – the left side of the box represents the past, the right side represents the future. The upper half represents the like, and the lower half represents the dislike.
He describes that yes, pain exists, but the way we relate to the pain and how we orient ourselves is based on like/dislike, past and future… We add layers and layers of pain that he calls “a real storm of suffering.” Alright, let’s lay this out.
In the upper-left – this represents the past and the things that we like. The pain in this quadrant relates to loss. “I miss the time when I could walk freely, where I could run without pain.” There’s a grieving, there’s a loss. Something in the past that we liked.
Staying with the liking, the upper-half and moving to the right, in the future – so it’s like, in the future – we are feeling desire, a longing. He describes needing a painkiller and needing it now. Getting relief and some sense of neutral and positive sensation as it related to his right foot.
Moving to the lower half of the diagram, that represents what we dislike… As we turn to the left, that’s the past – what we disliked in the past. This represents anger, I would even add resentment… This could be directed towards someone else in the way of blame, and it can be directed towards ourself in the way of guilt.
He should have been a better surgeon. It’s his fault, he didn’t do a good job. That’s blame. The guilt would look like “If only I would have not agreed to have the surgery…” Again, this represents anger.
Staying with the dislike, moving to the right, looking at the future… This quadrant is about future and dislike, and this is where we have fear. “Oh no, I hope the pain is not gonna be as bad as it was the last time.”
What Lode is describing in this diagram is that we have pain in the present moment, but then we layer it with these four different quadrants… Again, the upper left that represents the past and like is loss; the upper right represents like in future, and that’s desire. Then the lower left represents past and dislike, and that’s about anger. It could be directed towards others in the form of blame, or towards ourself in the form of guilt. Then the lower right, which is dislike in future, and that’s fear.
He says “Much of the pain that we feel is not of the present, it’s not of the here and now. It lives in one of these four quadrants created by our minds.” Yes, it does not make the pain less real, but again, it’s the way we’re relating to the pain that adds layers of additional pain.
When we think about relationship pain, it can be confusing. On one hand, we long for harmony, union, effortless flow in the way that we love and feel loved by our significant other. We long to feel the “happily ever after.” Then at some point we’re confronted with differences that may feel conflictual, and our strategies for dealing with conflict can feel extremely threatening in relationship, whether or not we shut down and disengage and turn away, or perhaps we get louder in an attempt to feel understood and to feel heard… Yet both strategies contribute to more disconnect, more feelings of inadequacy, abandonment, rejection, feeling along.
Earlier this year a couple invested into the Connected Couple program, and also supplemented that program with a few coaching sessions. One of their chief complaints was the way that they experienced conflict together and the impact of that. They were just for many years feeling a great divide in their intimacy, both emotional and sexual, as well as their way to feel safe together.
They described her as the constant aggressor, the one that would criticize, that would come in hot with blame and shame, that would protest actively, maybe yelling and increasing the volume of her voice to get attention and to get him to engage. For him, they described as the constant shutdown person. The person that pushed away, turned away, turned inwards, was not accessible, was disengaged, appeared to be void of emotion, was contained, presented as aloof, unaffected, ignored her, and stonewalled at times.
Let’s put this couple’s pain on Lode Dewulf’s diagram. If we look at the upper left quadrant, the like in the past, the husband in this couple might say “I miss the days where she adored me and was loving towards me.” She might say “I miss feeling him in our connection.” There’s a loss there.
Moving to the upper right quadrant – like and future. He might say “I wish she would treat me with more consideration and respect” and she might say “I wish he would engage with me and let me in.” There’s desire there.
Going to the lower left quadrant, of dislike and past. “She is such a villain, I can’t believe I put up with this.” Or she might say “He is so passive… How are we ever to have a relationship if he doesn’t show up?” That’s blame.
Or he might say “I don’t know how to give her what she needs… Maybe I’m not good enough.” She might say “Why did I choose this guy? Why didn’t I see the signs?” There’s guilt, as we turn that anger towards ourselves.
Moving to the lower right corner – dislike and future. He might say “Is this how it’s gonna be? I don’t know how to live with someone who constantly berates and belittles me. I may never truly be happy.” She might say “I have tried everything to get him to engage. Maybe he doesn’t really care about me, and will leave me. I may never have real love.” Fear.
It is painful enough to have disconnect in relationship. Lode is teaching us that we have the existing pain that we’re experiencing, and that we add additional layers of pain in each of these four quadrants, compounding the pain with loss, desire, anger and fear.
He asks us to think “How much of the pain is in the now, and how much of it is things we have added on, and how we maintain pain after it’s gone, unconsciously injecting more pain?” This compounded pain makes it that much more difficult to be vulnerable and to co-create safety in your dynamic.
If you’ve listened to previous episodes on this podcast, I’ve talked about the importance of turning towards your pain, so that you can see what’s going on. Have a little bit more understanding around where the sensitivity lies, where the pain comes from what the fear is. Once you have more clarity, then you can share with your partner more vulnerably. When your partner can see you, feel your hurt, they are likely to soften. This begins to create the safety, allowing the space to be open and connected, both people revealing themselves.
Conversely, when we don’t turn towards our pain, we will consciously – but more often unconsciously – work extremely hard to protect ourselves. We have so many good strategies to shut down, whether or not it’s trying to numb the pain through any substance, through food, through TV, through any form of distraction… Whether we just ignore or divert, or we protest and criticize and blame, or perhaps we go intellectual, we have excuses, we have stories, all of which are ways to attempt avoiding the pain. However, what happens when we avoid – we complicate the dynamic and create more pain and suffering. If you blame and attack your partner, they’re likely to get defensive. If you shut down, your partner is likely going to seek you out. Over time, if we avoid pain, the costs are great.
In a recent New York Times article titled What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity by Karen Jones, she talks about how her experience of not wanting to be in relationship and having sexual intimacy with men who were married… And what she found was most of them wanted to be married, wanted to have sex with their wives, and wanted emotional intimacy, but they didn’t know how to ask for it. So instead of having a difficult conversation and confront possibly hurting their wife’s feelings by expressing some discontent and pain around not being sexually intimate, they preferred – and this is obviously sometimes unconscious, but their actions were they were choosing to have an affair instead of having that difficult conversation.
Or we might feel deep dissatisfaction and unhappiness in our relationship, and think that it no longer works, and want to get a divorce or break up… Or perhaps we avoid pain so much that we lose ourselves, we lose connection with what matters to us, and we become a shell of ourselves.
One of the theories that I have discussed in detail on the Empowered Relationship podcast and have provided additional curriculum around is the developmental process of relationship. That is there are five developmental stages that every couple progresses through in some form or fashion; it will look very different for different couples, but most couples will go through the first stage, the romance stage, and then enter into the power struggle stage.
That is where we recognize our partner is different than we might have initially thought, or perhaps their style is different. This is where we will experience the conflict between introversion and extraversion, the prepared one, the spontaneous one, the budgeter or the spender, and there’s many, many different forms of stylistic differences, personality differences, and that we are gonna be confronted with these differences and at times it’s gonna feel conflictual.
How we deal with that conflict, how we deal with the pain that emerges in that conflict is key; that is why I find this TED talk so helpful, as he gives us mechanisms to understand how to be with pain in a more productive way… Because pain is inevitable, but how we move through it has a big difference in our experience. And ironically, when we turn towards the pain, there are many benefits. When we turn away from the pain, we are creating more suffering and additional pain.
Lode Dewulf says “I believe that avoidance pain is not the only way forward. In fact, I believe there is huge value in understanding your pain, and I can tell you from experience that that understanding of pain can lead to less suffering and more happiness.”
After working with the couple that I shared with you about, for one session, helping them turn towards their pain, they were able to shift their interactions in a powerful way. I got to meet with them this week and I was moved by their transformation and the amount of growth and safety and intimacy that they had cultivated in a pretty short amount of time.
They were remarking to me that being able to meet their pain directly opened up a whole new world for them, and that they realized how they were actively protecting their pain, and that it was creating more problematic conflict and difficulties and disconnect with each other… And unconsciously, they weren’t even entirely aware of how much pain was there for them, but that they were so entrenched in their strategies to protect that they weren’t actually really relating.
Their story is so inspiring, and I’m gonna be able to share more with you next week in part two as we continue the conversation of how pain and suffering increase, and what to do about it. I’m also gonna be sharing with you another teaching tool that Lode Dewulf talks with us about around how to change, how to grow, how to learn, and that there’s four stages of that, and I’m gonna relate that to relational growth as well.
If you would like access to the one-page visual of the developmental stages that I created, that have supplemental text around the key skills needed to develop to the next stage and what that all looks like, I encourage you to go to today’s show notes. Again, that can be found on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and find episode 140, How Pain And Suffering Increase And What To Do About It.
When you click on the show notes, you can find the button there; it will also be in the Mentioned section. This graphic will be a nice complement to part two of How Pain And Suffering Increase And What To Do About It. It’s a free download, so I encourage you to access it and it will give you lots of information around what each stage looks like, what the challenges are, and again, what the key skills needed to develop to move forward are. Again, that can be found on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, find today’s episode and you can find the link there.
Thank you so much for your interest in improving your relationship. It is important to know how to handle pain in relationship to create safety, allow more openness and connection in your relationship.
As always, if you have a question for the Empowered Relationship Podcast and you’d like to submit that, you can find all the details on the Contact section of my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com, and also if you’re interested in deepening your practice, ready to get on path of developing a more thriving, meaningful, authentic, conscious relationship, feel free to reach out to me so that we can explore next steps to getting you the support and the guidance to be successful in relationship. Until next time, I hope you take great care.
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