Discord Pt. 2

More about sorting one’s pain inside

There is someone I know that can never sort the old things in their life. From the time they were small and lived in a broken home and then got passed around from one relative to another, they never learned to cope with the pain and traumatic things in their life. Oh they were taught to remember the pain to be angry, to lash out at others and get even. But the deepest pain in their lives was often buried like that thorn to lay and fester through a whole life.

As the years went by, those thorns grew up scar tissue around them creating more and more pain. There also became denial in the form of “Oh that’s ok I’m over it.” Or “I’ll just not think of it anymore.” In fact those things never ever go away but build into layer after layer of pain that is so long denied that it becomes second nature. Although the person tells themselves they are happy, they constantly seek something, anything to make that inner longing go away. Early in their teens it came in the form of drugs, and cigarettes and in later years alcohol abuse. The uses of these substances were so long established and accepted in the circle of friends and family this person kept, that the fact that it was harmful to themselves or others was something that simply didn’t register.

As life’s pain built up and the hurts this person had accumulated built up, it caused them to wall off chunks of their heart. As relationship after relationship failed, they never looked inward; never seeing that the walls they built to block new pain was also keeping in the pain they sought to block. More and more they retreated into the habits that soothed their troubled heart. More and more they viewed life that everyone else was out to hurt them and they themselves were ok.

It never occurred to this person that the new relationships they started in their life were poisoned from the start. The people in the new relationships never knew until too late that there was this avalanche of pain and a fortress of ice around the person’s true heart. The love this person professed would be so watered down and delusional that those who chose to love this person would eventually be starved out of their life, to the bewilderment of the person. It seemed to them that it was just others rejecting them, always someone else out to hurt them. Again it never donned on them to look inside.

Even when the latest relationship broke down, more lives broken, that they were confronted about the old pain and the need to dig it all up and cope with it once and for all; this person reacted with scorn and replied, “What are you now, a shrink?”

Oh the sadness and pain we could all eliminate from our lives if we simply sort out those things in ourselves and face them head on. I’ll freely admit that I’m learning to do exactly that with the hurts in my life. I’m finding daily that more and more splinters are working out of the core of my heart; those things that have been long denied and have to come out bits at a time. It’s almost like those oldest things are like shattered glass. When viewed in a certain light it seems all to have been swept away. But upon looking at things from a different angle we see shards and can remove them. Sometimes we cannot see them at all but a bump from something else lets us know that that glass is stuck in the symbolic finger of our minds and hearts and has to be carefully removed by the tweezers of gentle introspection.

I don’t claim to know it all or have it all down pat. FAR FROM IT! I simply have seen firsthand the pain from keeping things buried inside and vow to do my best never to do so again.