What do you use to dull your inner pain?

There are moment in life when we just can’t seem to gain strength or comfort from within ourselves. We hold an inner emotional pain inside ourselves. I know this feeling well. I feel it now about my dad but I can also relate to this pain from past experience.

When I was younger I would cir-cum to a sense of self-pity, where I felt less loved or under appreciated. I would sit in this space for days, weeks and months at a time and really started to believe that I didn’t deserve to be loved or that I even had loveable characteristics. I became very dependent on what others thought of me and trying to get others to like me, as I simply lacked my own inner love and needed to gain it from outside. I needed men or friends to tell me I was loveable and wonderful all the time!

To dull my current pain and the pain I had in the past, I have always used things to subdue or at least shield myself. Some are simply because “I deserve them” and others are direct maskers of pain. I am talking about the things you turn to when life gets too hard and somehow you need outside comforts. Things like chocolate, alcohol, cookies, sweets and generally (it seems) things that are not particularly good for us.

For me at the moment, it has almost become a question of…. what is worse for my healing…. the eating of the chocolate to soothe me or drinking the alcohol to reduce the emotional pain or do I allow the pain out which seems to cause great stress on my body?

I am also overcome with a sense of guilt for having these things, craving these things, like that in itself is even more testament of my current weakness and that I should do good things for myself, like go for a walk, do some Yoga or meditate.

I know for years I would struggle with my diet and as I called it “sticking to things”. I would get gym memberships, start diets which cut out sugar or chocolate and I would inevitably fail at them. I never really knew why….. until now.

See, many of us have an inner pain. Something about ourselves we might dislike or not necessarily recognise. Perhaps you have been through a huge emotional pain (like me, right now) or have experienced something traumatic…. Perhaps it is that you believe you are not loveable, don’t deserve a man or that you don’t deserve to have everything you want in life as you are not worthy. Don’t feel bad – many of us have these thoughts:) I know I certainly did ….. for many, many years and some are still lingering! It is chocolate, alcohol and all those things you know you shouldn’t have that somehow make those feelings subdue. Somehow a slab of chocolate makes us feel more loved…. I know it is strange but it does 🙂 Somehow, the more “bad” it is, the  more we want it and the more it somehow dulls that pain. It is all kinda ironic as it inevitably is the cause of many of the things we dislike about ourselves – being overweight, bad skin, endo pain, feeling sore or depressed. We can cut out so many of the things we dislike about ourselves by cutting out the very things we have when we feel bad about ourselves – hope we can wrap our heads around that one.

So, why do it then? Why go against what inevitably know is bad for us?

Perhaps it is simply, that in this moment in time, it all doesn’t matter. The consequences of this moment don’t matter. This chocolate, alcoholic drink or great big piece of cake, don’t matter for the next 20minutes while I am enjoying them and getting their positive effects from them. – emotional effects I mean 🙂

Problem is, we become  reliant on them for that support. We delve into chocolate or alcohol more and more and start to believe that we simply couldn’t live without them. They become like a life partner – often even more reliable :). They are there for us and make us feel better and subdue and reduce our pain.

The thing is, they are all just masks. They mask our pain and subdue it – much like drugs. They never get to the real cause of our pain or actually get us to release the pain or deal with it. They suppress it and this inevitably makes them worse. By eating the chocolate or having that alcohol, we are inevitably giving it more attention and thought – after all we are miserable and we deserve it – right? We start to almost work ourselves into a spiral of being unhappy.

I know I am feeling this right now. I am so exhausted emotionally thinking about my dad, crying tears for him that somehow masking that pain is somehow more bearable than dealing with it.

I know I need to take it day by day and allow myself to grieve for him but somehow right now, I think I might just have another piece of chocolate 🙂