In this episode, breakup coach Sarah Curnoles shares how to move through emotional pain instead of numbing or avoiding it. You’ll learn the difference between clean pain and dirty pain, and the five key skills to help you heal: awareness, tolerance, regulation, self-compassion, and thought questioning. Listen in to discover how sitting with your feelings can ease your suffering and open the door to peace and joy again.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk for you. I'm Sarah KLEs, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk, to heal your heart. Let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
(00:44)
Today we're going to talk about how to cope with emotional pain. Hello friends. Sarah Kernels here, your breakup bestie, helping you heal from heartbreak and turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to you. I am a certified life coach, and I have never heard anybody in the life coaching world really talk about the actual pain that we suffer from heartbreak. And so we're going to be doing that today. We're going to be talking about when you are stuck in a lot of actual physical pain because it does hurt when you are grieving, when you are going through heartbreak, how the hell do you get through that, right? So that's what we're digging into today. And if you are somebody who is feeling like they're really stuck in this pain who feels like that, it's never ending, that you just keep reliving the same kind of hell over and over and over again.
(01:51)
I got you. I want you to be able to leave this podcast with some tools and strategies so that you can get through that pain and get out of it. So I know that if you're listening to this, what you probably want is you just want to get back to your normal life. You want the pain to stop, you want it to be over. You want to be able to sleep through the night without nightmares or seeing your ex in your dreams, and you want to stop waking up with anxiety and you want to stop wishing that things were different. You just want it to actually be different. You want to stop feeling so sad, heavy and in retching pain, right? So what I know about how I used to go through this and what my clients are doing when they first come to me, they try to get through this by making the pain stop, by distracting themselves.
(02:54)
And what that might look like is they are constantly work, constantly busy. Maybe they are throwing themselves into a new workout program and they're obsessed with getting that revenge body. They possibly book a trip, they go on a vacation thinking that this will be the perfect way to lift my spirits. This will get me out of my funk. And as soon as they get back, the pain is still there or they spend the whole trip crying, which I have definitely done. Other ways that people try to escape pain or distract themselves from it is binge watching Netflix, drinking wine, smoking pot, or sometimes people do this by getting into another relationship as soon as possible, they start swiping on the apps and they either go for the hookup or they go for another relationship, ASAP. So keep this in mind folks. When you see your ex move on right away, you don't know what's going on.
(03:59)
Maybe that is just their way of handling and distracting and numbing from the emotional pain that they're in because separation, sometimes even for the person who does the breaking up, sometimes it does cause emotional pain and everybody handles it differently. So don't make any assumptions about someone else's behavior and use it against yourself. But I digress. So if you are distracting yourself from your pain, this works only temporarily. As soon as you stop distracting yourself, the pain comes back and it comes back probably twice as bad because you've been pushing it down and it is just waiting and waiting. Pain doesn't go away just because you wait it out. It is just going to hurt. And this is why it will often feel unending because it has been backed up for way, way, way longer than it probably needs to be. And I want to take a little sidebar here and I want to talk about the experience of wallowing because this has come up recently on a couple of my calls with my clients.
(05:16)
So one of them said something like, I don't know, maybe I'm just wallowing. So here's what wallowing is. There is a difference between what psychologists call clean pain and dirty pain. I want you to think of clean pain as the experience in reaction to something that happened. So if you stub your toe, that's clean pain, right? That pain that you immediately feel after you stub your toe, ouch, that sucks. That hurts. Dirty pain is caused from your thoughts about the thing that happened. So you stub your toe, but then you tell yourself all day, ouch, that hurt when I did that a couple hours ago. Oh, my toe is probably swelling up in my shoe. It's probably going to be so uncomfortable to walk around. Ugh, this has ruined my whole day. Of course, this is how I started my day. My whole day is ruined now because I stub my toe this morning.
(06:16)
That really sucked when I did that. And how could I be so stupid? That is dirty pain. That is when you are keeping your pain alive through the thoughts and the stories that you tell yourself. So wallowing is when we hang on to pain longer than we really need to. We really sort of luxuriate in the fact that we're feeling this pain. We do this for a few reasons. Humans are programmed to focus on their injury because back in caveman days, this meant that you could survive, right? If you had pain and you had an injury, you knew you had to address it in order to survive. So if that stubbing your toe had been something more serious like you broke your toe, that pain that you have means that you need to take care of that injury and make sure it heals properly. Now, we don't live in a world where our survival is that threatened anymore.
(07:16)
It was way back in the day. So we don't really need to hang onto that pain the way that we used to. We don't have to keep that programming, and yet we do it. We do it by keeping memories of your ex alive. We keep replaying them over and over and over again and we enjoy that sweet pain sometimes. And we do this partially because it's a habit to keep thinking of those memories and sometimes partially we really enjoy the self pity and the righteousness that sometimes comes along with they cause me so much pain. So just I want you to notice if you are wallowing in pain and it might feel like you drift to the same story over and over again because you get to relive that experience of loss or injustice or you feel really gloomy a lot of the time and you feel like you're brooding and you let your feelings intensify into either fury or depression or also that your agony feels really comfortable.
(08:31)
This is how if you're wallowing, if your agony and your pain feels really comfortable, like perfectly worn in sweatpants, you might also notice you're starting to bore yourself. So these are all signs that you might be wallowing. So just pay attention to that. And so that is very different than the clean pain that we suffer from a heartbreak. A heartbreak naturally does cause some pain, and that's what I want to talk about dealing with today. If you are doing wallowing, if you are stuck in some of the dirty pain, go back to my episode on ruminating thoughts and that's going to help you address that. Okay? So when we are in emotional pain, what you really need to do isn't distract yourself, isn't to tell yourself stories so you stay in it longer. What we really need to do is we need to learn how to be with the pain instead of numbing it, pushing it away or repressing it.
(09:33)
This works because pain is not permanent. So this pain that you feel, even though it's excruciating and even though you might think in your brain that you're scared that it's permanent, it's not. There is an end to it. And in fact, any sensation, any pain, any emotion even will be fully felt after sitting with it for 90 seconds. You can try this out and we're going to talk a little bit more about this, but if you sit with and observe and watch a feeling, just like you would be watching the ocean, you'd watch a wave come up and you'd watch it crust and crash. That whole process of feeling a feeling come up, seeing it at its peak and then seeing it go back down lasts only about 90 seconds. Anything after that is dirty pain that you're doing with your thoughts. Now, you might have more than one wave, and when it's soon after the event, say your spouse passed away, those waves of grief, of emotional pain, those come close together.
(10:46)
But you'll notice they each have their own arc of they come up and they go down. Yes. So it only lasts 90 seconds. So here's what you need to learn how to do, and these are all skills. And skills just means that it's something that you can learn and you can practice and you can get better at. They're not things that like you're born with it or you're not, not at all the case. So here's what you need to develop. In order to handle emotional pain, you need to first build the skill of having the awareness, having emotional awareness. I talk about this a lot of being able to identify the feeling and just being able to name it is a skill because you can't heal what you're not aware of. That's skill one, emotional awareness. Skill two is having a tolerance for your distress.
(11:39)
All this is is just the ability to sit with the pain. So if you feel like you can't get through the full 90 seconds without really suffering, then build up your tolerance for it. Maybe you set a timer and you start with 10 seconds. I'm just going to sit with this pain for 10 seconds. And when that timer goes off, you stop. And maybe the next time you do it, you see if you can last a little bit longer, 15 seconds. This is how you can build your tolerance for distress. And when you have a tolerance for distress and uneasy feelings, you actually can handle discomfort in the rest of your life. This right here, if you take nothing else away and you build the skill of being able to be uncomfortable, that will change your life because growth happens in discomfort.
(12:31)
The third step, or the third skill I should say, is learning how to regulate yourself and soothe yourself. And this might look like deep breaths or grounding yourself or finding ways to create comfort, whether it's tea or soft blankets or cuddling with a pet. Okay? The next skill I want you to practice to handle your emotional pain is self-compassion. So instead of telling yourself stories about how awful you are and how you deserved this or whatever terrible things that our minds come up with, I want you to instead learn how to be soft and gentle with yourself. And this is a skill most of us have to figure out because we aren't often taught this, we're often our worst critics. And so start by being more compassionate.
(13:23)
And the final skill actually is more, it's addressing more of that dirty pain. But I want you to start to learn the process of questioning your thoughts. And I work with this a lot with my clients because this really brings a lot of relief when we learn not to believe everything we think, but to question it. Okay? So when you learn these skills, when you learn how to sit with your pain, your pain does not hang around forever. It actually you move through it and it goes away. And that allows you to get back to your life. You actually will have much more mental capacity for all the other things in your life, and you're going to be able to also open up your capacity for all the other feelings. So when you're able to sit with pain, then you are also able to have more capacity for joy.
(14:17)
It's just the way that that works. Okay, so this is an episode I hope you'll bookmark. I hope you'll come back to a time and time again. If you know somebody who is going through a lot of emotional pain, will you please do me a favor and share this episode with them? I would love it if you helped to share the word about this. And while you're at it, if you feel inspired, please feel free to give me a rating and a review. It would help me out so much as I get the word out about how I can help people through their breakups and turning them into the best thing that ever happened. I want that for you, and I want for the world because I know when we get through our breakups, we stop feeling so distracted and we get to be more present, which means we actually can do what we are here to do in the world. Alright, my friends, that's our episode for today. I hope that you take good care of yourself, and I will see you next time.