Your Emotional Pain Pattern is a Clue to Healing

Are you aware of your emotional pain patterns? Emotional pain patterns are clues to where you veered off the path of happiness and fulfillment, and they point to what needs healing.

These are the patterns developed in childhood to help you survive whatever challenges you faced growing up.

This is the pain that comes up again and again no matter how many times you move, change jobs, or start new relationships.

One of my most painful patterns was: feel bad, get into a romantic relationship to feel better, break up, feel worse.

The relationship never actually helped me get what I wanted: to feel better. To have more self-confidence, to feel my worth, to know I had value.

Even if the other person gave me that regard, I discounted it because how could they love me when I wasn’t worthy? It was an endless negative cycle.

It took getting into a really unhealthy relationship with an alcoholic/addict for me to finally hit bottom and realize that the problem was not finding the right relationship, the problem was healing my relationship with me.

I stopped dating and took time to analyze my past relationship patterns. I saw I was looking for love outside of myself. That was the clue to the truth: inside, I felt unworthy of love. That pain would never be healed by someone else loving me. I had to learn to love myself, know myself to be worthy, validate myself.

Here are some questions to ask to help pinpoint your emotional pain patterns?

• What situations keep happening in your life that lead to the same negative feelings?
• What are the feelings and situations you most want to avoid?
• Can you identify which aspects of life you experience recurring negative patterns? Work, relationships, family, parenting, caregiving, community activities?
• Look for the feelings that bother you the most. Is it anger, resentment, fear, feeling threatened, feeling controlled, loneliness, anxiety?
• Track your feelings for a week or a month. See if you can identify any cyclical patterns.

Once you pinpoint the recurring emotional patterns, you can look for the source of the pain and begin to address the original emotional wound. That’s where the real fun begins! More to come on this topic.

I’d love to hear your responses – what emotional pain patterns are you struggling with right now?

Photo by Praewthida K on Unsplash