Pain Is Hard. Being Alone In It Is Harder.

Let's take a sec to talk about pain. Whether it's emotional, physical, or psychological, every one of us knows what it's like to hurt. Pain is part of being human. But I don't actually think pain is what makes us suffer the most… it's feeling alone in it.

Most of us can tolerate difficult things far more than we think we can when we feel supported, understood, or accompanied through them. The pain is still there, but it becomes more bearable because someone else is helping us hold it. It's often not the pain itself that overwhelms us but the loneliness that can come with it.

It's why you'll sometimes hear people say that trauma isn't just about what happened to us, but what happened after. It wasn't simply whether someone noticed your pain. It was whether your pain was met. Did someone stay with you in it? Help you make sense of it? Let it matter? Or were you left to carry it by yourself?

There's an important difference between having your pain seen and having your pain met. Pain is seen when someone recognizes that you're hurting. Pain is met when they respond in a way that communicates, "I'm here. You're not alone in this. It makes sense that this hurts." It's that second experience that helps our nervous system settle.

The truth is, most of us have moments growing up where our pain isn't fully met. That's not necessarily because our parents didn't love us. As adults, we know there are times when we're overwhelmed, stressed, or just don't have much left to give. Our parents had those moments too. Unfortunately though, when those moments happened alongside our pain, our hurt may have been minimized, dismissed, or unintentionally made to feel like too much.

As children, we naturally adapt. We begin to make sense of those experiences in the only way we can. Maybe we learn: "My feelings are too much," "I shouldn't burden other people," or "I need to deal with this on my own." We don't usually carry those beliefs into adulthood thinking, "This is what I believe." Instead, we carry the ways we've learned to respond to pain.

So when something hurts later in life, we often move straight into escaping it. Sometimes by distracting ourselves, staying busy, trying to fix it, or intellectualizing it. We convince ourselves we're fine. Not because we're doing something wrong, but because somewhere along the way our system learned that pain was something we had to get away from or pretend didn't exist.

That's why (at the risk of oversimplifying) healing is about slowly learning that our pain gets to exist. That it gets to matter. That we don't have to abandon ourselves the moment something hurts. When someone feels that their pain has been met (seen, acknowledged, and responded to with care whether by someone else or, over time, by their own adult self), something often softens.

We don't heal simply because our pain is noticed. We heal when our pain no longer has to be carried alone.