Pain Is Hard. Being Alone In It Is Harder.
Let’s take a sec to talk about pain. We’ve all been there - emotional, physical, psychological. The root experience of pain, no matter the type, is universal:it’s not nice. I know that might seem like a plain way to describe it, but honestly, it’s what I so often hear when I ask clients what a painful experience feels like. “It’s just… not nice.” And really, it is that simple. Pain hurts. We do not wanna be in it.
But I think what often makes pain feel unbearable is not just the pain itself - it’s the loneliness that can come with it.
Most of us can tolerate difficult things a lot more than we think we can when we feel supported, understood, or accompanied in them. Pain becomes overwhelming when it feels like we are alone inside of it. It’s why people often say trauma is not necessarily the event itself, but being unseen or unsupported through the aftermath. Not having someone there who can see your pain and stay with you in it.
And when we’re young, no matter how loving or attuned our caregivers may have been, most of us have experiences where our pain is not fully met. Maybe it was minimized. Maybe it was brushed aside. Maybe there simply wasn’t space for it. A child will naturally adapt to that, and that adaptation shows up in beliefs like: “My pain is too much.” “My feelings don’t get to take up space.” “I need to handle this on my own.”
We carry those beliefs into adulthood unconsciously more often than we realize.
So when pain shows up later in life, many of us don’t actually know how to stay with ourselves in it. We move immediately into escaping, numbing, intellectualizing, distracting, fixing, or shutting down - anything to get away from the experience. Not necessarily on purpose or because we’re avoidant, but because somewhere along the way we learned that pain was something we had to manage alone.
Healing is a process of re-learning. Not how to get rid of pain, but how to relate to it differently. It's learning that your pain gets to exist. That it gets to matter. That difficult experiences do not need to be immediately solved in order to be acknowledged.
Honestly, I think a huge part of counselling is simply helping others not feel alone in what they're carrying. What I've seen over the last five years doing this work is that being deeply met in an experience can be far more healing than immediately being pointed toward the exit.
When someone feels fully seen, acknowledged, and understood in their pain, something often softens. The nervous system stops fighting quite so hard. And paradoxically, that is often what finally allows movement to happen.
That’s why I operate from the stance that “healing” has less to do with eliminating pain and more to do with ensuring it doesn't go unwitnessed. Whether that witness is a trusted friend, a counsellor or therapist, a partner, or even the adult version of you learning to stay present with what hurts, the experience is much the same: your pain no longer has to exist alone.
