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 simply 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. Was there someone who could see your pain and stay with you in it? Or were you left to carry it by yourself?

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, 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 genuinely seen, acknowledged, and understood in their pain, something often softens. The nervous system doesn't have to work quite so hard to fight against what's happening. And interestingly, that's often when things begin to move.

That's why I tend to think healing has less to do with eliminating pain and more to do with making sure it doesn't go unwitnessed. Whether that witness is a counsellor, a trusted friend, a partner, or eventually yourself, the experience is similar: your pain no longer has to exist alone.