Learning in Couples Counseling What to Do With Your Pain

[I posted this on my business Facebook page in April of 2023.]

It has been said you will either learn how to transform your pain in life, or else you will transmit it. I’ve been thinking about how in relationships, we transmit a lot of our individual pain back and forth to each other. Good couples counseling should help you identify how you are doing this and how to stop.

Last week I started doing yoga. I’ve had multiple sclerosis for 32 years and have always heard yoga is  really good for people with MS. I started on the most basic level, but still it was so hard, and sometimes it hurt. But I know so many valuable things in life are difficult and/or painful, and I can already feel my body starting to transform. It definitely hurts, but it hurts so good!

When you get into a bad place with your partner, when you get that uncomfortable feeling that you want to blame them or criticize them or call them out, think of that like an invitation from your soul (an opportunity) to dig down and learn more about what that feeling is. Running toward and not away from painful, difficult, embarrassing, frustrating, infuriating spaces in our lives will nearly always teach us some difficult but essential lessons about ourselves. This is the best way to grow in life.

But we cannot transform those places in ourselves if we aren’t willing to allow some painful truths into our lives. My term for this transformation is called the find, face, and follow process.

Finding truth happens in our minds. For example, a person discovers the unpleasant truth that, “I’m an angry person.”

Facing truth happens in our emotions. It’s where we come to terms with the painful reality of what we have just learned. “Wow, I’ve really hurt some people I care about because of my anger. It has cost me two jobs, and put a strain on my marriage and my relationship with one of my children.”

Following truth is where, having found and faced truth, you move into a new way of living and being. It’s where your mess becomes your message for others who are hurting and need the help you are now in a position to provide because of what you have gone through in your own life. 

This is how you use life itself as a great laboratory for the glorious transformation of your pain into beauty and bounty. 

It hurts. 

But it hurts so good!