Hello all, welcome to episode 53 of let’s talk dirty. Did anyone get the reference I made with the title of this episode? It’s like death warmed up. It’s a line from the movie The Devil Wears Prada. One of the girls is sick and someone asks how’s the cold doing? And she reply’s it’s like death warmed up. And this character in the movie is such an agitated, stick up her ass, miserable and empty person and I was noticing, as I was rewatchign this the other day, that she is like a representation of all of our worst thoughts about the world and about ourselves and about life and about other people. And it shows. Her thoughts are literally creating this death warmed up feeling, eternally, for her. No wonder she’s miserable. No wonder she’s physically ill. How much stuck negative emotion must there be in her body? And that’s how I used to think about SO many things. It’s like, no matter what it was whether it really was horrible, or it was just stubbing my toe, my mind would offer that it was the worst possible thing that could ever happen. Something is always VERY WRONG. Like either something is wrong with me or something is wrong with the world. And there’s nothing to do about it. Death is like the only thing we can’t escape from, so if something is death warmed up it’s like a total fucking black hole of despair and shit fuckery.
So who’s ever had these types of thoughts about something? About yourself.You observe yourself some time and you’re just like ughhh I am the worst most mediocre awful person. Something happens in the world, like right now we’ve got some serious human rights violations in our reality. And we’ve all got lot’s of thoughts about how hopeless it is. How so much is wrong.
Today I’m going to talk about the difference between Free Pain. And Expensive pain. And I want to share some ideas with you about how to stop misery or despair from manifesting into a physical, emotional, even spiritual stuckness that kind of looms over some of us for longer than necessary. And longer than necessary for me means, more than like a day. Because suffering with emotional pain, the expensive pain as I’m calling it, does not need to go on for weeks and months and years.
What I want for you is to be able to go through hard things and feel emotions like sadness and anger and anxiety and not be paralyzed. Because all of us suffer right? This is like something to notice about human connection, we all suffer. We all have free access to the pain of being human. We have free access to pain of losing someone we love or care about. Free access to disappointment when we don’t get something that we wanted. We’ve got free access to anxiety when something isn’t working the way we’d hoped. We get to have fear for free when our kid falls down and get’s hurt or our dog get’s lost. Or when your expectations get crushed…like right now what’s going on in politics, maybe you expected that the right to choose and have full autonomy over your body was a given but now it’s not. There’s hurt there.
Free pain is the regular human shit that we all get to have simply because we live here on planet earth and we care about stuff. And not only is there no avoiding this type of free pain, but there’s also no reason to avoid it.
Wanna know why? First, it’s free. And who doesn’t like free shit? And this isn;t just any ol free shit layin out on the curb. No, this free pain comes delivered to you because you are a glorious human who deserves to know the joys of a full and complete life. Without this free pain we would not know the free WONDER, EXCITEMENT, LOVE, PLEASURE that comes with it. Free pain is a blessing. Because free pain comes into our bodies when we think thoughts of care like “I really loved him and he’s gone.” or “That dream was so important to me” or “Women deserve freedom of choice.” Those are thoughts you won’t likely waver on, nor do you WANT to. There are truths, personal truths, that are unwavering, that will cause you pain, but the pain is worth holding on to your thinking. So free pain, any emotional pain really, is harmless. A feeling itself doesn’t
Ok it sounds really cool when I say it like that right but when we’re actually in it, it still feels like shit.
But, I’m going to tell you a secret today about thought work that I hope you’ll really consider: you cannot use thought work to change how you feel until you’re willing to actually feel the shitty feelings that every human feels. Willing. Not like yeah I’ve felt anxious before ok I’m done, because it sucks and I don’t ever want to feel anxious again. But really truly open to feeling anxious again and again without trying to get out of it. And this is a concept I tell my clients about when we start coaching together but almost all of them don't know exactly how to do this, to be willing to feel, until they've already done it. They also don’t usually see the importance of this skill until they've already done it. So it’s not something I have a 5 step plan for, really. So I’m sorry to disappoint you. But you will have to use this awareness, that to be able to effectively feel better, you must first be willing to not feel better, to find out how to do that. And where you can try that. Like the most simple way that most people can start to break down the unwillingness to feel is to notice what you try to do to distract yourself from feeling. That is the number one sign of unwillingness. Distraction and staying tense to the feelings. Like trying to get out of it.
Free Pain= the regular pain that comes as part of the package deal of being human. It’s not a problem.
Now, what then is expensive pain? And when is it a problem?
Expensive Pain=the extra terrible emotional garbage we pile on TOP of that free pain, with totally optional thoughts that probably ARE NOT in service of our ultimate truth or highest good. Expensive pain can cost us because it creates undesirable results over and over and over.
Side note for clients who might be listening, sometimes I will refer to this and clean pain and dirty pain, which I think I learned in Coaching School and you may have heard this in our sessions together and sometimes I’ll say human pain versus constructed pain. Or baseline pain verus pile on pain. Today I’m going to call it free pain and expensive pain because I think it get’s my point across the best. But just know, that if you’re like I think I’ve heard this before, you have, I may just be using different terminology.
So the expensive pain = the stuff we pile on top with our thoughts, that weighs us down, and we PAY FOR with our results.
So expensive pain happens when we think things like:
This thing happened and therefor nothing ever works out, there’s no point, everything is fucked, I have to leave this country, there is no good left in the world. No one likes me. There’s nothing we can do. There’s no one on my side. Something’s always wrong. Something is wrong with me. This is like DEATH WARMED UP.
ALL of that is untrue. It also sounds pretty dramatic when I say it all but I promise you that if you are suffering in pain for an extended period of time, there are thoughts not unlike these I just mentioned, that are keeping you in unnecessary, expensive pain.
So here is the point: when you are hurting, you can ask yourself, What role am I playing in my torment? What role am I playing in my suffering? Do I WANT to feel upset by this? Why?
Like for example,
I asked my client recently who was in the midst of sorting out whether her and this guy she’s been seeing were staying together or not, I asked do you want to feel disappointed if this guy breaks up with you and she originally said no and I was like why not?
And she was like I don’t like feel disappointed. And I said Do you want to feel happy if you break up? And she was like well no.
And we noticed that she did want to feel upset and disappointed because she cared about this relationship, she was just letting her old conditioning that told her negative emotions are all bad, to scare her out of just being willing to feel disappointment. Ok so like
Free pain, like disappointment, kinda comes from positive thoughts. We love someone and they die or we like someone and they break up with us or we feel passionately about something that’s taken away. Or we are excited and thrilled by something we want and it doesn’t work out. None of the pain from those things, the genuine, almost knee jerk, clear and pure, effortless pain that comes from those things is a problem. And if we allow that type of pain, the intensity lessens over time. And in between those waves of disappointment, she, my client, and you can get on with your life and function. I’ve said this before but embracing the free pain actually helps it pass through us more quickly. Like when she decided that feeling disappointment wasn’t actually a problem and she just felt disappointment and was like oh ok, I can move on and stop obsessing now AND she was able to more easily get a handle on the thoughts that were causing her additional, expensive pain like “I’ll never find love again,” “there must be something unattractive about me.” “that was a total waste of time.” “what an asshole”
So feel the genuine ouch. Wow I really liked him. Ouch. Take the freebies. But when you attach a story of self depreciation or shame to what happened, that’s when you pay for expensive pain when it gets clogged and stuck and literally does feel like death warmed up.
So some other examples of when you’re investing in expensive pain maybe without realizing it: when you resist reality with thoughts like that shouldn't have happened. Not liking what happened is one thing, but fighting with reality piles so much anger and frustration on top of the free pain of just feeling sad or disappointed. Right?
If someone dies, I want to miss them and feel sad but when I keep believing this is unfair and shouldnt have happened, it can never be resolved because it did happen right so that feeling of like injustice and outrage will stay stuck for a long time. You will know it’s expensive pain when you’re having a hard time functioning or carrying on with your life like again we want to feel the free pain we feel when we honor women and bodies around the country who are having right’s and freedoms stripped away as we speak we want to honor them and feel the pain in that and, at least for me, I want to also be able to act and react with purpose and clarity, I want to take care of myself and continue my life and help the people I help and be a partner and a dog mom and a friend and I dunno, brush my teeth…but if I stay stuck in the beliefs like nothing will ever be good or easy again. We are all doomed. This ruined everything. There is never justice. I pile on hopelessness and collapse. Negative predictions about the future like I heard someone say the other day “it’s all downhill from here” that pain will stay stuck in their body, that pain will cause alot of inaction, it will teach that person to always give events and circumstances out of your control the power to determine their personal future, it will create more loathing and upheaval in their personal life if they don’t decide to challenge that thought pattern.
So free pain vs expensive pain, understanding this made a huge difference for me in understanding how to deal with my anxiety. Because when I was struggling alot with experiencing anxiety, I was having so much expensive pain about the experience. Like compounding anxiety that was unnecessary.
Thinking like, I have bigger dreams, there is a gap between how I am living my life now in a lot of anxiety and where I want to be living which is without much anxiety at all…that noticing caused a lot of free pain. Not being where I wanted to be. That’s the normal human pain of like sensing the disconnect between where I am now and where I want to be ultimately. But the expensive pain was then “I’ll never get there. I don’t know how because I am so broken. Something is wrong with me. This is so fucked up.” Those types of thoughts piled on self doubt and despair and confusion, where I stayed for a long time, paying for that pain with my results of not healing my anxiety for a long time. So I had to learn how to not only be with the anxiety that was happening, and get to a point where it was like oh ok, I feel anxious, and that’s ok, but also to be like I am willing to be uncomfortable here for as long as it takes for me to find my way out. I can stay with this free pain, it’s not always easy, but I can do it, and what makes it even easier is lifting the weight of all that crap I piled on top with all of these awful thoughts about me, my ability, how broken I am, how pathetic I am, all of that.
Your ability to understand the difference is going to help you grow so fast. Grow whatever. Your relationships, your business, your body image stuff, your creative project, your ability to heal your anxiety, your confidence, whatever. When you are stuck in pain for weeks and weeks you sink and give up. Doubt and fear compounds.
Painful shit happens, some people process it and some people let it totally derail them. I want to empower you to unshackle yourself from the costs of compounding this expensive pain. And show up for the free pain. Like eventually, with a little bit of thrill even! Like the thrill of having loved something so much that you get to experience the sadness and heartbreak of losing it. The thrill of wanting something so badly that you don’t have yet, and you get to experience the pain of disappointment.
When I was in Hong Kong my sister and I were walking downtown one afternoon and there was a line of literally probably 10,000 people snaking through the streets and I was like wow there must be a show or concert or something people are waiting for and we followed the line of all these super excited people to the front and guess what they were all there for? I free scoop of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. Ben and Jerrys was doing a free scoop day! And some people they really care enough about ice cream to wait in a line of 10,000 people right? But you know what, you will find me in that line, for my free pain, every time. I’ll probably complain about it some and get uncomfortable but I want that free pain, just as bad as the 10,000th person in that line wanted her free scoop of ice cream.
Free pain is not a problem. Expensive pain is what we layer on top and costs us.
Show up for the free pain.