What Is It & How To Deal With It

As we reach the later stages on our path to well-being, we are able to observe more and more subtle experiences. For example, it’s easy to observe the physical pain of breaking your arm, regardless of which stage you’re in. But as we move into the post-conventional stages, maybe we start to notice that we get anxious when we are around certain people. In transcendent stages, we may be able to detect the very subtle fear of death that we hold in our bodies at every moment. Eventually, we’ll be able to observe extremely subtle experiences such as efforting, resistance, wanting, and attachment. You can learn more about these stages here. 
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It is through observing each of our experiences that we can see them clearly, and seeing them clearly is what allows us to zoom out beyond them. But, in order to get to the point where we can observe the subtle aspects of experience, we first need to observe the big, loud stuff. The loud stuff is usually our emotional pain. This pain represents a giant wall that stands between us and the transcendent stages of well-being (e.g., Cook-Grueter, 2014).

If we desire to make the transition to transcendent stages, it often requires that we face the aspects of ourselves and our experience that we have spent our entire lives avoiding. These are the parts that we really, really don’t want to see. For example, we may be required to bring awareness to childhood abuse, neglect, and/or mistreatment (so a good therapist is often needed!) You can also do certain exercises that help you release and move past this pain. To fully work through these exercises, it’ll likely take 1-3 months (more if you take breaks, which you should do if it’s feeling too overwhelming).

In this exercise, you’re going to create a list of past traumatic events that you’ve experienced. Include everything you can think of whether it’s a big trauma (such as abuse) or a small trauma (such as your boss criticizing your work a few times). It’s difficult to know which thoughts or emotions have not been properly processed. So it’s better to be thorough in creating this list.

• Create your list of past traumatic events in your journal.

Write About Your Emotional Pain
Choose one topic per day to spend 10-30 minutes journaling about. Write about any beliefs, thoughts, patterns, emotions (e.g., anger, shame, remorse, hatred, etc…), social experiences, or physical sensations you may have related to this traumatic event. While journaling, don’t hold anything back—if you have murderous thoughts and emotions, write them down. Get it all out on the paper (without harming yourself or others). 

If you feel uncomfortable keeping what you wrote, immediately delete it or throw it away. This isn’t about keeping a record, it’s about bringing clarity to your true experiences and emptying yourself or your psychological trash. This one exercise may take you several months. It just depends on how many traumas you have. There is no rush, and if you feel overwhelmed, take days off, rest, recuperate, show yourself love, talk to a therapist, and begin again when you are ready.

In this exercise, you’re going to create a list of things that most bother you. These are the things that just get under your skin again and again. Include everything you can think of whether it’s a big trigger (such as someone threatening you) or a small trigger (such as your neighbor letting their dog pee on your lawn). Sometimes it’s the littlest things that actually are affecting us the most. So, be thorough in creating this list.

• Create your list of triggers in your journal.

Write About Your Triggers
Choose one topic per day to spend 10-30 minutes journaling about. Write about whatever comes to mind, whether it’s from the past or present, and really express how these triggers make you feel. Don’t worry if you sound completely nuts—you never have to show your journal to anyone and you can even throw away your writing once you’re done writing it. Just get your thoughts and emotions out on the page without holding anything back.​​

In this exercise, you’re going to create a list of habits you engage in that lead to negative emotions. For example, if you’re a people pleaser, you may find yourself frequently getting resentful of others’ demands on you. Or, if you have a hard time with work-life balance, you may frequently find yourself stressed from overworking. While making this list, include everything you can think of.

• Create your list of emotional habits in your journal.

Write About Your Habits

Choose one topic per day to spend 10-30 minutes journaling about. Write about the patterns you observe and how they contribute to your negative emotions. Express any feelings you have about these bad habits, where they came from, or how they perpetuate themselves. Get it all out on the paper (and not towards yourself or others).

Although many emotions can be released through journaling, we often hold emotions that can not be expressed well in words. So it can be helpful to do physical release exercises as well. Releasing pain can feel uncomfortable because it requires we actually feel the pain (both physical and emotional). But when it has been released, we generally feel lighter, freer, and more capable of managing our daily lives.

For this exercise, set aside 20 minutes and find some space where you can be alone. Think of a small pain or trauma that you still hold onto. For example, maybe you’re still mad at a childhood friend for something they did decades ago. Once you have an experience in mind, execute the following steps.

1. First, get into your body. Start by squeezing the muscles in your hands, then squeeze the muscles in your arms, then squeeze the muscles in your legs, then give yourself a big hug, squeezing your entire body. Take a few deep breaths while you continue to hug yourself.
2. Next, think of the situation which upset you in the past. Bring to mind the experience, how it felt in your body, and what emotions you felt. Allow these emotions to come up in your body and feel them with all of your senses, as much as you can.
3. Scan your body to observe as many sensations as you can. Perhaps you feel tingling, heat, clenching, pressure, vibrations, or other sensations. Scan your entire body and note every sensation you find, naming each sensation as you notice it. 
4. Let your body experience whatever it wants to experience. If it wants to hit a pillow, scream, or cry, let it. It’s trying to experience the emotion so that it can move out of the body, and we often stop it from doing so. Allow the emotions to move and release in a safe way (for example, hit a pillow instead of yourself or others).
5. Express love to yourself for being brave enough to experience these emotions. For each difficult emotion, send your love to it while accepting its existence so that it can finally move on. 
6. Listen to your body to see if you can gain any deeper wisdom from the emotions. Are your emotions trying to tell you to take better care of yourself or to accept yourself more? If these emotions were to speak, what would they say? Quiet your mind and see if any insights emerge that can help and support you.
7. Visualize the space the emotions were taking up in your body becoming empty. Perhaps you see the emotions flowing out of your feet like water into the ground. Or perhaps you see them whisps of smoke zooming out of your chest into the air. Try to imagine some sort of visual representation of the emotions leaving your body.

After you complete this exercise, you may notice tingling sensations, muscle twitching or shaking, or even stiff hands. It may be disconcerting if your body or limbs start to twitch, but this is actually a sign that your body is releasing trauma. For example, in breathwork, the experience of tetany (or muscle cramps) is well noted (Ginzburg, n.d.). Shaking, twitching, and tingling are also really common when releasing trauma through psychotherapeutic techniques such as somatic therapy (Levine, 2008). Animals also experience intense shaking immediately after undergoing trauma to release it from their bodies.

Although much of our psychological pain comes from thoughts and emotions that we can identify with our awareness through journaling, some experiences can be a bit trickier. Some of our pain was created in early childhood before we developed mental capacities such as memory or thought. Because we can’t focus on the mental or emotional aspects of these experiences, it’s difficult to release them through exploration tactics like journaling. 

Other emotional pain and patterns may have formed in the womb (Provençal & Binder, 2015), possibly due to dietary, emotional, or behavioral patterns of our mother. We even inherit experiences that our parents had through changes in our DNA (Skvortsova et al., 2018; Yehuda, 2022). This science helps explain why we can have pain and bodily experiences that we don’t understand (Van der Kolk, 1994). This pain may come from an experience that we can’t remember.

Whatever pain we still have trapped in our bodies often needs to be released through physical means. We may want to release anger by going to a ‘break room’ or ‘rage room’—a place where we can smash objects. Or, we could go into the woods and scream at the top of our lungs. Another useful way to release preverbal psychological pain is using neurodynamic breathing. This technique helps you access and release pain without having to know where it is coming from. You can try a free neurodynamic breathing session here: breathworkonline.com.

• Cook-Greuter, S. (2014). Ego development: A full-spectrum theory of vertical growth and meaning-making. mimeo, Wayland.
  
• Ginzburg, T. Methodology of Psychic Integration in Modern Breathing Techniques.
  
• Levine, P. (2008). Healing Trauma. Sounds True.
  
• Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological science, 8(3), 162-166.​
  
• Provençal, N., & Binder, E. B. (2015). The effects of early life stress on the epigenome: from the womb to adulthood and even before. Experimental neurology, 268, 10-20.
  
• Schubiner, H., & Betzold, M. (2010). Unlearn your pain. Pleasant Ridge, MI: Mind Body Publishing.
  
• Skvortsova, K., Iovino, N., & Bogdanović, O. (2018). Functions and mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance in animals. Nature reviews Molecular cell biology, 19(12), 774-790.
  
• Van der Kolk, B. A. (1994). The body keeps the score: Memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress. Harvard review of psychiatry, 1(5), 253-265.
  
• Van Der Kolk, B. (2003). The body keeps the score. Trauma, 2, 50.
  
• Yehuda, R. (2022). How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children. Sci Am.