Numbing Yourself From the Pain Means Giving Up Love

If there is something we avoid feeling like fleeing prisoners of fear, it is undoubtedly emotional pain. We fight so that we do not face situations that are painful and we end up numbing our emotions. What happens with this anesthesia is that it is universal and has consequences.

Does it seem difficult for you to love by entering a state where you do not know if you really have ability to feel love? Don’t worry, this is something that is also normal for the rest of us mortals. It involves a state of confusion with fear as a background to the possibility of becoming insensitive.

But fear not, you have the ability to love and you just simply had to build a wall to defend yourself against all possible dangers and fears that invade you. All the alerts that have stirred you up are based on the experience of other painful situations, and you consciously and unconsciously try to prevent their recurrence.

Avoiding suffering and pain

Although suffering and pain are not the same, we try to avoid both experiences. However, avoiding pain is not a good idea because it is a natural process by which we must experience situations that sadden us or cause discomfort. Everyone, at some point, has gone through suffering and has fed into it, when all we had to do to get rid of it was surrender to the pain during the time we needed to.

Pain helps us grow and develop, and suffering causes us to stagnate. Therefore it is important to differentiate from each other. Since entering into pain requires living this experience, and feeling the excitement to finally let go and release it naturally.

Suffering appears with the denial of pain and emotional detachment. We prevent our wounds from healing and scarring. We get stuck and our pain becomes unnecessary suffering. Giving ourselves permission to feel the pain without necessarily recreating it allows us to face the experience and move forward, as well as to prevent us from being held back by suffering.

Disconnecting as a protection mechanism

There are moments that have been so painful that they have caused us to develop a specialized mechanism to disconnect from our emotions, our body, and become cold to avoid entering where we already suffer. This may even include dissociation: when we are not able to accept reality by the emotional impact it has on us.

When there is a possibility of there being a similar unpleasant situation that we have filed away in our past experiences, our survival system protects us. In the back room of this artificial protection hides our most distressing fears, such as fear of abandonment, loneliness and rejection.

This avoidance and coldness towards experiencing certain situations that put us on alert may be determining our lives:

• By avoiding the risk of loving.
• The insecurity of trusting those around us.
• Interacting with caution by staying on the outside.
• Maintaining relationships in which we are primarily moved by our interests, by what we can get from people, and using them as instruments for our own purposes.
• Creating a hostile universe where survival and competitiveness reign.
• Lack of confidence: pandering, seeking recognition and avoiding the expression of our own needs.

Emotions and feelings are our compass

Emotions and feelings are all we have, without forgetting that we humans have no choice but to surrender to the experience of living. Which means daring to be able to experience the pain if we feel love fully.

Anesthesia is not selective, if you apply it to not feel pain, you will disconnect yourself from who you are, from your emotions and feelings and, ultimately, from life itself.

These sensations- feelings and emotions– are our accurate compass as they indicate how we feel at all times. They let us know that we are not empty shells, but are enriched by an extraordinary inner world. A cosmos where we have two options: making the most of something and abandoning ourselves, or giving ourselves to the experience or cutting all ties with it.

The choice of making yourself vulnerable or protected, taking the plunge and daring to dive and swim in the river of life depends on you and no one else. Otherwise, you will stay on a shore watching as the current passes long without you being a participant, without taking advantage of the possibilities that only surrendering to the experience can bring you.

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