Unbearable pain makes life unbearable. Everyone lives with pain but not everyone lives with unbearable pain. One can feel alive with pain but not with unbearable or crushing pain. Having challenges and struggles often gives us a feeling of being alive. In fact, a life without challenge and pain is boring and meaningless.
Unbearable emotional pain is most often the legacy of developmental trauma. What makes emotional pain unbearable is not so much the discomfort experienced in the body, but its crushing and terrifying meanings or what I call, killer organizing principles. Everyone organizes or makes sense of his or her life experience and draws conclusions that impact their self-worth, relationships, and place in the world. Emotional trauma is often organized unconsciously into self-damaging beliefs and themes. Emotional pain itself is not pathological or unbearable. Pain becomes unbearable when killer organizing principles evolve from one’s experience of pain, such as, there’s no hope for me. The world is against me. I’m doomed to suffer. I’m stupid and incompetent. It would have been better if I was never born, etc.
People who repress or try to numb unbearable emotional pain and its crushing meanings are held hostage to their pain. Their lives are never about growing and thriving but only about surviving. They are preoccupied with their unending pain which they try to get rid of, often in ways that are self-destructive. They develop a false or pretend self which may appear to the outside world like they’re functioning, but inwardly they are dying. Their personalities are built upon defenses to protect themselves from being further hurt and to ward off threatening challenges to their self-esteem.
For many who suffer from unbearable pain, psychotherapy is the only way to find relief from their suffering and to feel alive. The major focus of psychotherapy is to make the unbearable, bearable. This process involves facing and owning one’s feelings, understanding them in their present and historical context, thereby promoting the possibility for the discovery of new, more self-empowering, and self-affirming organizing principles. It is a process of self-discovery and self-understanding, and when successfully navigated, gives birth to a new person who feels alive and capable of building a life of meaning and authenticity.