What do you do when you feel intense hurt and emotional pain?
As humans, we instinctively try to resist anything that inflicts pain on us. Be it a hurtful comment
from a colleague, anger or resentment from a loved one or a situation that we hate to go through;
we simply try to resist it. This is because, resistance is the only way most of us know to reduce the
pain and deal with it. But, while doing so, we hardly realize that by resisting it, we actually invite
more pain into life.
What you resist, persists!
So, the more you resist something, the more it keeps coming back to you. Just like a coin tossed up
in the air with great force falls back to ground with an equal momentum, the more you push
something farther, the closer it gets.
It’s like an endless loop and to come out of it you must know how to close the loose ends.
Accomplishing this will require us to understand what goes behind the scene while we try to resist
something.
Why do we resist?
Interestingly, not everyone resists the same things. Which means that what might cause pain to you
might not be painful to someone else. Your individual life experiences define some unique things
that you would not want to deal with again. These are your own realities which your mind has built
up for you and make you suffer.
How you experience your life is nothing but a result of your own reflection in the mirror. If your past
experiences consist of anger, you would mirror the same emotion today. You will attract more anger
into your life. The more you run away, the more you think of it and resist it, the more it will persist.
Then, in order to deal with this pain, we follow it up with a few patterns which are elaborated in the
next section.
What do we do when we resist?
When the pain is too large to accept or handle, our mind finds different ways to handle it. You might
get into denial and refuse to accept the underlying problem that is causing you the pain as you
believe that by ignoring it, you might lessen the pain. Even if you are aware of the problem, you
make it look like no big deal and tuck it in some remote corner of your mind, trusting that it will
never trouble you again.
Worse even, you put the blame of your sufferings and life’s situation on someone else and never
own up your responsibility towards life. You try and portray that none of this is your fault and hold
immense anger for those, whom you wrongly think, have spoilt your life.
How can you overcome resistance?
It is very important that we understand that none of this – hiding from your pain or blaming it on
someone else – is going to work. Bottling up your problems can never be the solution. The pain will
continue to persist, and get stronger than before, unless you decide to confront it.
So, you must try to get into action and change your current situation. There would always be some
situations that you will be able to change by yourself like trying to fix up a broken relationship or
discuss your weakness with your boss. But some situations will be outside your control and in those
conditions, all that you would have to do is keep your trust in the bigger scheme of things and go
with the flow. Simply by changing how you respond to a certain situation is all that matters.
