Retrain Your Brain

So, John, we all experience pain and grief to some degree.

Why do you believe we fear those feelings so much?

Well, as they say, everyone is going to experience pain in their lives.

It doesn't matter who you are, how rich you are, how happy you are, how good looking you are, how good in shape you are.

And because pain is such a big part of being human, we understand that there are You know, that pain doesn't have to be the only definition that we draw or we interpret from difficult times.

Sometimes there's poignancy to tragedy.

And so that cultivation, that pairing of the two, the splendor, the beauty with the sadness or with the difficult times or the adversity tends to history has shown that that tends to inspire us.

It tends to uplift us and give us euphoria in that sense.

So you're building emotional resilience by finding the aesthetic in your pain, finding the beauty in the suffering, and thus in that process as you dignify it, you actually reduce your suffering as well.

Well, you know people don't like to feel these emotions.

That's why I started out with that question because we ignore them or we deny them or whatever we do to stuff them down.

But what happens – When grief is not dealt with, what happens to us physically, emotionally, spiritually?

Well, exposure to unprocessed grief or unspoken grief is, you know, it could be perilous to your central nervous system.

The event that occurred, the trauma or the person that you are missing or have lost, the memory of that person might stay with you longer than than you would like.

And also it could stay with you in a way that could be detrimental to you because it will feel unresolved.

It will not be converted into either appreciation or a happy remembrance.

So it's good to check in with it as often as possible.

And, you know, so when I work with my clients, it's a hard sell in the beginning because they don't want to go there.

They don't want to talk about this stuff.

So what my book does and what I do is I try to introduce them to the idea that you can go there, but in a different way.

You can try a different route.

You can flip the script on grief and start to associate your pain with personal growth, with sometimes even joy, but personal growth and gratitude.

It's a different paradigm shift.