Going into the pain..........................

A friend of mine has been having a bit of trouble with some pain/numbness/tingling in her mid-back/arm, and came over yesterday to confer with "doctor Patty." As I was massaging her sore muscles, I could not help but compare and contrast her reactions to those of my youngest daughter's when I do the same to her. If my daughter asks me to work on her, you can believe that she is in a bad way, because she claims "I hurt her." First rule of theraputic massage....... It doesn't always feel good. Like a two-year-old receiving a time out, sometimes our muscles have to be encouraged to behave. Anyway, the hardest part of working on my daughter, is in getting her to relax the muscles so they will go back to doing what they are ment to do. She is not used to her body mis-behaving, and has not had the need to work through much pain in her young life.

My friend, on the other hand, is older and wiser. As anyone that has been around for a while, she has had her share of pain to deal with. She has made a consious effort to go inside of her body, and listen to the signals and subtle cues, and to learn from them. As I was working on her, she was able to enter into a relaxed state, that encouraged her muscles to also relax. She has learned the fine art of working with the pain, rather than trying to escape from it.

Regarding my body, I am pretty good at facing and working with the pain.

Regarding emotional pain, I am pretty much still spending all of my energy fighting it, rather than embracing and working through it. When I make declaration like, "I don't care what others think" I am running from pain. If I really don't care, I don't feel a need to declare my feelings of not caring. When I am being my most defensive, is when I am in the most pain.

Someone told me the other day that I have a very forceful personality. No disagreement from me on this one. I agreed with his assessment, and we moved the conversation along. Had I been brave, I might have expressed my opinion that my forceful personality was born out of pain and fear, and that while I am coming across to the world as a force to be reckoned with, inside I am feeling like a fraud that will be discovered at any second. This persona of a forceful personality was born out of a need to protect myself; from my inability to deal with emotional pain. Remember the movie Sybil? Maybe I don't have names for the various personalities living inside of me, but they are there never the less. How else can I explain my ability to be having a knock down drag out DISCUSSION? with (my) Mister, the phone ringing, and me answering it and having a sweet sounding pleasant conversation with whoever is on the other end of the line. As soon as the phone connection is severed, "miss dagger throwing insults, fight to the death to make my point" takes over again, as if the phone had never rang.

Or take the game Rock, Paper, scissors................. Rock smashes scissors, scissors cut paper to ribbons, and paper takes the light out of rock by covering it. In order to protect my broken heart I can smash, cut, and cover any light that one can bring on, even if doing so makes me more miserable than I was before. And you thought you had issues!

From a logical perpective, I know that my defensive behavior is neither productive or beneficial to anyone, especially not me. Sometimes, I catch onto this logic before creating too much damage. The longer I hold onto my justifications for my behavior, the more pain and suffering I go through. No logic in that statement. Many (many) years ago, when I was in junior high school ( For all you youngesters out there they call it middle school now.) I had an argument with a girl that I had been friends with since Kindergarten. We didn't speak to each other for the next three years. Can I remember what I was upset about? NOT AT ALL. But I feel really sad that I wasted all that time on something that was so unimportant that I can't even remember it.

I have had enough death in my life to know that nothing is as important as the people in our world. I either need to get rid of these personalities inside of me that cause pain to myself and the people around me, or I need to figure out how to go into my perceived pain to work though things once and for all. Does anyone have the name of a good exorsist? No! Then I had better get busy confronting my pain instead of the people in my world. Think postive thougths for me please.