Pain Feels Good

Have you ever wondered why we stay stuck for so long?

Or why there is so much poverty?

Or why you stay in a relationship that basically sucks for longer than you should?

Or stay in a job that you hate?

Okay, yes, we stay in a job we hate because we need the money to pay our bills. And it’s easier to just stay there and suffer than it is to find a new job and do all the stuff that goes along with finding a new job. I get it. Been there.

Or we stay in that relationship because we have that shadow of a hope that things can change. One person wants to get better. You still love that person.

Or maybe you were just blinded by the relationship and can’t really see what is wrong because it’s just “comfortable.”

You can come up with all kinds of excuses for why we stay, why we suffer, why we stay stuck. But those are just excuses. They don’t go any deeper than surface level.

You’re broke. So you need money. But what’s keeping you broke? It’s not just your circumstances, or the job you work, or the stuff you buy. There’s so much more to it. The circumstances, the job, the stuff, those are only on the surface. They can easily be seen and changed.

You aren’t happy in your relationship, but you stay in it. There are financial reasons to stay in the relationship. Or maybe you think you love this person. Or maybe you think you just don’t deserve better.

This is where you are going to argue with me and tell me that none of this actually feels good. And I will partially agree with you.

But I also disagree with you.

In your rational mind (what you are thinking about right now), this is where none of it actually feels good. You don’t really want to stay where you are.

But in your unconscious mind (buried deep in your subconscious), the pain feels good. The pain is easier and more comfortable to feel because you think you deserve the pain. The pain actually brings about happy feelings.

The pain is easier because you would rather feel the pain (and numb out to it) than to find the real underlying problem. This is where I was for the longest time.

You’ve felt this pain for so long that you know what it feels like. Feeling something different, feels foreign and wrong.

We’ve been trained to believe that feeling good is wrong. Feeling powerful and deserving is wrong.

You don’t deserve to feel good.

You don’t deserve to have money. More money than you know what to do with.

You don’t deserve to have the relationship of your dreams.

You don’t deserve to have the house, the car, the life that you have always dreamed of.

You don’t deserve to have the job that you actually love going to every day.

Life has become a pattern. Get up, go to work, come home, numb out, sleep. Then wake up and repeat it day after day. Your choice of numbing out can be any number of things: shitty TV, hours upon hours of Netflix binges, shopping, eating, sex, alcohol.

But the thing is, you do deserve all of that stuff that you want. You always have. You were just trained to believe that you weren’t good enough. You didn’t deserve any of it.

You deserve all of it. You always have deserved all of it. And you deserve it simply because you are who you are. You are enough just as you are. You always have been enough.

It doesn’t matter who taught you that you didn’t deserve any of it, or that you weren’t enough. It only matters that you know now that you are enough and you do deserve everything you want.

You wouldn’t have your dreams and desires if you didn’t deserve them.

But the first step to getting those dreams and desires is to realize that the pain you feel inside you that is keeping you where you are and making you believe that you feel okay, is to kick that pain to the curb.

You don’t have to figure out right now why you accept this pain. It has personally taken me years to figure out why I accept the pain. The same situations kept happening to me over and over again. And I couldn’t figure out why. It was partially because they felt “good,” partially because I thought I deserved them, and partially because I was taught growing up that feeling good, feeling happy, being positive and loving life weren’t the norm. The pain and numbness were my comfort zone. It was what I felt I deserved. Even though I wanted something so much different in my life.

As soon as I would get close to having what I wanted, it was ripped away from me. All because my body and my ego wanted the pain to stay. It was more comfortable to stay stuck, stay broke, stay miserable, than it was to change it.

The pain was more comfortable than feeling the happiness that I wasn’t supposed to feel. The pain was more comfortable than feeling the anger towards a specific person. The pain was more comfortable than feeling someone else being mad at me. The pain was more comfortable than being mad at myself. The pain was more comfortable than sitting with myself in the quiet to process what was really going on in my life. The pain was more comfortable than the temporary discomfort from making the changes I desired.

If something goes wrong it was my fault. And it was easier to blame myself than it was to see that someone or something else could be the real cause. And for me, it was usually something else. That something was that feeling good was wrong. Loving life and what I did in life was wrong. I couldn’t have a better life than my parents. I couldn’t have a better life than those I loved.

But why do I have to suffer for someone else’s choices, when it’s not my choice?

My ego wanted to keep me there. But I didn’t want to stay there. So until I realized that I needed to feel the anger. I needed to feel the uncomfortableness. I needed to allow myself to be mad.

And then I needed to realize that my dreams were more important than making anyone else happy. I needed to make me happy first. If someone wasn’t happy with that, then they can either fall out of my life or they can be dragged along behind me.

My life is far too valuable to let someone else make the decisions for me, especially when their decisions don’t make me happy.

Once I made this decision, I began waking up joyful and happy every day. More and more opportunities that I had been searching for started to just fall into my lap.

But this journey hasn’t been easy in the least. You just have to decide do I want to stay comfortable in my pain? Or do I want to feel uncomfortable for a little while to create a new comfort level with my amazing life?