Last week, I was in a power tussle with one of my teachers. To complete my Barbara Brennan training, I needed to submit homework. My inner rebel was having absolutely none of it.
I had been back and forth with them all year, submitting late and reluctantly.
Finally, she emailed me: There’s still a pathway for you to graduate, but we need you to re-engage with this.
What becomes harder for you to tolerate, if you’re not in crisis? she asked.
What a question.
What becomes harder for you to tolerate?
And I think this is a core of something important.
We match our external world to our internal world. Which sounds so counterintuitive.
If we’re used to feeling low level terror all the time, we will make sure our outside world matches that – we’ll create scenarios where things feel last minute, stressful, crisis-mode. Why? Because then we can stay blended with the terror, and we don’t have to actually feel it.
There are two ways to feel pain. One way is the blended way – you feel the terror, but from inside the terror. And then there’s the unblended way – you feel the terror, but with enough space and perspective that it’s actually digesting. The first way can masquerade as you feeling your emotions, but you’re actually precisely not feeling your emotions. You’re using the experience of being inside the terror to avoid actually digesting the terror.
Barbara calls these soft pain and hard pain. Hard pain goes around and around, it loops, it never ends; it’s filled with negative pleasure, and it also truly sucks. Soft pain moves, it feels more tender and vulnerable. In some ways, it’s more painful – it touches the actual root of the wound. But it also brings catharsis.
Negative pleasure says: I enjoy what is familiar to me. If being afraid is familiar, I will have derived some negative pleasure from it.
If I stop pushing my world into crisis, I have to actually feel the terror – not as a safety blanket of ‘terror is familiar to me’, but allowing it to digest. And that was so much harder to tolerate than the familiar experience of doing things last minute and being in crisis.