PAIN. It is the number one reason why people come to therapy.  Whether it is from feeling sad or anxious, remembering a traumatic experience or a heartbreak; everyone comes in to treatment wanting the pain to go away. “When will it stop?” “I never want to feel this way again!” “Why is this happening to me?” These are all common sentiments that clients express when describing what they want from therapy. My response is always the same and always met with the side eye: “what if you could welcome the pain?”

There are few things in life that are certain and the fact that you will feel pain is one of them. If you heard me on the TFBG Podcast Episode98: ‘Showing up When You Want to Lay Down,’ you will hear Dr. Joy and I talk about pain and how to use the PACT (Plan, Acknowledge, Compartmentalize, Time) method to be able to manage having painful experiences when you still have real-life responsibilities. If you haven’t heard it, check it out.  In this blog, I want to give you another idea. I hope to encourage you to consider that instead of running from pain we can welcome it, understand why it shows up for us and use it to learn what we need to do to take care of ourselves. 
Pain is important. Without pain we would not know when there are things that are hurting us. When you do not know what is hurting you, you will continue to engage with it until the damage that it is causing is irreparable. Let’s think about fire. One of the earliest lessons that we learn as children is that fire burns. We are told that and some of us have the experience of getting close to fire, feeling the heat or maybe even feeling a little burn and so we know not to get too close and certainly we don’t put our whole hand in it and just keep it there.

What is my purpose? Most of us want to know what we were placed here to do, what are our intrinsic gifts and talents and how are we meant to use them in our lives. For those of us who feel called to a specific purpose, we often wonder if our purpose can be the way we make our living. We yearn to understand, especially when we are early in our journey, how this “thing” fits into the bigger picture of our life and if we have the bandwidth to do “it” and have the success that we want; could our passion even be the vehicle for our success. Is it possible to have both?

Purpose & Passion
Defining a life’s passion or purpose is a very individual process. For some people it is rooted in the things that they are good at doing; for others it is what they love to do. These two things are not always the same. However, if we were to find what Samara Stone, branding expert and business coach, defines as the “sweet spot,” we’d be connecting ourselves to the things that we love to do and that we can do with relative ease. As ideal as this sounds, I find that it is the very thing that most people shy away from. The idea that what you seek is actually already present and that the journey to “that thing” is not that hard is a baffling concept. Most of us have things in our life that we LOVE to do; it is the thing you find yourself doing in your free time, the thing you dreamed about doing as a child and you still dream about doing. Over time, somehow we have internalized that this CAN’T be it. It doesn’t make sense for your life. It’s too easy, too simple, not grand enough or you feel like there must be some external validation to confirm your interests.