Overcoming Pain by Dr. Juan Harrison
Overcoming Pain
I’ve often heard the expression “You’re a glutton for punishment.” Some people tell us we may have to just “bite the bullet.” Once there, we may find ourselves in a “world of hurt.” Pain is no fun. It is to be avoided at all costs. I have trouble hearing out of one ear, but it doesn’t hurt. I decided to live with it since there was no pain. Had an old jaw tooth lose its crown to a Mentos candy. What was left was jagged edges cutting my tongue and cheek. Thought I might as well get it cut out. Bad move. End result was bad pain in the vacated area. The pain killers and I were still battling the raw, sensitive, head throbbing, lymph node aching, burning hole left by the surgery.
For a lot of things we have to go through in life we can get a doctor or pharmacist to help us endure them. Other times not so much. We hear about entertainers dying from overdoses, sometimes administered by licensed physicians, as they tried to find a way to sleep. Too many years of nights and mixed-up days and too many pills to help get through the days and nights often ended in fatal circumstances.
Seems like the pains that often hurt the most are invisible. So much of the pain may have come about due to something missing from our lives, be it a lost baby, an absent former spouse, or some other relationship that has ripped out the will to live when it left you.
Others of us may have some sort of humiliating experiences growing up that made you feel unloved or worthless. Words can be far more cruel than physical wounds. Skin and bones repair and leave scars. Meanness and hateful words scar us and never heal. One can become King of the mountain, but you often can’t find a way to overcome those emotional hurts.
It’s hard to find someone who hasn’t endured pain and routinely feels the pain of a bad experience that tends to crop back up at the oddest times. You can spend a lifetime reviving and reliving the feelings attached to hurts in your past. Maybe you’ve been blessed to have an understanding spouse or best friend to help you find ways to cope with or remove such memories and hursts from your lives.
Too many of us have let issues with family and friends come to be roadblocks to our emotional health and peace of mind. Life is too short to let someone else steal our happiness and block our emotional growth. People can’t take power over us if we refuse to give it to them. They have no right to make us miserable just because they are. That’s one journey we need to let them travel alone.
By Dr. Juan Harrison
