Growing up in a lot of chaos and abuse I developed relationships with pain. Where pain actually became part of my identity. I have found that it is not an easy identity to give up. I see this happen in many different situations. For me, it was growing up in abuse, becoming very disconnected and really only interacting with life through two different emotions… pain and anger. And anger mostly being the secondary emotion to pain. I also see this when people lose loved ones. Sometimes it was a sudden death and that pain they feel is like a last memory. They don’t want to let go of the pain because somehow they feel it means letting go of the person.
Living with pain as part of my identity meant that I was drawn to a lot of painful situations. I really didn’t know how to live life any other way. When I became a Christian I saw God through painful eyes. I often thought that God was punishing me, that He had abandoned me when I was young and that He couldn’t possibly have anything good in store for me. Every life challenge became a reason as to why God didn’t love me.
It never occurred to me that in addition to those unhealed wounds that I’d taken on pain as an identity. That it had become part of my makeup and part of my filter through which I viewed life. It also hadn’t occurred to me that a lot of the attention I received growing up was negative. So I learned to associate pain with love. I had it all mixed up, understandably so.
Some of the biggest revelations came to me in understanding that pain is simply pain. It doesn’t make me anything. I think I was just scared of who I would be without it. And so the tug of war began. I don’t know about other people, I just know that I don’t let go of things very easily. I’m not naturally forgiving and I don’t naturally surrender. I fight. Sometimes for all the wrong things. It really takes the supernatural power of God to hep through things like this.
For my part, Grief Recovery helped tremendously with letting go of this pain as a part of who I am. Now God is doing His. I don’t like it. Yet, I don’t want this to be who I am anymore. I am so much more than my pain. I am so much more than anger and frustration. So even though I go through painful situations and I am seriously tempted to go down the rabbit hole in to painful bitterness and just live there, I am beginning to turn away and realize that this situation doesn’t define me. It just feels comfortable because I’m used to wearing pain as clothing. I don’t want to do that anymore. It also makes me vulnerable to spiritual attacks because I am more easily led in to self destructive thinking. The more I turn and rely on God the more that ceases.
I trust in the future. I believe in the goodness of the present. I also believe that though pain felt like a friend for many years, it was all just an illusion. A friendship made out of the necessity of coping with the unspeakable. It is definitely one of those “seasonal” friendships. One I am now very willing to let go of.
