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Welcome to Episode 128 of The Non-Anxious Leader podcast, I'm Jack Shitama, and today's episode is based on a single quote that I heard in an interview of Glennon Doyle by Brene Brown in one of her podcasts.

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I will put the link to that podcast in the show notes. In the episode, Doyle said, "Pain is not to be chosen and not to be avoided". Let me say that again, pain is not to be chosen and not to be avoided. And it made me think about the whole idea of pain and responsibility and taking responsibility for self self-differentiation. So I'm going to unpack that one statement in today's episode. The quote reminded me of the choices we have in dealing with pain, both our own and that of others.

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Pain is a part of life. It shouldn't be avoided. At the same time, willingly choosing pain is not something we should be doing either. This rings true for both kinds of pain. That is our own pain and the pain of others. But it's true in different ways. I'll address the reasons we avoid pain and the downsides that come with that. I'll also address when engaging with pain is helpful. And finally, I'll talk about why we don't want to choose pain.

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Let's first talk about the ways that we avoid our own pain, one way we do this is through denial. We know that denial doesn't help the problem. It doesn't deal with the pain. It only stuffs it into a place where we don't have to think about it. So maybe it doesn't bother us so much. However, we also know that when we ignore this type of pain, it will rear its ugly head in some other way. This leads to the second way we avoid pain, which is through displacement.

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Pain displacement leads to a triangle in which we focus on an issue or another person to avoid our own pain, one kind of triangle is substance abuse. This is especially true when we try to deny our own pain and then we use and abuse substances to try to deaden that pain. Another triangle that might occur is when we focus on some cause or issue which is related to this pain. There's a fine line here because the cause working on a cause could actually help with healing.

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However, if it's used to channel anger and blame, then it's not helpful. When I was a young pastor, there was a mother and her eight year old daughter who were murdered by the estranged husband and father. And the parents of the mother were active members of the congregation. In my pastoral care work with this family, I ended up getting involved in a support group for victims of violent crimes. I accompanied the couple, the grandparents of the young girl that was killed, the parents of the mother who was killed.

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I accompanied them to these support groups and through that, we got involved in an effort to pass a constitutional amendment in our state for victims of violent crimes. I would say that that work was helpful for this couple. They did not use it to displace their pain, to avoid their pain. It actually helped them to work through their grief. But you can see how this kind of effort might actually cause them to get more angry, to get more animated, to get more anxious about their grief and displace it in unhealthy ways.

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Another kind of triangle that avoids pain is blame displacement. This is refusing to take responsibility for yourself by blaming others for the pain that we are feeling. This can come out in the form of anger toward another who has nothing to do with the pain that we are feeling. In some cases, there is nobody to blame, but in other cases there is somebody to blame and we may be bitter and resentful and hold a grudge towards that person.

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In either case, when we are blaming someone else for our own pain, we are not taking responsibility for self granted the other person may have caused it, but at this point, whether they ask for forgiveness or not, it's up to us to decide how we are going to deal with it. It doesn't excuse what the other person has done. It's mainly about taking responsibility for self and knowing that they can't fix what is hurting inside of us.

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In other cases, there is no one to blame for the pain. For example, in the loss of a loved one, there may be nobody to blame. Oftentimes we may triangle God and blame God, or we may take it out on somebody else and hurt others around us, even though they have nothing to do with the pain that is going on inside of us. So all of this is to say that the part of the saying that pain is not to be avoided reminds us that pain is a part of life.And if we are able to engage the pain in healthy ways, then we have a chance.

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It's actually an opportunity for growth. It won't be easy. It will be a challenge. But if we don't allow our own anxiety to take over and keep us from taking responsibility, then we have a chance to work through our pain. There is real truth to the saying that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. At least it has the potential to make us stronger if we can take responsibility for self and work through our pain again.

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I am not saying this is going to be easy. Some pain can last for a long time, like the grief that comes from the loss of a loved one, especially a spouse. And some pain comes from trauma that we just can't work out on our own. In this case, the help of a therapist can make a huge difference. Asking for help is not avoiding taking responsibility for yourself. It's actually being honest and knowing that we can't do it alone.

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That's different than blaming others or denying that the pain even exists. For me, the lesson when we are dealing with our own pain is it is not to be avoided. We want to try to engage it in healthy ways, whether we do that on our own or we ask for help in appropriate ways. So the next question is how do we deal with the pain of others?

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One way we avoid the pain of others is to disconnect emotionally, this is a form of denial where we just keep our distance because we don't want to deal with the pain of others.

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The other way that we avoid the pain of others is through overfunctioning. In either case, we are unable to deal with the pain of others because we have a low threshold for pain in general. We don't like to see others suffer, so we either disconnect or we try to fix it. Ironically, Overfunctioning is both avoiding the pain of others by not letting them suffer and also choosing the pain of others by trying to fix it. For them, it not only makes them less capable of dealing with the pain, but we also end up taking on as much or more of the stress as the person in pain.

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I'm having a hard time thinking of a way that we choose pain for ourselves. Only if you can think of examples, please share with me and I'll address it. But right now I think the main way that we choose pain and suffering is by forgetting where we end and where someone else begins. Instead of just taking responsibility for self, we take responsibility for others as well. The best way to engage the pain of others in a healthy way is to stay emotionally connected to them without actually taking on their pain, without trying to fix it.

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For them, it's about walking alongside another and allowing them to deal with their own pain, whether it's our own pain or that of others. The path to growing stronger is by engaging it in a healthy way. This means talking about it without blaming, grieving in appropriate ways and knowing when we might need help. Whether that's just having someone to talk to or even getting professional help. Some pain may never go away, but working through it enables us to make our peace with it.

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And doing so will help us to grow stronger and will increase our own tolerance to pain and the pain of others. By growing stronger emotionally, we grow more self-differentiated and we are able to understand when the pain of others is something we can't fix, this doesn't mean we disconnect. In fact, it means that we will move closer to another person who is in pain but do so in a healthy way. We will let them know that we care without trying to fix it for them.

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We also know that this is the best way to help them work through their own pain. People don't often need us to tell them how to fix things, but they need for us to walk alongside them. I will post a video in the show notes. It is How to help a grieving friend. It's five minutes and it is worth watching it's by Megan Devine. If you don't want to go to the show notes just Google How to Help a Grieving Friend and it should come up on YouTube because this shows exactly this idea of allowing somebody else to go through their pain while remaining emotionally connected.

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Pain is not to be chosen. It's not our job to take on somebody else's pain. It's our job to walk alongside them. But pain is also not to be avoided. We don't want to disconnect from them. And when it's our own pain, we don't want to deny it. And we don't want to avoid it. We want to embrace it so that we can grow stronger. I believe self-differentiation and working through our own pain go hand in hand.

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And I also believe that non-anxious leaders get better at doing this, because what they also do is they help the people they work with grow stronger just as they are growing stronger as well. That's it for Episode 128, a little bit shorter this time, but I really like this quote and I think it is helpful for me to know where I end and others begin. Don't forget that you can connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com.

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And if you would like to follow me on Instagram, you can find me @JackShitama. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.

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