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Clean Pain Vs. Dirty Pain

Podcast Transcript:

Friends, This one is a good one, I’m not going to hold back. I’m going to talk to you about this topic as though I were talking to my best friend. I’ll be sharing some very personal information, so heads up, there is some sensitive material I’ll be sharing.

 

I have a lot of goodness to unpack and if there was one concept I wish I would have known about when I was younger, it would be this one: the difference between clean pain and dirty pain.

 

And this is such a powerful concept, it’s so important, I made a booklet for you that you can download as a resource if you want to walk through the steps I’m going to teach you today. You can use this booklet and journal about whatever it is that is needing some loving care and attention in your life, in your heartspace if you will, and you can do the work of cleaning up some dirty pain with the help of this booklet.

 

Go to Danielle Vaughn coaching dot com and on the podcast page, there will be a link under this week’s episode, episode 16. You’ll see the link in blue, click on it and download your booklet resource.

 

You’ll be amazed at how doing the work, taking the time to address an issue that is still hurting, how much relief and lightness is available to you as you APPLY the principles I’m going to teach you here today.

 

For me, this podcast, and all the work I do really, is about helping people feel better.

 

 I know what it’s like to go through life feeling heavy and sucktastic all the time, and wondering why I feel crappy when I’m so blessed, - like I shouldn’t feel this way. I should be so grateful. . . I hear my students say this a lot too, lots of other women say this all the time too . . . I shouldn’t be so irritated all the time at my children – they’re good kids, but I just lose it with them and I feel like crap. . .

 

I’ve noticed that when we’re feeling stuck in negative emotion, when we’re spinning in our own pain, it’s because we haven’t had the time, or taken the time, to do the work of really FEELing our FEELings.

 

Most of us don’t know how to feel our feelings, the uncomfortable ones. Especially the ones that we think we shouldn’t feel – like feeling judgmental, or ungrateful, or angry, or depressed, or annoyed, irritated, ticked off, defeated, we’re taught to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off.

 

I think there’s a lot of merit to that – pick yourself up and dust yourself off. But not before you acknowledge the pain of landing on your butt, on your tailbone – and man – that hurts like a mother.

 

I grew up on horses, and I’ve been thrown off of a horse, literally - and l’ve landed on my butt and been covered in dust. Literally. It’s no fun. It hurts and it hurts for DAYS. It hurts initially. And it hurts when I slowly try to stand. And it hurts when I lift my leg and put my foot back in the stirrup, and it hurts when I swing myself up into the saddle, and the horse starts to move again, all of it hurts. And then there’s the pain for the week’s following. The days and the weeks following.

 

And so I think you’re following along with me where I’m going with this literal and metaphorical example.

 

But here’s the question:

 

Why do we think our pain should fix itself or that it’s going to fix itself someday, down the road?

 

When I fall of my horse, my pain didn’t just fix itself.

 

In fact, if it’s going to heal, I have to actually pay attention to it, treat it with some loving care.

 

I have to slow down and let it heal.

 

When I fell off my horse when I was fifteen, I had to baby it.

 

I had to slow my roll. Take a break from riding for a while. I walked funny. I had bruises.

 

And this happens emotionally as well.

 

And so if we don’t take time to heal our wounds, lick our wounds so to speak, then it can cause problems.

 

We may not heal right. We may reinjure the wound.

 

And this is what happens emotionally when we don’t take the time to address the pain and we think it will fix itself.

 

It doesn’t fix itself.

 

Instead, it festers and compounds.

 

This is true.

 

I’ve seen it.

 

And I help hundreds of people process their old wounds. Their dirty pain.

 

And so let’s define what I mean when I say dirty pain: I’m talking about the kind of pain that leaves us stuck in either feeling sorry for ourselves, or feeling full of self-judgement, or judgement of others for causing us pain. And so, the kind of pain that leaves us feeling worse than the initial circumstance as time goes on.

 

I learned this concept from two people really, from Martha Beck who is herself a Life Coach an Author and an Oprah contributor – she’s a brilliant woman and she knows pain. I’ve read a couple of her books and I get the sense that this woman knows pain.

 

And then I heard this concept again from one of my favorite Life Coaches, Jody Moore, who happens to be my Mentor and who I admire and look up to in my professional career as I’ve learned from her and studied how she coaches.

 

And so when we’re trying to understand which kind of pain we’re experiencing, whether it’s clean pain or dirty pain, we want to take the time to get to the root cause of what is causing the pain.

 

On previous episodes, I’ve taught the concept of the think/feel/act loop – and how our Thinking, our Thoughts about our Circumstances, whatever they may be, are what causes our Feelings.

 

For many of us – just this initial idea – the idea that Thoughts create Feelings can be so mind blowing.

 

But it’s true.

 

Thoughts create Feelings.

 

And it’s one of the most important things you’ll ever learn as you grow into capacity of healing any residual dirty pain.

 

Another way of saying this is: there are Facts and there are Thoughts about the Facts.

 

I use the words Facts and Circumstances interchangeably.

 

And I use the words Thoughts interchangeably with the word – Story.

 

We tell ourselves stories about facts, depending on the Thoughts we’re thinking about our Circumstances.

 

Are you following me?

 

Here’s the thing:

 

Facts don’t hurt us.

 

Fact’s don’t hurt.

 

Facts are the math of our story.

 

And - Math doesn’t hurt our feelings.

 

It’s the thoughts we have about the Math. For example, the number on the scale. It’s just a number.

 

The number on the scale doesn’t cause your feelings. WE cause our own feelings with the story we tell ourselves about what the number means.

 

It was John Adams who said, “facts are stubborn things. . . “ just before the Revolutionary War broke out. Do you know that story?

 

Facts are stubborn things. Facts don’t budge.

 

Facts don’t fudge it.

 

Dang it!

 

John Adams’ insight about Facts can teach us such great insights about human nature. That’s one of the reasons I love to study History so much, human nature doesn’t change. We have the same tendencies to think/feel/ and act as civilizations and peoples did hundreds of years ago.

 

A quick recap: Adams was the defense lawyer for British soldiers who fired their muskets into a crowd of colonists who were angry. There was bloodshed, and the crowd wanted all sorts of justice. The crowd resented the soldiers, even before the bloodshed, they didn’t think the British soldiers should be there in the first place.

 

Tensions were high and Adams was defending an unpopular defendant, the British soldiers. He argued that the crowd was endangering the soldiers’ lives and the soldiers acted in self-defense. He called witnesses that described how the crowd verbally threatened the soldiers and threw objects at them. Witnesses recalled how the mob had repeatedly called for the British soldiers to be killed.

 

As the angry mob pressed closer and closer toward the soldiers, The British soldiers fired on the colonial mob, it reminds me of some of what we are see in America’s streets today.

 

But, Adams met with the british soldiers who were being held in prison privately and heard their side of the story.

 

Remember, everyone’s side of the story is their Thoughts about the Facts. The facts can be hard to uncover when they are buried in story. But Adams was determined to get to the root cause, why did the soldiers fire and cause bloodshed?

 

He discovered they acted in self-defense.

 

I’m really summarizing here. The court case was riveting and took the colonies by storm, everyone followed it and had opinions about it.

 

Adams told the jury to look beyond their bias, (which is another way of saying look beyond your story of what you think you know) look beyond the soldiers being British and ask themselves to look at just the facts. Look at the math. And then, from that place, make a judgement.

 

Facts are stubborn things.

 

When the jury ruled in favor of the British soldiers, it set a precedent for trial by jury in the colonies, in the Americas.

 

And so from this story – we get a glimpse into where dirty pain can come from. There’s so much dirty pain on both sides of this story – from the colonial mob who wants justice and who resents the British soldiers and the King’s new taxes that the soldier’s presence embodies to them, and we can see the dirty pain of the British soldiers who have a job to do, who feared for their lives and defended themselves, who fired into a crowd and felt a lot of fear and guilt for causing bloodshed – the whole story articulates dirty pain really well.

 

So do a lot of current events we’ve seen over the summer as they’ve unfolded before our very eyes in the cities of America with rioting and such.

 

America as a nation is in the throes of dirty pain.

 

There is a lot of dirty pain.

And so dirty pain comes from this place of wanting rights to be wronged / of knowing that something has gone wrong that we think shouldn’t have gone wrong / and so our minds get stuck and spin on the injustice of things, and how the pain wouldn’t be necessary if someone or something would do the right thing in the first place. Right?

 

Dirty pain wants justice.

 

It wants wrongs to be righted.

 

It wants things to be fixed.

 

And it feels justified.

 

It also feels righteous.

 

But the problem with dirty pain is that it hurts the person in it more than it hurts anyone or anything else.

 

Now, let me interject here that some of our pain we experience, some of our righteous pain, and our sense of justice pain is pain we want to keep.

 

When we learn of the evils of sex-trafficking and how humans are sold as slaves, we want to feel pain. I don’t want that pain to go away – because the pain and ache that comes from knowing other human beings are suffering in such a way is a reflection of my values – my core beliefs that slavery and taking advantage of people is wrong.

 

But pain crosses into Dirty Pain when it is keeping me stuck from taking action that promotes growth, that keeps me from learning, and when compassion is unavailable to me.

 

The world needs more humans who are willing to do the work of cleaning up their emotional pain. It will move us individually and collectively toward compassion and love and help us show up as better versions of ourselves. This is how the human species will evolve, if we are to evolve.

 

If we don’t do this work, we won’t evolve.

 

You are a Growth Warrior when you choose to face your dirty pain and clean it up in a purposeful way. It is so admirable.

 

And so you might be wondering how to do that? And this is where my booklet I put together will help you. I’ve included some questions to walk through to help you clean up dirty pain if you are interested in doing so.

 

Before I get into the questions, I want to bring to mind some examples most of us are familiar with of people who’ve done the work of cleaning up their pain:

 

  • Elizabeth Smart comes to mind. I follow her on social media and she has done the work of facing her pain. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t have pain anymore. She still refers to those nine months of her kidnapping and being taken advantage of as the worst nine months of her life. But she isn’t stuck in the pain of it. She’s able to transmute it into some good in the world. She has said before that she never asked to be the poster child of surviving sexual abuse and kidnapping, but she will step into that role if it will help others. So there’s an example of someone who’s moved her dirty pain into clean pain.
  • Another example that comes to my mind is Martin Luther King Jr. He’s a pretty complex man. His pain motivated him to take action and make changes in a world that wasn’t living up to his vision, his dream of what it could be. And so there was a lot of pain that motivated his work. But the reason I categorize it in the Clean Pain side of things is because his pain didn’t keep him stuck and ineffective. Instead, he transmuted it into a movement that my parents talk about still to this day, how he stirred something powerful in their hearts and brought awareness to problems they didn’t know were going on.

 

And so I want to point out with these examples how clean pain is powerful. It makes us more effective. It is the very essence of what is meant with the phrase beauty for ashes.

 

In the olden days, Gardeners will sometimes take the ashes from their fireplace and pour it onto the rose bushes in the spring, to help grow beauty for ashes.

 

And it doesn’t have to be such big, heavy examples so much: other examples that come to mind are:

  • Parents who are able to partnership parent their children together after a divorce. They don’t punish each other or make their children choose sides.
  • I think of women who have miscarriages or experience infertility and they see all their friends having babies, but they are able to access some genuine happiness for others in the midst of their pain.

 

Ahhh, maybe there’s no such thing as nonheavy pain. So yeah.

 

But let’s go through the questions that will help you get to clean pain. Are you ready?

 

So these are questions to ask yourself if you are wondering if it is clean pain or dirty pain:

 

If you answer Yes to any of these questions, you might be spinning in dirty pain:

 

  1. Is this feeling keeping me stuck, and is it based in drama and not necessary?
  2. Is this feeling causing me to not move on?
  3. Is this feeling causing unnecessary pain and making me less effective in my life?

 

Remember, I have that booklet for you so you can have a copy of these questions for your reference, this really helps my clients work through their pain that is keeping them stuck.

 

And so alternatively, if you answer Yes to any of the following questions, you might be in clean pain:

 

  1. Do I believe that feeling this way about this Circumstance is appropriate and what I want to feel?
  2. Is this feeling cleansing and healing and necessary for growth even though it doesn’t feel good?
  3. Is feeling this going to help me be able to learn and eventually move on or gain traction?

 

Those are such good questions to ask yourself if you are wondering.

 

After you’ve decided which category your pain falls in, it is helpful to separate out the facts from the Thoughts.

 

I have found that this can be a little tricky for people to do. We are so caught up in our thinking, we don’t always see the facts.

 

The best way to articulate this is to give another example.

 

I’m going to get deeply personal here. And so, just know that I’ve done this work myself. I’m not perfect at it. I still have dirty pain. Every human being does, honestly.

 

And so this work continues in my life. And that’s fine. I’m all in. I’m up for it. Because I believe in the process of seeing it through to the other side.

 

I want to be clear that I don’t have all the answers. And that I don’t want to present myself as such.

 

But I want to speak to what I know. And so, addressing the dirty pain I grew up with as a young girl – mainly to help you have some hope that this work – works. It isn’t just a pretty theory. It has real world application. And so I want to share with you how I applied it.

 

When I was three years old, my mother died – (if you have young listeners with innocent ears, you may want to put your headphones on . . . just want to warn you in case enquiring young minds are listening) and she died from a domestic violence incident, a gunshot wound to the chest in a domestic violence dispute. Ugghhh, I know that’ a lot to reveal on the podcast. But I don’t want to pretend. I don’t want you to think that I don’t know what I’m talking about here.

 

Her death was hard to make sense of for all of us who loved her so dearly. I was an only child and was quickly adopted by my aunt and uncle, whom I am so grateful to and whom I always refer to as mom and dad whenever my parents come up on the podcast.

 

But I have to say, losing my mom at a young age, remembering her and missing her, and knowing how she died, knowing it could have been prevented and that it was so unnecessary – it wasn’t an easy thing to wrap my mind around.

 

I carried a lot of bitterness in my heart toward the man whose hand she died by. And so did my entire extended family. My mom was such a light. Gone too soon. Tragic and sad and unnecessary.

 

So there’s a little portion of my story.

 

And my pain is understandable, right?

 

My pain is justified.

 

If anyone were to tell me different, I’d hold onto my pain even tighter.

 

However. . .

 

Let’s walk through the questions – let me articulate the steps I’ve walked myself through in order to clean up my dirty pain.

 

When I separate the Facts from the Story, what I discover is how important semantics are. The words I use to think and frame my story – matter.

 

Since Thoughts create Feelings, we’ve talked about this before, then when I tell myself, “I was devastated when my mom died,” it’s okay to tell myself that. But it’s a little inaccurate. The fact is – I was devastated by what I thought about my mom’s death.”

 

Now stay with me here: this is higher level stuff. That’s why I want to walk you through the thought process. It makes all the difference.

 

When we realize our minds cause our feelings, we can be much more in control of our emotional lives. It doesn’t mean that we won’t choose to be sad; of course I was and still am. Of course we will. But it does mean we can decide not to be mad for the rest of our lives. We can choose how we think about things and be more in control of our emotional lives, depending on our thinking.

 

Many of us go through life believing our stories so deeply that we think they’re facts when they’re not. And this is fine – unless – the story is so painful, it’s debilitating.

 

Every time I tell myself how devastated I am that my mother died, I’m choosing to retell a painful story. If I reiterate it in the same way, every time, for years and years, without changing it, it just isn’t useful. There’s nowhere to go from there. Do you see?

 

And so the old pain from when I was a little girl, if I tell the story the same way to myself every time, then I’m really living in my present moment in old pain. Dirty pain.

 

I want to pause here and say that knowing this can be a LIFE CHANGING thing my friends. LIFE CHANGING.

 

And so once I realize that telling myself how devastating it was to lose my mother is causing old wounds to continue to reopen, the next step isn’t to pretend it didn’t happen and just Happy Thought my way to a better feeling.

 

No. That’s not what I’m saying either.

 

And maybe, in your mind you might be thinking right now, “so you went through this tragic thing, how can you possibly say it isn’t affecting you now?”

 

And I want to answer with saying that if I keep telling myself how tragic it was, I’m going to keep feeling the tragedy of it again and again.

 

It isn’t useful.

 

And I’m not the only one who has come to this conclusion.

 

As a Life Coach myself now and having seen a variety of women from a variety of backgrounds, I’ve learned I’m not the only one who’s experienced some tragedy, some really hard stuff.

 

Some have been through extreme abuse as children. And though the physical abuse is no longer occurring, there’s some perpetual patterns of experiencing the abuse in their own minds to this present day, and they don’t realize they’re doing it. They’re in the same pain from the past.

 

The Past only exists in our minds by the way. When we live in the Past, we’re squandering our power.

 

It’s true.

 

That’s another podcast topic I could deep dive on for another day.

 

But we give so much power to the people and the events from the Past. Often times, those people and those events have moved on or passed on. But we haven’t.

 

And so –  going back to the questions, I had to ask myself: Is my pain from my mother’s death causing me to be more effective in my life? Or is it causing me to be less effective?

 

And what I found was that there was a little bit of both. It was nuanced.

 

And so I set out to clean up the dirty stuff.

 

The dirty stuff was in my thoughts that weren’t serving me, that put me in victim mentality, like:

 

  • My life could be so much different if my mom were still here.
  • The man who took her life should have saw justice. He’s an evil man. (I should point out that he never went to jail. I won’t go into the details of that – the whole thing was ridiculous. But even that thought, ‘the whole thing was ridiculous the way it went down with the police,’ that thought does NOT serve me in that it feeds my victim story.

 

And so to clean it up, I worked my way through some kinds of thinking and reframing that helped me see things in a way that helped me move forward. And here’s the thinking that I came up with:

 

  • Yes my life could have been different, AND I’m grateful for the parents I landed with and how good to me they were. In a lot of ways I’m so lucky, given the circumstances.
  • It’s possible the man who took her life is living his own private hell and I don’t need to add to that, or join him there. Justice will find a way, and I don’t have to take that role on. I’ve got other things to do with my life.

 

And there’s a lot more useful thinking that I’ve arrived at that honestly feels more cleansing and healing and available to me.

 

None of the Thinking I’ve arrived at changes the Circumstance of my mother dying. Again, this isn’t about pretending that things are fine and okay and turning a blind eye.

 

It’s the opposite. It’s about looking at Pain square in the eye and saying, I see you pain. Now what?

 

I love that question, now what?

 

Then my mind gets to work on looking at the thinking that is causing my feelings, asking myself great questions that help me move forward, and taking control of the precious moments I have in the present to make beauty for ashes.

 

This is what the power of Thought Work has been teaching me. That it’s possible to heal and cultivate resilience when life gives us unwanted Circumstances, things we didn’t ask for.

 

Cause Life is really good at doing that, have you noticed?

 

Thank you Life.

 

You’re so fun.

 

Thank you very much.

 

And so sharing that example with you feels cathartic, it feels refreshing in a way. And I’m grateful I can draw from my own experiences and help you with whatever circumstances you are facing, whatever pain is keeping you up at night.

 

You can go and download the booklet I put together that walks you through the steps of moving dirty pain into clean pain if you’d like. The link is on my podcast page. You’ll find it at Danielle Vaughn coaching dot com.

 

When you go through the questions in the mini workbook, you don’t have to bring up something as heavy or difficult as the example from my own life I just shared, you can walk through the questions with anything that you feel stuck on, anything that is bothering you, really.

 

I had one client who walked we walked through the questions in regards to body image and a difficult post-partum time period. Another client worked through it with her son in mind who had lied to her about his grades. And so the circumstance doesn’t have to be something so big or heavy.

 

Just your willingness to look at your pain with honesty and an open mind will do wonders for your ability to heal and move forward if you are feeling stuck.

 

I appreciate you being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing this podcast with your friends, leaving reviews, the reviews make my days you guys!! Share and subscribe to the newsletter here. I share lots more helpful info in bite sized bits. Seriously, I am loving the community that is coming together here. We are Growth Warriors!

 

I hope you have a beautiful day my friends.

 

Take Care

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