In my time as a therapist, one of my positions was in Quality Improvement. Back when I was in Quality Improvement, one of the odd things I noticed was that the level of pain reported by some patients increased at discharge from treatment compared to admission.
I thought that the patients should have less pain at discharge from hospitalization rather than more pain. This discovery concerned me and struck me as odd. I reported this finding to my boss.
When I sat down and discussed this finding with my boss, he pointed out that the patients we saw this pattern in were addicts. The phenomena we were seeing was that their pain level was increasing related to getting sober. They no longer had the drugs or alcohol to medicate their pain.
They were now facing their pain rather than medicating it away. Although somewhat counter-intuitive, the increase in pain was a good sign. The increase in pain was a positive indication they were improving.
At that point, the saying “Pain is a protection of life” made much more sense to me.
In a similar way, one of the signs that you are waking up from the effects of an affair fog is increasing pain and anger. When you wake up to what the cheater did, you’ll be angry. The emotional pain sets in.
Not only will you be angry, you’ll realize what they’ve taken from you. More than that, you’ll realize that part of you allowed this to happen.
The realization that you turned a blind eye to signs of the affair is a natural part of the waking up process. Staying angry at yourself is self-defeating. Instead of taking it out on yourself, consider working through the trauma.
Working through trauma isn’t fun, yet in the long run, it makes for better healing.
In the video “Overcoming Affair Trauma”, you’ll find ways of making it through the pain rather than medicating it away. One of the problems with medicating the pain away is that that the pain never goes away and that the medications only mask things, not fix things.
Whether your way of medicating pain involved drugs, sex or running away, none of these heal the trauma and its pain.
Your pain is your body’s way of telling you that something needs changing. You now face the choice of whether or not to make those changes or run from them.
With a few clicks, you can start going through the healing rather than putting it off another day. Your pain is telling you something. I hope you’re listening to what its’ telling you.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
