20 May So you’re hurting? Let it break!

Moving through life and especially in the line of work I do as a mental health clinician I’m regularly surrounded by people’s journeys. Every single one of us has a unique story. One of the most common threads weaved through every story, however, is our discomfort with pain — not physical, but emotional.

We want to avoid it at all cost. We seek out love though we’ve been hurt before and build fortresses around our hearts to avoid pain, all the while misunderstanding that pain is a part of living and let’s us know what’s wrong and needs attention. The troublesome issue is that many people devote tremendous time and effort trying to avoid it unsuccessfully and continue doing so, making it more difficult to deal with.

I am no stranger to pain and am totally disinterested in its effects — however, your pulse lets us know that experiencing pain is inevitable. As long as we are living and in some kind of relationship with others, there will be pain.

So today I want to offer a little perspective on how to proactively deal with heartbreak — it may sound a little sadistic but read on.

My take on dealing with pain suggests that we don’t run from it but that we identify the best way to deal with it head on. This gives us the opportunity to be actively engaged in our healing process by choosing to learn the lessons we need to take with us into the next season of life. We can heal properly and leave the issues behind us — freeing us to try again, love again, live again.

If it’s breaking you can’t begin to repair it properly unless you give it the proper attention. You have to face your pain.

I remember back in April 2007, I made a trip to NYC to visit the family for my mother’s birthday. We got up there and had a great time with the family as usual. Later that Saturday night I started to come down these sketchy stairs in my parents’ home and thought to brace myself as I made my descent. All that preparation? Yes! Aaaaaand it was all for naught. Somehow and very quickly, I tumbled down the stairs and reached behind me to grab the banister in a poor effort to break my fall. Needless to say, in so doing, I not only fell but I seemed to leave my hand behind me and there it was — trapped in the banister! I broke one of my fingers.

We went to the hospital where they eventually set my finger and told me to follow up with a specialist once I got back to Maryland. Would you believe that in just a few days my finger had already begun to heal? But the problem was that it was healing crookedly and if it was not repaired it would permanently impede the use of my whole hand.

So there were treatment options — of them all, the medical advice given was to re-break it, reposition it properly this time and put some tiny screws in place to support proper healing and restore its use. Do you see where I’m going here?

So they scheduled me for surgery. Told me what to expect when they put me under and what I might be able to expect coming out of surgery. The surgery was successful. The end!

ABSOLUTELY NOT!

My hand was in a cast to protect it while the bones and the incision spot began to heal. Once sufficient healing took place and the stitches dissolved, it was time to make my next step. Physical therapy. What for? I had to begin working on restoring the use of my hand because though the bone was set straight, I now needed to retrain that finger and hand if I wanted to use it again and get optimal use. It wasn’t enough to straighten it out and stick a few tiny pins in there. The real healing required a lot of exercise and intentionality on my part. It took several physical therapy sessions and required me to follow up at home with exercises to reinforce what I was learning at these sessions. If I didn’t continue with the exercises, it would delay my progress.

Real healing requires a lot of exercise and intentionality on my part.

I didn’t have to bother with the surgery if I was cool with my finger healing crookedly and wanted to avoid more pain. More pain was inconvenient but so was the idea of life with a bum hand that wouldn’t function properly. What I really wanted — the restored use of my hand — seemed far more profitable in the long run than the avoidance of pain and surgery.

More pain was inconvenient but so was the idea of life with a bum hand.

So I bucked up and agreed to the treatment plan. I’ve since regained full use of my finger and hand and I have a snazzy scar left over from the surgery and stitches. It shows that I’ve been through something… and I survived it. The process was painful but so was the idea of going through life crookedly. Would you rather be temporarily uncomfortable or uncomfortable indefinitely?

If you’re living, pain is a’coming. Choose the best treatment option to address your brokenness. Make sure that option gives you fully restored use of your heart. When you learn the lessons, keep going — fight the urge to default to crooked patterns that set you back instead of moving you forward. If you don’t, those muscles atrophy and you revert. Let’s do the hard work and seize full restoration. Perhaps the best thing that could have happened to you was to have that heart broken. Now it can be properly mended, if you choose.

Until next time!

Ciao.