Embrace the Suck

Creating Change in Our Healing Journey

Lately, I have been thinking about the healing journey and what it takes to work through our past experiences. Many of us enter this journey with the simple goal of “stopping the pain,” which sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s not.

We enter our therapist’s office for the first time, hoping she/he can work some miracle to fix us and stop the pain. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could wave a magic wand, make all the painful memories disappear, and help us feel better about ourselves? It would be nice, but unfortunately, that is not how it works.

Trauma sucks, and healing from trauma sucks even worse. To heal, we need to move through troubling memories and painful emotions. The path forward requires us to go through it, not around it. Healing means creating change. Growth is a sign of that change. You can’t grow and stay the same.

“Familiar can be more tolerable than something I don’t know.”      — Dr. Arielle Schwartz, The Post-Traumatic Growth Handbook

Working to change habitual coping strategies that helped us survive our painful childhood is challenging. We want to move toward our goals, but to Dr. Schwartz’s point, the familiar is, ironically, much more tolerable and comfortable for us.

There really is no other way to say it: change is uncomfortable. It feels awkward. It doesn’t feel “right.” I want everyone to understand that discomfort is normal for the change process. It is to be expected.

Sometimes we are surprised or freaked out about the discomfort, and we shouldn’t be. Let me tell you what often happens. We work really hard in therapy or coaching, and we start to see change. We start to feel things we are not used to because we’ve been dissociating or we have protected ourselves from having those feelings to survive. Then, our internal system feels threatened because, in the past, it was not safe to experience those feelings, so we try to “back out” of our growth and go back to the comfortable.

Change becomes intolerable for us because it is new, different, and sometimes painful. Sometimes a behavior change can bring up some long-held limiting beliefs that kept us safe in the past, and we struggle to exchange the old, comfortable patterns with new patterns that lead us to achieve our goals. Then, we get discouraged, triggering the unrelenting thoughts of “you’ll never get through this because it is impossible.”

This is the point where we need to draw on our courage to sit in discomfort and learn to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It will take some time for our internal system to adjust to this new way of doing things. We have to manage the threat response in our systems by acknowledging that we are still safe, even though this supposed safety doesn’t feel right.

I firmly believe in creating incremental change and the power of the pause.

During my healing journey, I have learned that taking on too much change at one-time overloads as well as overwhelms my system, leading me to shut down and be unable to move forward. As a result, I have also learned that staying within our window of tolerance is required for us to move forward.

The discomfort we feel during the change process reflects the stretching of our window of tolerance. We are pushing our limits, and it’s uncomfortable, but when we do push, the result is more room for us to grow.

Once we’ve pushed into the limits of our window of tolerance and experienced the discomfort of it, we need to pause to allow our system to adjust to the “new normal.” Our system will adjust when we consistently affirm that we are OK, that we are safe.

Thinking about the above reminds me of the process I underwent before participating in triathlons several years ago. When I saw the Iron Man Triathlon Championships in Hawaii on TV, I immediately added the competition to my bucket list. However, taking part in the competition also seemed daunting to me, impossible even. I couldn’t even run a marathon, never mind combine a swim and a 110-mile bike ride.

One day, however, I read something about a shorter-distance triathlon called a “sprint,” and I decided I wanted to challenge myself. I’m sure this is trauma-related, but I am attracted to doing hard things, things that other people would not attempt. Just about anybody can run or walk a 5k, given enough time to get in shape, but it takes a diverse skill set to do all three well enough to participate in a competition. So, I started training.

I devoted myself to the training, and it took me some time to get myself into shape because I was not a lightweight. Again, I enjoy doing things other people don’t think I can do…proving to them and myself that I can do really HARD things.

It was hard work. It was painful work. I was using muscles I hadn’t used in a long time, and I was always sore. Part of the training was pushing my body to the limit, then giving it time to recover. Then it’s a process of rinse and repeat. You keep repeating until your fitness level increases to the extent that you can complete the distance and achieve your goal of finishing the race.

I personally loved the challenge of the training process. I loved the variations in the workouts. I loved pushing myself. I loved doing things that no one else thought I could do. I wasn’t trying to “beat” someone else; I was trying to improve myself, my time, and my performance.

It was not at all comfortable. When you spend hours on a road bike working on your fitness, and your butt hurts from sitting on the seat, and your legs are chaffing, it can be painful. The amazing athletes I had the privilege of working out with encouraged me to “embrace the suck” because they knew that the discomfort/pain would help me achieve my goals.

We follow this expansion process in much the same way during our healing journey. We “work out” with our therapist or coach, pushing ourselves to our limits, but then we need time to recover. We need to allow ourselves time to heal before we start pushing ourselves once more. If we don’t give ourselves time to recover, we will inevitably cause injury to ourselves and further impede our progress toward our goal.

On the healing journey, discomfort is not our enemy. Discomfort is a sign that we are using different muscles than we are not used to using. Just like triathlon training, I want to encourage you to “embrace the suck” of your healing journey. When the “training” is difficult, remind yourself of what you are working toward. If you need to take a minute to catch your breath, do it, but come back to training. Pick up where you left off. Repeat and keep moving forward.

Remember, this is your “race.” This is your journey. You are not competing against anyone else; you are working to meet the goals you have set for yourself. You are not alone. We are participating in the race with you, embracing the suck with you. You’ve got this!!!

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