Overcoming emotional pain from childhood

Even the best, most well intentioned parents could not watch over you. They were human. They made mistakes. There would be things outside family life that would have affected you.

Childhood is often a chaotic time that results in emotional pain you have to overcome to live a happy, healthy life now.

Such events leave deeper scars as you were still in your formative years, when your minds and bodies were still not fully developed, and thus more susceptible to damage.

Think of your minds and bodies as wet clay - a slight brush would have bent you out of shape. When the clay was dry and hardened, you would have been more resilient.

Overcoming the emotional pain

There are a few steps to overcoming emotional pain from your childhood that I have used to great effect.

The first step is to realise that these events, painful as they were and still are, can help you grow. They happened for a reason. I know that it is hard to swallow when you are in the depths of emotional pain, but please hear me out.

Maybe these events made you do a lot of things that you regret. Maybe they hurt you and you still have physical and mental scars. Maybe you spent years of your life in a lifestyle that was self-destructive. Maybe you carry around a lot of anger and depression.

So: still your emotions and ask yourself honestly. What is the lesson you learnt? Let's say you were beaten by a classmate as a kid. The lesson you learnt might be to protect yourself. You might have developed street smarts as a necessity.

These street smarts may protect you from a life threatening attack in the future. Or perhaps they have already protected you - you felt bad about going to a certain place and you didn't go. If you had went you might have gotten into trouble. You never know - there is no magical genie popping up to tell you "Well done! You have just avoided certain death by deciding to stay home and watch TV instead of going to that wild party." You probably just felt bored.

What do you mean, benefits?

This might sound like a load of crock that I'm spouting, but everything truly does happen for a reason. I have had so many things that affected me deeply when it happened, and later I found out that it had actually been for my benefit.

Sometimes the benefit would simply be that it made you stronger. Just like a bodybuilder pushes against weights to build his muscles, these events have served as weights to build your emotional and mental strength. It might have catapulted you on a journey of self development. I suffered from much emotional pain, and that started me on a journey of self-help, and now I am stronger and happier than I would have ever been otherwise.

Now that you have learnt from your childhood events, the next step is to forgive and stop letting it affect you. This can take two forms: Overcoming the emotional pain; and finding out the patterns that it has ingrained in you subconsciously.

There's more

What the first means is obvious. Stop the pain, the heartache. But what does the latter mean? Some things have left patterns and habits in you that don't serve you well. Going back to the example of the childhood beating - it might have left you unable to make friends with new people, or it might have made you violent yourself. You might unknowingly sabotage your friendships and relationships. These patterns are so deeply ingrained that they require a lot of soul searching and self analysis to dig out. It is beyond the scope of this article; however, visit the website for more on this.

Overcoming the emotional pain is something that I have years of experience with, and can write about with confidence. It is a massive topic that requires more than a few articles to cover - you can also find more info on that on my website.