What will processing hurt do for me?

Many of us find ourselves in cycles that we struggle to break free from. Even though we want to change and we try to, the old us keeps coming back. This is because we're looking for answers from the outside. If there's something that keeps coming back in our lives, it's because the answer is inside. Honest self-reflection is the path to change.

What are the consequences if I don't process hurt?

Avoiding our internal struggles leads to chasing sources of temporary happiness such as job titles, possessions, public persona, and sometimes even drugs. This results in a long life of continuous disappointment. Once we learn the value of honest self-reflection, life becomes a beautiful adventure of curiosity and growth without need.

What makes this process effective? 

What allows our buried struggles to have influence in our lives is our lack of understanding of them. Going through the process of self-reflection allows us to gain clarity into why we feel what we feel. Having this greater understanding of ourself gives us a greater ability to manage how we think about things, how we feel about things, and how we react to things.

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What's the first step?

In order to begin processing our hurt, we must first understand that we/our thoughts are not one thing. We are two things. One is our self and the other is our unconscious mind. 

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What is the unconscious mind and what does it do?

The unconscious mind is where we store beliefs and values based on moments we’ve repetitively experienced over time. It can also be influenced through current or past trauma in our life. The unconscious mind operates as our friend here to help us through life taking on the load of repetitive responsibilities so that we can operate in this world free to choose to be curious about whatever we wish to focus on.

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An example of how we train our unconscious mind and how it helps us through the day.

Most of us have learned to drive a car. Driving requires a lot attention to manage many regular adjustments and corrections. Yet, after a few months or years of driving, we're able to maintain lane integrity while thinking about something completely different. Who is now driving the car? Through the repetitive actions of driving, our unconscious mind has learned this behavior and adopted this responsibility for us giving us a freedom to focus on other things while we drive from one place to another. 

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How can I tell if the voice in my head is my self or my unconscious mind talking?

This is difficult at first specifically because there is no change in tone or cadence or volume between the transition of your self’s voice or your unconscious mind speaking. Both voices sound like the same person (you). The easiest way to distinguish between your self's voice and the unconscious mind is to watch your thoughts and hear which voice believes a thought you disagree with and hear the voice that is disagreeing with the thought. The voice that believes the thought is your unconscious mind and the voice that is disagreeing with the thought is your conscious mind or your true self.

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Why does my unconscious mind think the way it does?

Unconscious thoughts are adopted from our experiences in the past and the beliefs we had back then while we were going through those experiences. The good news is we’re constantly reprogramming old beliefs by revisited the original experience in our mind that inspired the original belief and rewriting the meaning with the new wiser information we have today. The bad news is sometimes a belief was put in place during times when we were hurting. And to revisit those beliefs means revisiting some of the past pain before we can see what the old belief was and change it to the newer belief with more compassion and understanding. Since revisiting old pain can be hard to do, often we avoid doing so to protect ourselves. By avoiding the previous hurt, we’re allowing the old beliefs to stay in place and continue to run our lives in ways that we don’t always like about ourselves.

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How do I change a negative unconscious belief into a positive unconscious belief? 

First, you need to really want to. This is work that requires a lot of your resources (time, energy, focus). You need to gauge how available you are to practice this work. Your gains compound on top of each other which is where the progress comes from. It’s helpful to remove distractions and interruptions from your life while going through this process to give yourself the best chances for real progress. If you feel you are ready and available, give yourself quality space to be with yourself and give yourself a chance to experience you (meditation). Depending on our ability to slow our mind down, the first few experiences may simply be learning how to be with only yourself. It gets easier with practice and determination. While in meditation, our focus is on nothing. Thoughts will still come up but our goal is to watch them with no attachment. Each experience of a thought does not need to be followed up with another thought. We are aimlessly watching thoughts as if they where a movie, each thought appearing and vanishing as a surprise. After we gain the ability to let thoughts appear and vanish as a surprise, now we give ourselves permission to talk with our thoughts. As a thought or belief comes up, ask yourself why do I believe that. After the ask, wait. Allow yourself to go back to an appear and vanish mode. Go back into peace with no need for an answer. In doing so, listen to the response you get. Nothing is also a response. It may mean you need to ask another question. There are no timelines to when these answers come. Enjoying being with yourself is the key to getting quality answers. The more comfortable you are with yourself, the faster the answers will come. As you get an answer to why you believe something, ask yourself, ok. Why do I believe that. Continue this process as you drill down into discovering why you are who you are. As certain answers come up, ask yourself is that true. Asking yourself is that true gives you the chance to open the door to that belief and rewrite it if you wish. 

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This process is something I like to call the why rabbit hole. I do so because we never know how deep this journey goes. Our job in self discovery is to continue to ask questions going further into ourselves until we’ve found the thing we wish to change about ourself. 

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The mind is extremely sophisticated. It knows what you are trying to do and will setup obstacles to detour you from your path sometimes tricking you into thinking something that isn’t the problem is. Your mind is protecting itself. You’ve given it permission to operate the way it has for some time. And it’s disagreeing with the new conversations you are having with it to make sure you really want the mind to operate in a different way. Remember the mind thinks it’s helping you. The only way to avoid these obstacles is to have a relentless determination to go deeper into yourself regardless of the answer that comes back to you. When an answer comes and you think you’ve discovered something, keep going. Thought has been protecting us for some time. We are looking for feelings in this journey. 

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When you do find an item you are looking to address within yourself, it will likely be an epiphany that often puts one in a daze simply because this work is hypothetical until you experience it for yourself. There’s a lot of effort, faith and trust required to drill down enough to discover what operates you. This moment is a tiny rebirth of whoever you want to become next. We become the new version of us by deciding how we want to reinterpret the event we are visiting. 

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This can be easy or it can be difficult depending on how prepared we are to re-experience the hurt of that moment. Sometimes the hurt is overbearing and we revisit the moment exclusively as the person we were back then. When this happens, temporarily retreat and recalibrate. It’s important that when you are revisiting hurt from the past that it’s a combination of who you were then with who you are today so that you can approach it with more compassion and understanding to insert the new belief.

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Important notes to this process:

1). When you are having conversations with your unconscious mind, you must always be kind to the unconscious mind regardless of what you are exposed to. The unconscious mind operates as our friend and will listen and cooperate with us as long as you are kind. As soon as we begin to get upset or frustrated, the unconscious mind retreats from the conversation and returns to normal operation.

​2). Diving into past pain is often best done in doses depending on how difficult the pain is to go through. Only allow yourself to experience what you can handle. As struggle becomes overbearing, retreat and give yourself time to heal and strengthen between meditation sessions to give yourself space to better be prepared for your next experience. 

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What if I can't slow my mind and thoughts down?
Let's talk about meditation. The goal of meditation is a combination of witnessing and accepting what's going on around us both externally and internally without the need to participate.

External acceptance can be assisted by bringing yourself to a place without distractions from the external such as going to a quiet place with nothing moving or acting around you. It's best to have your eyes closed while sitting in a comfortable position.

Internal acceptance takes a little more work. What we're doing here is attempting to separate our self from our unconscious mind. We don't have control over the thoughts our unconscious mind presents to us but we do have control over how we react to those thoughts. The intention of internal acceptance is to become an observer of the thoughts as if they were on a movie screen in front of us without attaching ourselves to what comes on and off the screen. So often we want to participate in the movie of thoughts and add our say to the story. Internal acceptance is experiencing the thoughts in a way to where their appearance and disappearance becomes a surprise every time. You're not connected to the thoughts. You're watching them. To practice what this experience feels like, imagine staring at the sky by an airport where airplanes land and never letting the airplane passing through your field of vision distract you from staring at the sky as a whole. The airplane does not have control of your attention.

The primary benefit of meditation is increased trust. Increased trust that you can let go of what's going on around you in the external world and still feel safe. Increased trust that you can allow your thoughts to be what they are without attaching yourself to them in the moment giving you a greater sense of self control.

How can processinghurt.com help me with my progress?
Often a person has a specific curiosity, concern, or hurdle they wish to address followed by another and another to help them along their path of self discovery. Visit our help center to learn more about frequently asked questions.

You can also speak with a positive energy coach. Speaking with a positive energy coach means connecting with someone who is willing to completely share and experience your struggle with you in order to effectively coach you through the experience. Reach out and let’s talk. We’ve gone through this process ourself and enjoy helping others along their own path of personal healing and discovery.