Why You Turn Your Pain Into Self-Punishment (And How to Stop)

What was your first clue that some feelings were okay to show, and some weren’t? Who first told you to fix your face? To smile, even when you didn’t want to?

When did you first learn to edit yourself, to prevent someone else from acting out, or turning against you?

When did you first realize your safety came from hiding?

When expression stops feeling safe, then feeling stops feeling safe.

But that energy still has to go somewhere.

So most of us devised rituals.

When I was a teenager, this looked like eating until I was uncomfortably full. When I started gaining weight, this looked like punishing myself afterwards with hours of skip rope or running. Starting another extreme diet. Reaching adulthood it was drinking til I blacked out.

Violence towards myself came easily. Because the easiest way to not feel was aggression. It placed the focus on something other than the feeling. A villain I could attack. Even if that villain was myself.

Rituals give us something to depend on when nothing feels dependable. It gives us a feeling of control and certainty when everything feels uncontrollable and uncertain.

What we’re actually looking for is regulation. But when we aren’t taught how, this is when all of these “solutions” that almost work get weaved into our systems.

I remember coming back from a run already high from endorphins and deciding to do a line of coke anyway, just because it was so deeply ingrained into my Friday night ritual. How I couldn’t even feel the high. But that it felt like the safer option, in case the thoughts caught up to me.

This was the doom loop I created for myself. Because in my attempt to regulate, I was continuously making my dysregulation worse.

What I learned in sobriety and being still:

When you learn how to relax despite a difficult emotion coming up, rather than reject, dismiss, avoid, or try to fix it, your relationship with your emotions changes. Your relationship with your body changes.

Your nervous system stops panicking. You learn to wait, rather than react. The mind will try to tell you a story of why you feel this way.And while it might feel good to follow that story, you know that what happened in the past doesn’t dictate what you choose to do now.

The feelings we usually don’t want to feel - sadness, unworthiness, anger, shame, guilt - are usually the most useful ones in teaching us which parts need love the most.

Not wanting to be wrong is the part of you that was shamed for making mistakes. Not wanting to say no is the part of you that was guilted or punished until you said yes. Not expressing needs is the part of you that was denied, mocked and ridiculed for having them at all.

We’re told that happiness is the goal, the prize for being good. But being good, according to someone else’s values, meant performing to an ever-changing set of rules that could shift at a moment’s notice.

“Am I good enough now? Can you love me now?”

We become the versions of ourselves that are “easiest.” A convenience that can’t be left behind.

So we create a list of emotions we don’t want to have, lest one slips out and is seen as distasteful, weak, unacceptable.

The emotion that gets me into fight or flight the quickest is impatience. It’s the one I judge myself most for after, because my dysregulation often looks like anger, or hostility. Impatience makes me judgmental, because I project my discomfort onto what’s happening in front of me. “If only they would do it like this, why is this taking so long, why are they like this?”

The mind goes to look for things to fix, offering solutions to problems that aren’t mine. The story that I tell myself is if these “problems” outside of me are fixed, I would stop feeling impatient.

But. No.

The impatience is there because I am still learning how to be patient with myself. Because I learned at different points in my life that I wouldn’t be offered patience if I fucked up. That the punishment that was coming was big, scary, and unavoidable. Try harder, Vera. Stop fucking up, Vera. Why are you so disappointing, Vera?

And then I see it.

And then I feel it.

And then I let it move through my body, where it needs to go.

These days my hand will unconsciously hold myself as I do this, without me having to ask.

Because my body no longer senses danger all the time. Self-protection becomes the exception that feels weird, rather than the norm where feeling safe or loved felt weird.

So as my mind is saying, “Don’t go back there. Don’t see that person. Avoid these situations,” my heart is saying back, “Good job facing that. Face it again. Don’t avoid these situations. Practice.”

This is the new ritual. Loving the moments where I want to reject myself the most. Getting closer to the feeling, rather than further away. Telling myself it’s okay to feel that way, and knowing I can respond differently next time. I don’t have to worry about how will I know? The feeling will tell me.