Growing Pain versus Pain Pain

People often come to counselling when they’re stuck. They either can’t see their way through a difficult situation, or they can see several ways, but are unable to take steps in any direction.

Usually, people are stuck because every choice involves some sort of emotional pain, and there isn’t a clear personal value that makes one outcome more meaningful than another. For example, the situation could be asking us to establish boundaries, risk conflict, accept a difficult reality, or to let go of something precious..

It’s easy to feel stuck in those situations, where there’s pain in every direction. Those situations often make us feel a mix of frustration and of failure, like we’ve done something wrong to end up in a situation where there’s no viable solution. No matter what we do, or don’t do, we’re going to suffer, and often so will others. It’s easy to fall into rumination here, grinding over the different options, replaying the past with “if only” scenarios, and catastrophise about the future.   

Once we accept that it’s pain in every direction – often with the help of counselling – our thoughts and the counselling process often turns to finding the most optimal outcome. To the client, who has to endure the pain, the best option often seems to be the one that causes the less discomfort.

But it’s at this point that there’s an important choice to be make. Author Heidi Priebe recalls one of her psychology professors making the distinction between growing pain and just plain old pain. And this is the important guide we all need to use when choosing from a menu of pain. Some pain is just useless pain … it does nothing for us but make us suffer. But other pain, sometimes the more acute and intense emotional pain, forces us to grow.

And that’s a valuable metric with which to make decisions when we’re stuck. When we visualise ourselves on the other side of our dilemma, do we see ourselves all haggard and broken, having run the gauntlet and endured an ordeal and ready to rebuild our lives? Or do we see ourselves strong and victorious, having been made stronger and more confident, our emotional scars as symbols of battles fought and won? We don’t so much need to rebuild because the ordeal itself has rebuilt us.

If we aspire to have our challenges and our suffering make us better people, then we should be ready to accept the paths that call on us to outgrow our problems, rather than just endure or avoid them.