Episode 25: Dirty Pain Is Optional

Pain is painful. And life is full of it, right?  But did you know that there's a type of pain that is optional? (As in, you can choose whether to experience it or not?). There’s clean pain (the inevitable struggles of being human) and dirty pain (the unnecessary suffering we pile on top with our thoughts). Tune in to this week's episode to discover new thoughts that will help you experience pain differently--and maybe even find more joy along the way. 

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Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts Podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 25. Dirty pain is optional.

I'm Emily Ricks and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way, so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hey, how's it going? We're going to talk about pain today.

Are you ready? I want to offer you some new thoughts you can choose to think about the pain you experience in your life, if you want to feel differently about it. I find it really helpful to distinguish between clean pain and dirty pain. So let's talk about both of those.

Clean pain is the natural, necessary pain that comes from life's challenges, like grief after losing a loved one, or disappointment after a setback. Clean pain is of course painful, and even though it doesn't usually seem like it, we actually want to experience clean pain as part of a rich, textured, meaningful life. Like if we had the power to just zap away all pain from our lives, and we could eradicate every feeling of grief and sadness and disappointment and loneliness, we think we would want that, but actually that would make for a very flat, one-dimensional, shallow existence.

We think we would be so much happier if we didn't have to experience pain, but it's not really true. Think about it. How can you feel warm if you don't understand warmth as being in contrast to cold? How can you feel motivated or excited unless you've also at other times felt discouraged or uninspired? So I went skiing recently, and it was cold and actively snowing, and we were skiing fast and hard, and my quads were burning.

And I'm telling you, the hot chocolate I had at lunch was so good. Like maybe the best hot chocolate I've ever had. The heat I felt as I held the cup in my hands, the rich, creamy, warm chocolate in my mouth while I was sitting down and resting, all of that was in contrast to the cold and the intense exertion that I had felt in the morning.

And so it was so amazing. And I don't particularly like the feeling of being cold or the feeling that my quads are about to give out. And yet in the end, I actually do want to feel that as part of a fun, challenging adventure with my family on the ski slopes because we love flying down the mountain.

It's so fun. So clean pain is like being cold or having your quads burn when you go skiing. It doesn't necessarily feel good, but it's an appropriate and necessary part of the overall experience.

Dirty pain, on the other hand, is the suffering we create with our thoughts about our pain. Dirty pain comes from how we choose to interpret our suffering. So a certain amount of pain in life is inevitable.

Clean pain is part of the reality of being a human. It's going to happen. We're going to experience loss and betrayal and fatigue and fear and sickness and all sorts of other things as humans.

Dirty pain is what we create when we fight that reality and argue with it. Dirty pain looks like resentment, self-pity, blame, judgment, rage, or bitterness about our suffering. Dirty pain is optional suffering that we add onto the necessary pain.

So there's a base layer of pain that just comes with being human. And then we get to choose whether or not we want to layer dirty pain on top of that suffering and discomfort. Clean pain is something I actually want to feel, even though it doesn't necessarily feel good.

So here's a memory of clean pain that's imprinted in my mind. When my youngest was two years old, we moved into a new house. He was still sleeping in a crib at the time.

And if we hadn't been moving, I would have kept him in there for a few more months. But as it was, we decided it didn't really make sense to disassemble the crib and then put it back up in the new house and then transition him to a bed a little bit later and have to reconfigure the whole bedroom. So my husband and I had agreed that we would give the crib away as part of the move, get new beds for our two older kids and have the younger two start sharing the bunk beds their older siblings had been using.

So I remember vividly being in the chaos of packing boxes and doing projects. My son Tyler was running around in his blue and green striped dinosaur footy pajamas. My husband Kyle, power drill in hand, was getting things done and checking things off his list and taking the crib apart.

And all of a sudden I felt this wave of grief just hit me like a gut punch. I knew Tyler was my last baby and him not sleeping in a crib anymore was a big transition. It felt like the official end of the baby stage of motherhood for me.

And I wasn't quite prepared for it or quite ready. And I started totally crying just thinking about the things that I wouldn't ever do again. So I turned on a song I had sung to Tyler a lot when he was first born.

I scooped him up and just held him and swayed to the music as we kind of danced together. And I was crying really hard. But this was clean pain.

It was sadness, yes. It was grief that this stage of motherhood was ending in a way. But it was also really beautiful and powerful to feel how the agony of pregnancy and childbirth and sleep deprivation and the struggle of having little kids was also matched by the joy of snuggling up and reading them stories after their bath in their footy pajamas and singing lullabies and teaching them to eat and walk and pray.

And I actually wanted to feel the grief. And I wanted to feel the loss in that moment as that stage was ending because that is part of the love of the overall experience of parenting. So that's clean pain.

Clean pain is also me wanting my heart to break a little bit. When I have a friend who has a premature baby in the NICU and they're not sure how many days or months that baby will live, I want to cry for them. I want to feel some of their pain and carry it with them.

That's clean pain. It sounds like this is deep. This is hard.

This is painful for them. This is suffering. I could layer dirty pain on top of that sadness by thinking no one should ever have to go through anything like this.

And then I would get to feel resistance on top of the sadness. Or I could think, well, I guess God doesn't really love his children or he wouldn't let things like this happen. And then I would get to feel unloved on top of sad.

I could think this is so awful and unfair and the doctor should have been able to prevent this. And then I would get to feel resentful on top of sad. So we create dirty pain on top of the clean pain when we say, no, I don't want to feel this.

I shouldn't have to feel this. Something has gone terribly wrong here. I'm not supposed to have to feel pain.

We create dirty pain when we think no one I care about should ever have to suffer. All of those thoughts layer on resistance. Dirty pain comes when we say, I hate this feeling.

I hate this experience. I hate this pain. I hate this person for causing me to suffer.

And then we layer on hatred and resentment to the suffering. Dirty pain comes when we say this never should have happened. Then we layer on powerlessness.

Dirty pain comes when we say other people shouldn't have agency to make choices that affect me. Then we layer on anger at God. Do you see the difference? So here's what I want you to know.

And what I find to be incredibly helpful as I face challenges. Here's what I learned in my coach training and what I believe to be true. Dirty pain is optional.

It's a choice. We create dirty pain by how we think about our suffering and thoughts are optional. All thoughts are optional.

So dirty pain is optional. You can heap as much dirty pain onto your suffering as you'd like. And also you can choose not to.

So if you want lots of additional unnecessary dirty pain in your life, here's what you do. Resist the clean pain. Fight against it.

Try not to experience it. Believe that you and everyone you love are meant to frolic through the metals without any pain or suffering. And that life is supposed to be easy, painless, and happy 100% of the time.

And then when pain comes along, and I promise you it will, complain about it as much as you can. Say that it never should have happened. View pain of any kind as something terrible, unbearable, and unfair.

This is how create dirty pain. You can create more of it by blaming other people, other people's parents, the world, the weather, or anything you can think of for things that happen in your life. Blame is incredibly effective at taking something that is painful and challenging and adding even more pain to it.

Blaming whatever you can for causing your pain will help you make sure that you stay stuck in your suffering indefinitely. So that's how you create dirty pain if that's the choice that you want to make. On the other hand, if you want to stay in the clean pain zone and not keep the resistance and the blame and the resentment on top, here's what that looks like.

You actually welcome the clean pain. You choose to feel it on purpose. You lean into it.

Here are some thoughts you can think when you are experiencing pain. They'll help keep you in the clean pain and not layer dirty pain on top. Okay? And this works for emotional pain and also physical pain.

So let's say that you got in an accident and you broke your leg. In that instance, you're experiencing physical pain in your leg, and you probably also have some emotional pain of the loss of the things you're not going to be able to do for the next several weeks or however long it takes for your leg to heal. So in times like that, when you're experiencing either physical pain or emotional pain or both, here are some thoughts you can think that will keep you in the clean pain, leaning into that part, and not layering dirty pain on top.

This is pain. This is part of my journey. Can you feel the acceptance rather than the resistance? There is beauty in this pain.

You can choose to believe that. I have much to learn by staying open to this pain. This pain is my life curriculum right now.

It is teaching me. This pain is the price of my growth. Those are some of my favorite thoughts to think when I'm experiencing pain.

And it doesn't take the suffering away, but it does change the experience of suffering. When we don't layer the dirty pain on top, there is something that feels cleaner and more beautiful when we embrace the pain. Now, if you notice that you are creating additional layers of dirty pain, and you notice that you're thinking thoughts like, oh, this is the worst thing ever.

This shouldn't have happened. This is all my fault. This is all her fault.

I don't want to feel this. If that's where you are, I want to encourage you to remind yourself this. You can just tell yourself this part is optional.

I'm choosing this part right now. And it's okay, right? You might want to choose blame right now. That's fine.

You might want to choose resistance right now. You might not be ready to lean into the clean pain yet. That is totally okay.

Just tell yourself the truth that it's optional and you're allowed to create it if you want. And you're allowed to reduce it if you want. It's so empowering to believe that dirty pain is optional.

I can choose to add more of this on if I want to or not. Now notice I'm saying dirty pain is optional to feel. I'm not saying dirty pain is wrong to feel.

It's not wrong. If you view it as wrong, then you're going to layer on judgment of yourself when you are choosing blame or resentment or anger. Now you're also going to have judgment and probably self-loathing.

If you view yourself as bad or wrong for feeling dirty pain, because you know, you're creating it with your thoughts, then you just create more layers of dirty pain. Okay? So dirty pain is optional, but also not wrong to feel. It's fine to feel.

It's okay. You can choose it if you want to. And in many cases, it's part of our human experience.

And sometimes we need to feel it to understand what it is and eventually decide to reduce the amount of it that we're creating if that's what we want to do. But do you see how it's really different to view it as optional than it is to view it as wrong. But I see it with my clients all the time where once they know that they're the ones choosing it, then they want to beat themselves up for making that choice.

So I want it to be very clear that my recommendation is you tell yourself this dirty pain is optional, but that you don't tell yourself that it's wrong. It's fine. So as Wesley says to buttercup and the princess bride, life is pain, Highness.

Anyone who says differently is selling something. That's the truth, right? Life is pain, but there's clean pain and there's dirty pain and they're different. So that's the thought I want to offer you today.

Dirty pain is optional. It's not wrong. It's not even a huge deal.

And you can create it and feel it if you choose to. And we all do to some extent as humans. And that's fine.

It's just negative emotions vibrating in your body and you can handle it. But knowing that it's optional and that it's created in your mind by the way you're thinking about your pain can really help you make intentional choices in your life about how you want to interpret your own suffering. So I'm cheering you on as you lean into the clean pain in your life.

And as you meet yourself with understanding in the times when you resist it, I hope this idea helps you find more meaning and joy in your life. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll talk to you next week.

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Send me a DM on Instagram at Emily Ricks coaching and tell me your thoughts, your impressions or questions about the podcast, or drop a comment and share how you're choosing to feel clean pain on purpose this week. Come find me on Instagram @emilyrickscoaching and let's connect.