Find purpose in the pain.
I once heard the Pope praying that he dies quickly when it’s his time without the pain. “I’m not very good at pain,” he’d admit.
In my psychotherapy work, people hate pain. The pain of their emotional wounds. Their trauma in life.
“I feel a lot of pain. Cant sleep. Can’t function. Thinking of dying. I want to get out of this pain,” said Tina, who’s a housewife based in Switzerland.
Another client, Bob, experiences the pain of guilt and shame from his pornography addiction. “I’m losing motivation, I always slip,” he’d use to say in our sessions.
“What’s the point?” Riza would say about her therapy, going through the pain of her husband’s infidelity.
People hate pain? So it seems. In many instances.
But allow me to submit to you a different take: people don’t hate pain.
Yes, people don’t actually hate pain.
What they hate is pain with no purpose.
Observe this. People pay for pain with purpose.
Some pay for pain in training to run marathons for that sense of accomplishment, among others.
Others, the mothers, pay for pain to endure 9 months of pregnancy and labor in the hospital. They do for the joy of bringing a new human being into the world.
There are those who were raised in poverty. A lot of financial pain in their lives. They pay with their blood and tears and hard work for the purpose of giving their families a better future.
Right now, we’re going through the Covid pandemic. A very difficult time throughout the world. It’s hard. The pain. But there’s a purpose. We all just need to search for it.
Find purpose in the pain.
I love what best selling author and speaker Craig Groeschel once preached,
“Don’t look at life only from the perspective of pain. But see life from the perspective of purpose. At times, God’s preparation comes packaged as pain.”
Then he quoted the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:28:
“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
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Dr. Angelo Subida is a clinical psychotherapist, author, and speaker. He is author of books "Inner Healing," "Secrets Of Your Self," "Chess and Life," among others, blogs, and articles. He has appeared frequently as an expert on psychotherapy/life recovery issues on national television, radio broadcasts, print media, and webcasts, including GMA 7, TV 5, ABS CBN 2, Q-11, 700 Club, Radyo Veritas, Inquirer Radio, Smart Parenting Magazine, Business Mirror, among others, and has served as resident therapist/counselor for parents and kid-artists in the highly popular ABS-CBN 2 Voice Kids TV singing reality show. Dr. Subida is an eclectic, multidisciplinary therapist and originator of his own revolutionary high-tech, high-touch counseling plus model. His areas of specialization include parent-child therapy, clinical infidelity treatment, relationship/marital counseling, separation/divorce therapy, anger management, depression, addictions, psychotherapy-spirituality integration, and innovative chess therapy. For more of Dr. Subida, you can find him at www.drsubida.com.