Haunted By Hurt – Stopping Relationship Pain Insights October 2006

Sometimes the words, actions, or neglect that cause hurt become a repeating loop inside you. They may lay dormant when you’re busy, then start up again when you go to bed, or when you’re alone, or when you feel alone even though you’re with your partner. The pain is like a poison permeating your thoughts, eating at you, despite the fact that better times, or the passage of time, have replaced that hurting time. The pain hurts more and more, as if the original event is magnified with memory, until you feel twisted by it, tortured by it. It haunts you.

When you are haunted by a hurt, it nags at you despite any desire you may have to stop the pain. It nags at you like a toothache, unable to be ignored. It nags like a bad smell, permeating everything inside you and around you. And it really does affect everything inside you and around you.

No matter how much you rationalize, ordering yourself to let it go, or rhyming off the reasons not to let the past wreck where you are now, or even despairing that your pain doesn’t matter, old hurts are like a serpent with fangs sunk into you dripping poison into your veins slowly and steadily, killing your joy and killing your relationship.

You may want to put old pain behind you, to have a chance at a fresh start. You may want to put old pain behind you to move on, and really put the past behind you. At this point you’ve probably realized that deciding to put it behind you isn’t enough, you need a way to free your insides of old wounds and their leaking poison.

The first step to freedom is to realize that you need more than your conscious mind to break this pattern. You need to tap into your subconscious, the place that’s hanging onto your old pain with both hands, and playing that repeating loop over and over again. In order to really free yourself of haunting, you need an exorcism at a different level of your mind.

Your subconscious mind considers every pain you experience a warning sign it holds onto to protect you from the future. Unfortunately, your subconscious does not consider time, or circumstances, and it forgets that you have a cognitive, rational brain to evaluate situations.

It’s as if you went for a walk and stubbed your toe on a crack in the sidewalk. Your cognitive brain decides you should either watch your step or wear closed-toe shoes. Your subconscious is a lot more severe. It might decide you should have bad knees so you won’t go for dangerous walks, or that you should have a sore toe for the rest of your life so you’ll never forget that nasty pain of a stubbed toe. Typically it takes a bit more than a stubbed toe to get your subconscious this aggravated, but emotional pain is a lot more than a stubbed toe.

Your subconscious will hold onto an emotional pain even more fiercely, because it hurt a lot more than a sore toe. And it did – hurt a lot more, I mean.

The problem with this plan of operation is that keeping a sore toe is not going to help you go for walks, whether you decide to walk with your old partner, find someone new, or walk alone. It’s not going to free you from haunting. You have the ability to decide how you want to face the world. The fact is, you know stubbing your toe hurts, even if your toe stops hurting. You know what hurt you in the past, even if it stopped hurting. You can take that into account when you make decisions. That’s the beauty of a cognitive, rational brain – it figures stuff out.

Unfortunately, your subconscious is a little hampered in this regard, what with being unaware of time and circumstances. And it tends to generalize in a really broad way, making assumptions and creating expectations that influence you in all sorts of negative ways. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, your subconscious has the keys to the pain storing programs, so it’s the part of you that decides whether or not you are haunted, and what you are haunted by. Basically, it decides how you are going to face the world, and what you have consciously decided isn’t having much effect.

It’s a good thing you can learn to change all that.

I can spend a lot of time talking about all the conscious reasons you might be hanging onto your old pain, too. They’re war wounds, and sometimes when you’ve earned your wounds it’s hard to just let them go. It’s a scorecard, and you use it to evaluate everything that happens, viewing the world through everything bad that’s ever happened to you. There are lots of behaviors that aren’t in our own best interests that we do anyway – and typically there is a subconscious program at the root of that behavior. That’s why, when you have moments of clarity and decide to quit the behavior, that doesn’t work either.

Like I said, you have to work where the power is, which is at the subconscious level. The tool you use to deprogram a haunting hurt varies depending on how the hurt was acquired. Here’s one method you can try on some of your wounds. This method has two steps, one for removing the fangs and another for drawing the poison.

First, to remove the fangs, use a method to disconnect the emotional ties to the old event. Picture the first time this hurt happened, one event, as if it was floating in a glass ball. If there are many wounds, you’ll have to do them one at a time. There are bulk clearing methods, but I won’t cover them in this article.

Imagine you can see the event like a film clip playing inside a glass ball. Now, imagine that there are emotion strings, like threads, that pass through the glass ball and carry on to your past and future. These emotion strings are present for every emotion you experienced during that event. Even though your haunting may be fixated on one emotion, such as resentment, hurt, betrayal, or abandonment, let your imagination fill in all the other potential emotions you felt, completing sadness, despair, loss, grief, and anything else that might have been there. Don’t be concerned if you’re adding more than was there. Better to get more than not enough.

Now, imagine you can put gloves made out of light on your hands, and you can melt away the strings from the ball. Keep wiping and melting across the surface of the ball until all the strings are gone. You can make the gloves as strong as you like, so that they can melt through anything. Don’t worry about the inside of the ball, what you’re dealing with is the influence the event has on your present and future. It was real and valid, in its time, and making peace with that is a different process. What you want to change now is the haunting.

When you feel you’ve got all the strings dissolved, you can let the ball float free. It’s still there in your memory, what you’re deleting is the influences on your present and future.

The second step is to draw the poison created by the original event, and the ongoing wounds of the haunting. The first step of this process is to admit that this original event is in the past. Even if someone was to do exactly the same behavior, or say the same words, you would be a different person experiencing them because time has passed. You are older and wiser, and you probably have a different perspective because of what you lived. Certainly if it happened again you would probably be hurt, but you wouldn’t be having the identical experience you had before because that experience has already changed you. This admission is difficult in itself, because your wisdom has come at a price. Well, this is how you stop paying the price and enjoy the benefits of being wiser. It’s up to you to decide if you want to do that, or keep on hurting.

If you feel you want to stop hurting, continue. If you can’t make that choice, keep repeating the first process with the glass ball until you feel better able to face being pain-free. Any healing is a process, and you’ll only release what you are willing to release at the time. Repeating a healing process allows you to release from a deeper place, and you can tell when you’re at peace with your past. It’s simple, it stops hurting.

If you’re ready to continue, imagine that you are standing in front of a magic mirror, facing the person that hurt you in the past. They cannot touch you or hurt you now. You can decide if you can hear them, and you can even blur the view of their mouth so you don’t have to know if they’re speaking. This is your healing place, you’re in total control of your experience.

It’s important that your image match the person who hurt you at the time, not the present version of that person. When you are ready with your imagination, stand facing that mirror image. Imagine there is a great beam of white light pouring through you, protecting you and healing you and freeing you. Tell that person you are free. You can say something like this:

“You hurt me, but you will not hurt me this way again. I have learned from my experience, and I now know how to protect myself from the way you hurt me this time. I will not feel this same hurt ever again. I’m different now.”

Sometimes it feels frustrating to only deal with one incident, when what you really want to say is “You’ll never have the power to hurt me again.” In fact, there are ways of disempowering a person from hurting you, even in a current relationship. Again, it’s about mastering your subconscious mind.

For now, we’re focusing on the haunting of old hurts. This is one of many kinds of process, simple enough that you can do it yourself. Now you have a choice, and you aren’t trapped in haunting. You can exorcise your hurts and free yourself. Then, you can choose how you deal with your sore toes and pains, using the wisdom you’ve acquired throughout your life. Being free of haunting make choices clearer. It also helps you open yourself to more good choices, enabling you to find choices you didn’t know existed when you were submersed in haunting hurt. Take back your power to decide how you face your walk in the world. Enjoy.

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