Unseen Pain: The Loneliest Place

In all my years of work, the loneliest place I have found someone in is a place where their pain was unseen.

Witnessed pain is the act of healing and yet, in the pieces that cannot be seen, whether by shame, guilt, embarrassment or denial, it becomes a felt sense of betrayal or abandonment. This can come from self, or other.

We become buried in the unseen.

What kind of pain is unseen? When we are brave enough to share our pain, sometimes it isn't recognized by others. Sometimes it is misunderstood. With the unseen pain, comes disenfranchised grief.

There are pockets of lonely in the world, depending on your life experience and from those experiences we try and find pockets of understanding to combat the loneliness. There's grief support groups for death of a loved one, there's connection groups for business owners, the list goes on and on. There are many ways that we begin naming unseen pain through social movements, advocacy, etc.

None of these things will take away the loneliness of risking to share ones pain and not have it reflected in the eyes of another.

Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we show up with judgement. Sometimes we cannot comprehend. Sometimes our privilege allows us to escape the need for compassion and understanding. There are so many ways and reasons for a persons pain to be unseen. Whatever the reason, whether someone is choosing the hide the pain, or they've been brave enough to share it and it's met with a lack of understanding, the end result is loneliness.

In that loneliness, the thing that is often harder to let go of is the desire to have understanding. We end up holding harder to our pain (physical or emotional). As we hold hard to the pain that has no place to go, we internalize it (self blame) or we externalize it (blame others). Either way, we house it. We categorize it. We hide it. It begins to affect us in different ways.

As we become impacted we also then find ways to cope. Our body goes to the most route memorized way of coping when we need it. Often times, it is what we have learned from our earlier years and this can be maladaptive. It can cause us to move further into a place of pain as a cyclical pattern.

When I am sitting with someone, I scan for patterns and then I'm curious about the pain point. Often times when a pain point is found, what joins us in the room is grief. The loss of relationships, the loss of understanding, the loss of self-compassion. When pain takes over and we become isolated in our pain it becomes harder to see any of the light surrounding us.

So wether you're struggling with addictions, whether you're waiting for your forever home, whether you're hoping your parents might one day understand you, whether you're figuring out a new normal from a sports injury, whether you're adjusting to life after divorce, whether you're grieving the loss of a child or spouse, the commonality is the pain unseen. Pain unseen is pain unwitnessed and it is the loneliest place in the world. The good news is there are places and people that will allow space for those things to be seen. If you're having trouble finding one, reach out. We are here to support.

Because pain seen, pain witnessed and pain understood (by self and others) is the pathway to healing. It allows for movement. It allows us to not hold so tightly. It allows us to breathe.