One of the most helpful concepts I have come across, for myself and my clients, is the idea of clean pain and dirty pain.
Clean pain is an important part of emotional healing. It allows us to process and move through challenging experiences. It can feel like disappointment, grief, or sadness. It feels like emotions that we WANT to have if something really hard happens — like the emotional pain that we’d feel if we lost someone we love, or the life we used to know. We want to grieve that, to feel the loss. It feels important, it feels honoring. It moves us through and permits eventual progress.
Dirty pain, on the other hand, is the kind of pain that keeps us stuck. It prevents progress and keeps us spinning in negativity. Dirty pain is the kind of pain that embitters us — the pain that keeps us focusing on thoughts like “why me?” or “i hate my life now” or “it’s not fair” — thoughts that don’t lead to positive progress or productive problem-solving.
Clean pain makes us better. Dirty pain makes us bitter. They’re both totally normal and natural and understandable. But being aware of which emotional pain we are experiencing can be very helpful in understanding what’s happening for us, and gives us the chance to intentionally decide to do with it. Generally we want to process clean pain, and question/redirect dirty pain.
Coaching helps with both.
Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts on these concepts.
Thanks for reading,
Bethany