Don’t waste your pain

BY DANIEL COLE

No one is insulated from the challenges and perils of life. Problems and pains are inevitable; if you are not coming out of one, you are probably heading to one. We’ve all had our fair share of life unfairness, be it, the premature death of a loved one, sickness, foreclosure, declaring bankruptcy, divorce, infidelity, or marital challenges, job loss, accident, to name a few. The question is not, ‘If we will face problems, the question is when we face problems.’ Problems and pains are part of life we can’t live life so cautiously to avoid them.

Many people go through life feeling resentful, bitter, unforgiving, and despondent because they’ve been ‘wounded’, they’ve been taken advantage of, they’ve been maligned and mistreated. Remember, Adolf Hitler was once a child and so also was the great Martin Luther King Jr. Our past experiences play a significant role in how we turn out in life.

The beauty of your past painful experiences is that others can find healing through your scars, but only if you are willing to share it. To not waste your pain, share the lessons it taught you, not from a place of resentment and bitterness, but a place of forgiveness and inner peace.

Your pain is a chapter in the book you’ve not yet written. It’s a part of your story you shouldn’t leave untold. The great Maya Angelou once said, there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. The people around you don’t have to go through what you’ve gone through. You may have learnt it the hard way, but others around you don’t have to. Be vulnerable with your story.

If we don’t take time to heal from past pain and hurt, we unconsciously build a wall around our lives, and by so doing, we live life so cautiously and overly sensitive, we do this to avoid those experiences again. But the sad reality is, sometimes in life, we don’t choose our problems, our problems choose us. The most important thing, therefore, is to learn as we go through each phase of our life.

He was born on March 26th, 1905. In 1942, Frankl and his parents, wife, and brother were arrested and sent to the Thereisienstadt concentration camp; Frankl’s father died there within six months. Over the course of three years, Frankl was moved between four concentration camps, including Auschwitz where his brother died, and his mother was killed. Frankl’s wife died at Bergen-Belsen. When Frankl’s camp was liberated in 1945, he learned of the death of all his immediate family members, with the exception of his sister who had emigrated to Australia.

How did Viktor Frankl not waste his pain? Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a groundbreaking book that detailed his perspective of living through the ordeal that was the concentration camp. He was a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna from 1948-1990, and he directed the neurology department at the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital between 1946 and 1970. Throughout his career, Frankl published numerous books, received dozens of honorary degrees, lectured around the world, and served as a guest professor at universities including Harvard, Southern Methodist, and Duquesne.

Every pain has a purpose; your perspective is everything. You can bounce back. You can rise and dream again. Your dream is still valid and possible, and it’s not over yet. No one lives a life of significance and meaning without a measure of pain and discomfort. Embrace it! Grow through what you may be going through after the rain comes the rainbow. Remind yourself that this too shall pass.

Confront the reality that life is unfair, and that bad thing happen to good people. This will create a mental readiness when a challenge arose. Share your story, write that book, publish that blog and write that article. Don’t leave your story untold and don’t waste your pain.