The process of healing pain can, should, must feel good.
This is true of all levels of pain.
And it's absolutely true of our worst human pain as well.
Actually, the worst the pain, the more the axiom applies that its healing, its resolution, its integration, must feel good.
If you leave a session of trauma work, or some other form of deep healing work, feeling like you've opened a can of emotional killer stray cats, and now you have to herd and rein in and deal with these fuckers all week until this same time next week;
If you leave feeling like you should feel better because now, you understand more about your pain, but you see, reluctantly, that you don't actually feel better;
If you leave feeling gutted or heavy or some other flavor of awful, or if you leave feeling some hesitance or tentative confusion, or if you leave with a whiff of "something just isn't right":
It's not you. You're not doing something wrong.
Probably, it's also not your healer/therapist/teacher/coach or whatever modality being used in and of itself, either.
***
From my observations, you may feel shitty about your technically amazing and cutting-edge pain/trauma work because the underlying presumption is that the trauma is a pathology that must be treated pathologically.
It must be treated as: separate. Bad. Ultimately: the trauma is treated as something to be rid of.
There is a better way.
Or: your body knows there is a better way.
Which is why you--or rather, your body--feels some degree of "not good" with some more conventional healing means.
***
Here is a different underlying presumption you can "try on," as Byron Katie says.
The pain that remains in our bodies--the trauma left from experiences we could not fully integrate--carries vital parts of ourselves.
The pain carries--is made of--all the parts of ourselves we had to repress, parts we thought we had killed off, because we had to make the awful choice between remaining whole...or surviving split off from the parts that had to go for very very very good reasons.
We made the right choice: we survived. We made it here.
And here is the great news!
Now, you can reunite with these parts!
This is such good news! Literally, it's the best news ever.
Why? Because separation is the basis of all our suffering. Integration is the basis of our joy. Integration is the physical representation of Oneness.
By its very definition, oneness--the felt experience of it, that is--heals everything.
***
This good news is why trauma healing should be a rather cheerful affair: it's a reunion with evermore parts of you.
Of course, the event(s) that induced the trauma are treated with the utmost care. Zero bypassing.
When we let the body lead, though: everything is felt, seen, at the body's pacing--and her pacing is genius. And it is genius because the body ultimately is made of, ultimately belongs to, the realm that made the mountains and sunrises and smoothies and air. The body belongs to Nature.
No trauma is bigger than Nature.
***
Also: the bigger the trauma: the bigger the reunion that is possible.
And the reunion, it wants to happen.
It just needs to be greeted with cheer, with kindness, with sweetness and softness and maybe a blanket. Think of a shy child.
Of course, reunion--healing, integration--requires capacity. Spiritual muscle.
You can't lift a 100-pound weight not because you don't have enough will power. You can't lift it because you don't yet have the capacity.
And so, just like physical weight lifting: we start small.
Unlike physical muscles, though: one's spiritual musculature--one's capacity for seeing-- grows exponentially each time it is exercised.
Again, this is because the body is made of, and belongs to, Nature.
***
And so is the trauma.
The trauma is a part of Nature.
It is a part we had to disown, or that we thought had been killed. Thus, it has gone unconscious. Or: it is unseen.
It's still a part of Nature, though, and so it still has power, and so it still acts. But it acts in a way that is unconscious to us.
And once we see the pain, the trauma, consciously: as we greet it with evermore cheer, and kindness, and sweetness and softness and maybe another blanket:
Then it gets to take on its conscious form--the one from which we became disconnected however long ago.
And in the light of our seeing, our trauma tranmutes, reveals itself, as all the power and love we've need to be and feel truly complete.
Little by little, yes. Session by session. But this is what is possible. This is what is hoped for.
And all of the process feels good, all along the way.
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