By Yael Reiss
All human beings and all their problems somehow can sum down into one simple thing:
We all try to avoid pain.
The problem with avoiding pain is that life has pain in it. Life has pain and life has joy in it. By trying to avoid the pain in life we try to avoid a part of life, thus we always minimize our lives, in the fruitless attempts to avoid something that cannot be avoided.
Think about any problem that you are stuck with. What is the pain that you are trying to avoid?
When you are courageous enough to stop avoiding this pain and letting yourself go through it, that’s when the problem will no longer be a problem.
When people allow themselves to go through the pain, they come out of it on the other side. Often people come out on the other side of pain stronger and perhaps even more joyful than before.
An extremely important example is avoiding the pain in grief of separation. I see people who are in relationships that are damaging themselves, their partner and the children – and they feel unable to leave the relationship.
The same with not letting go of a workplace that is no longer healthy for the person, a friendship that is consuming energy in unhealthy ways, etc.
It is not an inability to leave the relationship. It is unwillingness to experience the pain of grief in separation.
Only people who go through the grief, with all the pain in it, can come out on the other side of grief with energy to live life fully again.
In my view, Mother Nature has given us grief, like any emotion, so when it goes through us, it has a certain energy that does what is needed to be done.
As we go through the pain of no-longer-having-what-or-who-we-had, when we come out on the other side of grief, we feel a renewed energy to participate in life in a new way.
This is only one example of the importance of being brave enough to stop trying to avoid pain. Because each time we try to avoid pain, in an ironic way, it tends to prolong the pain and put us into some kind of suffering anyway.
In each family there is always an emotional pain that was attempted to be avoided throughout the generations. This is often when people find themselves overwhelmed with trying to figure out what is wrong.
Family Constellations workshops are a very special and effective way to let yourself look into and safely experience the pain that was avoided through generations in your family.
Doing so, you will be the first brave person in your family in generations to have gone through that familiar pain, and out to the other side of it. Enabling yourself, as well as the generations to come, to live life fully in a new way.
FamilyConstellations
