Do you know someone who always gets offended, whose life seems to be always full of drama
and victimhood, maybe small issues get blown out of proportion or their life is just always in chaos?
How about you personally? Are you ever that person, are you creating your own suffering? Sometimes I
like to oversimplify, I do this because when we try to put our problems into categories
it helps us to clarify what we should do to solve them. So in this video you're going to learn about
two categories of pain- Clean pain and Dirty pain and this is really important because when you can
tell the difference, then you'll know what to do about it because the vast majority of pain is
the type that we cause ourselves. That means that you can resolve the vast majority of the painful
a friend who said I need to talk to you about something but she wouldn't tell Rose what it was
about. So they made a plan to meet over coffee, but because of their schedules they had to wait two
weeks. So for two whole weeks Rose worried about it. She wondered what her friend needed to talk
to her about, she wracked her brain, she wondered if she had offended her friend or if her daughter
had done something to her friend's daughter, and Rose said- 'As time passed, all I thought about was
what I might have done wrong. I played back every encounter we'd had over the past month
to the point where I became so distraught with the idea of what I might have done that I was driving
myself a little crazy. Rehearsing explanations for my phantom behavior was causing me
such great distress that I finally called a mutual friend to see if I could find out what I had done.
My friend assured me it had nothing to do with me, but I didn't believe her. When the coffee date
finally arrived my friend seemed nervous, she had a hard time getting the words out
and apologized saying this was very hard for her, she eventually blurted out I'm getting a divorce.'
This was the moment that Rose's whole perspective shifted, she'd been assuming that this conversation
was about her, but in that moment all of her self-created fear, her worries, her sense of guilt,
all of that fell away and she shifted to pure compassion, she felt sadness with her friend.
Now, Rose didn't know it, but she was experiencing two types of pain here- the pain of her friend's
divorce, and before that, her own self-inflicted pain, which was brought on by her anxious thinking.
So let's take a look at these two different categories of pain that Rose was experiencing
and talk about their differences. I know pain is complex, but for our purposes I'm going to place
pain into two categories and for lack of a better word i'm going to call them clean pain and dirty
pain. So clean pain is the beautiful and innate emotions that come from our experiences from
being alive and these emotions can include: joy, and gratitude, wonder, hurt, grief, regret, sadness, etc. So
think about this, like why do we listen to sad songs or watch movies that make us cry or
even scary movies that make us jump? We like to feel alive and and to live with feeling.
In Rose's story when she felt sympathy with her friend she hurt with her, but this is a
clean pure sadness that comes from compassion and it's part of being connected to people.
On the other hand dirty pain is the suffering that we create in our lives
by our thoughts, our choices, and our actions. Often this pain is created by how we think and how we
act. We feel bitter about missed opportunities or we feel angry about perceived slights. In Rose's
story she created huge amounts of stress and pain when she spent two weeks assuming that this chat
over coffee was about something she did wrong. Like Rose, we tend to spend so much of our time
making ourselves suffer and in this video as well as throughout the rest of this course
you're going to learn about a bunch of ways that you may be creating your own suffering of things
that you're doing that are keeping you sick or hurting or angry and this includes things like-
How we think about the world, blaming others, taking offense, holding grudges, taking things personally,
right? Distorted thinking patterns, things like- 'oh everything is awful' or 'everyone's out to get me' or
taking things personally. Shaming ourselves for having emotions and trying to suppress our
feelings, having a victim mindset, self-deception, avoiding our problems, comparison and competition
with others, making bad choices, being reactive, or making choices that go against our values and
there's chronic stress, which is believing you're in danger when you're actually safe and there's
so many more, but there's a bunch of things that we do to create our own suffering. So does this idea
that you're potentially causing a lot of your own pain whether knowingly or unknowingly does
that make you feel empowered or discouraged? Now this is really important to check your response.
For many people with depression or anxiety they create their own helplessness in one of two ways
they say 'oh this isn't fair, it's my genes, why is everything out to get, me it's not my fault'
or on the other hand they say 'oh everything is my fault, I'm a terrible person', or maybe
you do both of these things. Check yourself, when you learn what you're doing that makes it worse
you can then learn how to stop it. To be clear I am not saying that it's your fault that
you experience depression or anxiety, but I am saying there's something you can do about it
and we all have a natural impulse to blind ourselves to our self-created suffering, we try
to escape our responsibility for it and sometimes that looks like wallowing and self- vindication.
We want to believe that it's not our fault, that there's nothing we can do about it other than just
you know feel bitter. These are two mental blocks that stop people from healing- it's blaming others
or outside circumstances, or blaming ourselves. We can't create change in our lives when we blame
outside forces for everything. This is like saying- 'It's not my fault I'm depressed it's my parents
fault' or 'I can't help it' or 'the world is such a terrible place and everyone is so horrible
they make me depressed', and we also can't create change when we blame ourselves for everything.
So saying things like- 'Everything is my fault, I'm a terrible person' you know, thinking this way is
just beating yourself up. When you label yourself as broken you block yourself from taking the small
actions that actually lead toward healing your pain. Neither of these attitudes which are you
know believing that we're completely helpless or believing that it's all our fault, neither
of these really help us take action. The reality is that we do contribute to our own suffering.
Our actions, our thoughts, and our responses can greatly enlarge our pain. Blaming ourselves or
others doesn't help us take any action to improve our situation. If we want to be able to take action
to change our lives and suffer less, then we need to be able to know when our suffering is
in some part caused by us and when our pain is simply a natural and beautiful part of being alive.
If we can distinguish between the two then our choice of action becomes clear.
So option A is dirty pain right, 'I'm doing something to make my pain worse so I'll work
to change it'. Option B is clean pain, 'this pain is a natural result of caring so I'll continue to care'.
Now of course this is an oversimplification there's times when we don't know if it's our fault
or not. There are circumstances where it's ninety percent one way and ten percent the other way,
or there's times where we feel like it's our fault and it really isn't you know and
then there's other times where we're deceiving ourselves and I think it's not my fault or my
responsibility and it really is. So there probably should be an option C which is something like- 'I'm
not sure if there's something I'm doing to make this worse, so I'll keep doing my best to explore
and to stay open to change while moving forward in my chosen path.' I think the serenity prayer
really illustrates this concept well- Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. One of the best ways
to let go of self-caused suffering is to let go of victimhood and blame and to take responsibility.
'I am 100% responsible for what I am responsible for.' This is almost a radical responsibility,
we create suffering when we either resist the truth of our own responsibility- 'it's
not my fault' or we create suffering when we take responsibility for things outside of our control,
like other people's choices or trying to make everyone around us happy or things like that right?
True accountability is letting go of trying to change the things that you are not responsible for.
Stop putting all your energy into trying to change other people and put that energy into
improving yourself. So here's an example of how you could apply the idea of clean pain/dirty pain.
Mike's boss gave him a huge assignment at work, he tried to work hard on it and some days he worked
really hard and other days he got overwhelmed, some days he didn't focus very well, some days he got
distracted by social media, sometimes he couldn't move forward because of the other members of the
team hadn't finished the parts of their job yet or he was waiting on a step in the supply chain.
Now finally the deadline came around and the assignment wasn't complete. Mike walked into
his boss's office with a sinking feeling. His boss throws a fit, he gets all red in the face, he yells
at Mike, he tells him he's a horrible worker and he ought to fire him and Mike is super furious right,
he's ashamed, he's indignant, but on the surface he just submits, he nods his head, he promises to get
it done as soon as possible, and when the tirade is over he walks back to his office, he shuts the door,
and he wants to cry. He thinks- 'this is so unfair, this is his fault, the assignment was too big,
he didn't give me enough time'. Well now he feels angry and like he's being mistreated. Then he
starts listing in his head all the reasons why his boss is a terrible boss and he starts remembering
every little thing he ever did that bugged Mike. So now Mike is fuming right and then Mike starts
to get mad at his co-workers- 'they're idiots' he thinks, 'it's their fault not mine, if they
had done their part I wouldn't be here.' So now Mike is feeling trapped and angry and helpless.
Mike tries to get a little more work done that afternoon but eventually the day ends
and he leaves work feeling kind of shaky and tired. When he gets home Mike slumps on the couch and he
starts to think about all of his failures- 'What's the matter with me? Why can't I get anything right?'
He starts to compare himself with his brother and his coworkers, who all seem to get the work done
faster. 'I'm such a loser' he thinks, 'I hate my job, but I'm just no good, I can't find a better one,
it's all my fault.' Well now he's feeling discouraged, depressed, and hopeless. He's
upset because now he thinks the problem is this incurable personality trait.
In this situation Mike is creating some of his own pain, he's making himself angry by
remembering all of his boss's faults. He's making himself feel helpless by blaming his co-workers.
He probably makes himself feel guilty because he doesn't work as hard as he should and then
by using black and white thinking saying- 'I never get anything right', he makes himself feel hopeless.
By comparing himself to others and putting himself down he creates a sense of discouragement and
depression. All of this would be considered a dirty pain, pain that Mike is creating by the way he is
thinking or acting and the great thing about this is that when you learn to think or act differently
you can make the vast majority of your pain go away. Let me give you an example of how this works.
We often get all confused about our responsibility when we say things like- 'Well I did this because
he did that', in order to give ourselves power to act and power to resolve our dirty emotions
we need to focus our efforts on exactly what we are in control of and let go of the rest. When
we take full responsibility for 100% of the things that we are responsible for it empowers us to free
ourselves from the pain that we're creating in our lives. It can be hard to know how to do this
especially with really big, complicated problems so doing the locus of control activity on paper
can be really really helpful with this and you can find that in the next video in the full course.
But for Mike this might look like writing it down on paper right? In this column says I'm responsible
for- The skills I learn, how hard I work, whether I communicate assertively with my boss about the
scope and timeline of this project, I'm responsible for how I choose to think about problems,
where I choose to work, I can choose to have a growth mindset and learn from this experience.
I'm not responsible for- My boss's emotions, his assumptions, his reactivity, I'm not responsible
for my co-workers and how fast they work, I can't control problems in the supply chain, but I
am responsible to plan ahead and try to predict problems in the supply chain.
When Mike takes the time to clarify responsibility he can focus on his area of control, he can choose
to think differently about this problem instead of exaggerating his own or others weaknesses, he
can just focus his energy on accepting what he can't change and changing what he can
when Mike takes the time to write all of this down he realizes that he needs to have a conversation
with his boss. He remembers the times his boss has helped him out, not just the times he's yelled,
and Mike knows he needs to be assertive with his boss and tell him how much time he really
needs for the project. He needs to talk to his boss about the obstacles that he's facing and
he needs to give a realistic timeline for when the work can be done. So he realizes that by thinking
of himself as a complete failure that that is black and white thinking, a cognitive distortion,
and he replaces that with a little more balanced approach saying something like-
'I've had some successes and some failures, but I can keep learning and growing. When Mike creates
clarity about what pain he's causing himself and what he needs to let go of, Mike starts to feel
a sense of hope and empowerment and he knows what action to take. So this is the skill I call clean
pain/dirty pain. The truth is that we create much of our own suffering and this is awesome because
if we can identify something we're doing to create our own suffering, then we can fix it.
We can take action to resolve the problem and come to peace. When we can identify areas to
change, we can turn our pain into peace, we can heal our hearts from anger, fear, and depression.