Stress and emotional pain – Causes and Solutions

Understanding stress and emotional pain (Tao Therapy)

In order to understand why we experience stress and emotional pain, it will help first of all to understand the following three principles:

First Principle
If we believe something we will act as if it is true.

Second Principle
Emotions are not our response to reality they are a response to our interpretation or beliefs about reality.

Third Principle
We are only content when we accept our present experience. (Even if that present experience includes thoughts about the past or an imagined future).

There are two ways to apply this third principle.

We can:

a. Stop wanting our present experience to be different to what it is and be content instantly (unconditional acceptance gives unconditional contentment). Then base decisions on the information (we’ve just accepted) within the current experience.

b. Try and make everything in the world do what we want. Once everything in the world is exactly as we want it to be, we will then be able to stop wanting things to be different (conditional acceptance) and be content.

Most of us are only aware of the existence of option 2, therefore we believe we can only be content if people and events do what we want. All negative emotions have their roots in this belief.

In daily life, this tends to be played out as follows:

When we, people or events behave as we want, we are content or happy. When we, people or events don’t behave as we want, we are unhappy or discontent. This is experienced as emotional discomfort or pain. Therefore we try to control ourselves, people and events to either ‘gain’ happiness or ‘avoid’ pain.

This leads to:

All or nothing thinking, or perfectionism, where we insist that things should be a certain way or they are not acceptable (this is conditional acceptance). This arises because we seem to be punished with emotional pain (discontent) unless we, people and events are exactly as we want them to be.

This fosters the belief that only by controlling people and events, can we feel at peace. Perhaps ‘we’ even get angry with other people, because they have not behaved how they ‘should’ and ‘caused us pain’.

The happy part of this is we have it the wrong way round. Our natural state of mind is actually happiness and contentment. (As in option 3a above).

It is only our efforts to try and control everyone and every thing that causes us pain and perpetuates the illusion that our happiness is dependent on the behaviour of people or events. In fact if you were to let go (of trying to control everything) and accept yourself and life unconditionally you would fall into your natural state.

If for example a person stopped trying to control a person that was ‘making them’ angry, the anger would disappear. Better than that, they are now at peace in themselves which is the contentment they were striving for in the first place.

Realising this, you understand there is nothing to do (or force) to be happy. There is no event or person you have to control, impress (or prove yourself to) in order to be content or avoid pain. What a relief. You can be your natural contented self.

The painful penalty for not realising this can sometimes lead to people getting depressed, despondent or turning to alcohol, drugs, gambling, TV, computer games food, sex, thrill seeking and other distractions in an effort to fulfil a nagging desire for contentment or seek relief from the effort of trying to single-handedly control the entire world all the time.

Put another way when we experience emotional pain it is a signal to us that we have placed the world on our back again. However emotional pain is just a helpful reminder for us to return to sanity. In the same way that physical pain is a helpful reminder to remove our hand from a flame.