By Charissa Kim Allen

“Pain that is not transformed is transferred.”

This is one of my favorite quotes. I love that it acknowledges the inevitability of pain in our lives. I love that it challenges us to acknowledge the consequences of emotional pain left unchecked. And I love that it gives hope that we can do something transformative with pain instead.

Growing up, I did not know how to look my emotional pain in the eye — in other words, I couldn’t tolerate painful emotional states. I took it as a compliment when others would label me as “chill,” “nice,” and “easygoing.” As the senior pastor’s daughter of a megachurch, I internalized many eyes on me, high expectations to be perfect, and many internal alarm systems to prevent rocking the boat. I learned at an early age that, in order to maintain this perfect status quo of pleasing my environment, I must not be emotionally reactive, at least to the public. “Negative” emotions such as anger, disappointment, and hurt were therefore not allowed to exist. 

The tricky thing was, they did exist. If I were honest, I was very angry, very disappointed, and very hurt. And another tricky thing was, I did not have the resources or motivation to simply exit or deny my roles in my social environment. So my brain did what its survival instinct knew to do to reconcile my internal and external realities: it tried to cut off the painful emotions. I look back at my adolescent years and can now recognize that I lived life in a very dissociated and psychologically split state. I was either cut off from my true needs, gut, and desires in public, or lost in the chaos of my unprocessed emotions in my home.

I can look back with compassion at my younger self now and acknowledge that she did not have the resources or guidance to tolerate and transform her pain. As a result, those emotions would ricochet between the state of suppression and explosion.

Depending on the messages we received in our formative years, we all have different tolerance levels to varying emotional states. For some, stereotypically negative emotions such as shame, guilt, anger, grief, or helplessness are intolerable. For some, stereotypically positive states such as relief, comfort, or desire are intolerable. How we cope with emotional intolerance can look vastly different: suppression, denial, explosiveness, blame, escape, distraction, performance — our internal systems do whatever it takes to not stay in the experience. It makes me think of intolerance on a systemic level. When a societal system, built on something shaky, cannot tolerate the reality of one member’s protest or pain, it does what it can to deny, suppress, or erase the experience. I also think of our intolerance to overwhelming pain and terror around the world, in realities such as genocide, bombings, cruelty, destruction, and large-scale violence. We are wired to flinch at overwhelming pain. Especially when this pain involves faceless people far away, our wiring to self-protect comes in strong. We numb, intellectualize, over-spiritualize, polarize, and detach.

I am not promoting an unsafe pace towards exposure to pain that leaves us overwhelmed and vulnerable. However, building our tolerance to our emotional realities, including the painful ones, is a necessary, transitory process for our integration. Integrated anger can transform into agency and advocacy. Integrated regret can transform into ownership. Integrated loss can transform into courage. In the same vein, building our tolerance to the pain of others is a necessary process towards deeper empathy, compassion, justice-building, and collective healing. Integrated pain transforms to growth.

So how do we begin to tolerate and integrate the pain? To put simply the starting point, we risk bearing witness. We choose the courageous path of the unflinching gaze towards pain, one step at a time. We lean into safe resourcing, like therapy, community care, spiritual truths, or sensory grounding, to risk seeing the messy reality. Because once we can bear witness to a painful reality, we can integrate it and react congruently, which helps to process through stuck emotional states. 

For example, if we bear observing the reality of abuse in our childhood, we can process through the congruent anger, shame, and grief that we didn’t know how to integrate back then and were stuck within us for decades. We breathe, connect, ground, pray, and look again. And over time, our per-view becomes enlarged to observe and grieve pain outside ourselves. Instead of denying another’s pain due to our discomfort, we offer an unflinching gaze that says “I can, and must, tolerate your lived reality.” As we build tolerance to bear witness, we realize how disconnection from pain gave us the false comfort of peace, but there was no peace. And we re-align ourselves to the messy process towards lasting peace.

I invite you to practice this now, for just a brief moment:

What emotional state often feels messy, unsafe, or intolerable inside of you? In this moment, bear witness to it. Observe it without judgment or agenda. Acknowledge what triggered that state and what it feels like physiologically. Breathe into and through that feeling. Say to yourself one or all of the following:

“This feeling is valid, and it is temporary.” 
“This feeling is something, but not everything.”
“This feeling is big, and it does not drive me.”
“This feeling feels uncomfortable, but I am learning to tolerate it.”

Charissa Kim Allen is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist working out of Orange County, where she lives with her husband and baby girl. As a former campus minister, minister’s wife, and lifelong pastor’s daughter, she is passionate about the mental, emotional, and relational health of Christian leaders as well as Asian American family systems.