It’s Not You; It’s Your Trauma
EP 0074 – Original Pain Work Revisited (Subscription)
It’s Not You – It’s Your Buried Six-Year-Old Terror
You keep running from feelings that arrived decades before you had words to name them. Thinking, distracting, and achieving will never outrun original pain. The only way out is through—and most people would rather stay comfortably numb than face how brutal that journey really is.
The Core of Original Pain Work
Original pain work means returning to the exact moments when terror, rage, neglect, or violation first landed in your nervous system—long before logic or language could process them. You were too small to fight, flee, or even understand, so you dissociated, numbed, and buried the experience deep inside. Decades later the body still holds every second of that helplessness. Until you deliberately go back, feel it again as the terrified child you were, and let the emotions move through instead of around, those original wounds keep leaking fear, shame, and reactivity into every adult moment.
Why Avoidance Feels Safer
You avoid because the nervous system remembers raw survival terror and equates feeling those sensations with annihilation. Going back feels like willingly stepping into the same room where the blows landed, the words cut, the abandonment sank in. The mind screams that if you open that door even a crack the pain will swallow you whole and never let go. So you intellectualize, you stay busy, you chase external fixes—anything to keep the original memory locked away where it can’t be touched.
The Brutal Toll of Staying Numb
Every time you sidestep the feeling you hand the steering wheel to the past. Addictions, codependency, rage outbursts, chronic anxiety, people-pleasing, perfectionism—all of it is the pain expressing sideways because you refuse to let it speak directly. You live on autopilot, ten steps ahead of the grief, until the body slows down and the metabolism can no longer outrun it. Then the panic arrives uninvited, relationships implode, and the life you built starts to feel like a cage you constructed to avoid the real prison inside.
The Freedom on the Other Side
When you finally surrender and ride the rapids of that original terror—crying, screaming, begging it to stop—you prove to every cell that you are no longer the helpless child. The fear loses its power because you have lived through the worst of it as an adult with resources. Space opens inside. Self-hate quiets. Choices become conscious instead of trauma-driven. Joy doesn’t have to fight for room; it rushes in to fill the emptied places. You walk lighter, breathe easier, and stop proving your worth to ghosts.
Three Important Takeaways
- Original pain lives in the body long before the mind can explain it; thinking your way out never works—you have to feel your way through.
- Avoidance creates sideways suffering—addictions, anxiety, and external fixes—that only grows louder the longer you refuse to face the source.
- Reliving the terror as an adult dissolves its control; the nervous system finally registers safety, joy moves in, and you stop living at the mercy of childhood fear.
Conclusion
Stop consuming content that lets you feel productive without ever getting messy. The podcast, the books, the endless scrolling—they are bandaids on a wound that requires surgery. Book the session, find the safe person, sit on your own couch and let the six-year-old terror finally have its say. It will hurt like hell. It will feel endless while you’re in it. But the peace, the lightness, the actual freedom that waits on the other side is worth every shaking, sobbing second. No one is coming to save you. Time to save yourself.
