Hello, my loves, and welcome back. I hope everyone is doing so well. We’re actually having a bit of a COVID scare in my house this week. We found out on Tuesday morning that our youngest, our 3-year-old, was exposed to COVID at his daycare, probably late last week. He has been doing fine with the exception of a very runny nose but we’re all getting tested this week and everyone is hunkered down- just to be sure. 

So two adults that work FT, a 6 year old that chats non-stop, and a very feral 3 year old all locked in a house during the holidays- yup! This can only go well.

But we’re all safe and healthy so that’s what I am choosing to focus on but will probably still visualize throat punching all of them at some point during our quarantine- totally normal.

For today, I’m going to teach you something that comes up so very often during infertility, but it can also be used in so many areas of our lives.  People experience such much dirty pain, without knowing that is what it is, and it is so unnecessary. So, I’m going to explain what these two things are, a helpful tool to help you navigate pain, and one of my favorite parables about this topic. 

So the title is clean pain vs dirty pain but you can also think of it as pain versus suffering- either way it’s the same concept. I prefer clean and dirty pain because I am a very visual person and I picture a windshield- one clean and one dirty. And as I go through the concept, you’ll see why that visualization is important. 

Before I get into the two types, I want to remind everyone that not all pain is suffering but all suffering is painful. 

Pain is a normal part of our human experience. Most people have heard the quote “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” Most people attribute that quote to HH Dalai Lama but it has also been attributed to Haruki Marakami, and M. Kathleen Casey. 

That’s the difference that we’re talking about. The one that is expected, just by living in the world, and the other one that is created in our minds. 

Clean pain

Clean pain is the first, instinctive reaction that we have to hurt.  The immediate response. I always find that , in general, with clean pain the intensity of it lessens over time. It’s most intense at the beginning. And then it passes through us- if we let it. 

I always think of clean pain as something that comes in waves. Think about when you’ve had a really big cry. You start out crying, maybe it’s heaving heavy sobs, and then it clams down a bit- you might even stop crying- and then the next wave comes- it’s waves with breathers in between.  Over time the waves often go down, and between the waves you begin to move forward., When you allow space for those emotions, then in between those waves you’re kind of able to function. And as time goes on, you’re able to function more. 

That’s clean pain.

To me it feels very sharp, but clear. Almost pure. 

Clean pain is the kind of pain you WANT to feel. I know, I know- you’re like “bull shit, em I don’t want to feel any of this” but think about it- there are some negative feelings you want to feel, right? I don’t want to feel good about my failed transfer. I want to be sad about that. If my friend has a miscarriage, I want to feel bad about that too. We don’t want to be happy if a loved one passes. WE want to grieve. Love and loss are in proportion to each other. We experience loss because we have experienced love. 

There is a beauty and simplicity in clean pain. 

Dirty pain

Dirty pain is the opposite. Dirty pain is our thoughts about our pain. It’s your thoughts about yourself in relation to your infertility.  In relation to your losses. Dirty pain is when we interpret something in a way that makes it harder on ourselves. It’s whenever we decide that we’re never going to get through what we’re going through, when we decide that something is our fault because we’re going through it, whenever we judge something or someone (like ourselves). Thought’s like “why me?” or this is awful, it’s not fair, this shouldn’t be happening or that something shouldn’t have happened the way that it did. 

Now, I’m not saying these aren’t perfectly normal thoughts to have or that there’s something wrong with you for having them. Not at all. I think every person has some variation on this thinking. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not dirty pain. It doesn’t mean that this thinking is useful or that it serves you. It’s the anger, shame, and despair that is created by our thinking. It’s layering a negative meaning on a painful situation. 

If clean pain is sharp, clear, and pure- dirty pain feels very stuck and murky. Like a drain clogged with gross shit. It’s almost unbearable. There’s no breathers with dirty pain. In fact, you usually get more aggravated and anxious trying to escape the dirty pain, which then compounds the experience. Our pain get’s dirtied when we resist it.  It feels like suffering. Not just pain. It’s excruciating. It’s like you’re wearing a heavy, weighted blanket but it’s not of your choosing. 

Dirty pain comes from a lot of different places. The two biggest ones are how we talk to ourselves- which is usually like an asshole and also through toxic positivity. There’s an upcoming episode about toxic positivity and I’ll dig deeper into that but essentially, toxic positivity is forced positivity. It’s the overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state that results in the denial, minimization and invalidation of the authentic human experience. It’s not useful at all. And most of the time, when we try to force our positivity and we CAN’T because infertility is really fucking hard- we end up feeling worse. Dirty pain, compounds dirty pain. 

The windshield

I told you about the windshield in the episode entry. Think about that within the contect of clean and dirty pain. With clean pain, we can still see through the windshield. We’re still hurting and in pain but we can still see to drive. 

With dirty pain, we can’t see shit. We can’t drive. We can’t go anywhere. We stay stuck because the deeper into dirty pain we get, the harder it is to break out of that cycle. 

Where do we go from here? The Tool.

Knowing that we are in the midst of dirty pain is one of the absolute best first steps to ending your suffering. Until we are aware of something, we don’t have any authority over it. We can’t change it. Without awareness we believe that things are just happening to us. We believe the stories our brain offers us about our pain. 

Awareness is so crucial during this time and for the tool that I am going to teach you, to work. It doesn’t work, unless you can recognize and acknowledge that you’re in all kinds of dirty pain. 

So, the tool is called ABC. Pretty effing easy to remember right? That’s what I like about it. 

The A is for acknowledge and allow for your pain. 

B is for Bring your pain with you- your clean pain

C is to cast out your dirty pain. 

So we start with the A because in order for you to feel better, to experience your pain differently, you have to be willing to acknowledge your pain and allow for it to be there. 

I talk a lot about this concept on the podcast and it’s a huge focus with my coaching clients only because, as humans, we’re not that great at it. Our brains interpret uncomfortable emotions as us dying. Seriously. I don’t know about you but when I am faced with a suuuper uncomfortable emotion, it kind of feels like I am going to die. 

This has been a part of our evolution. Anxiety and judgement were used to keep us alive when we lived in caves. It kept us hyper-vigilant for things that could hurt or kill us. It served a huge purpose in our day-to-day survival. Our brains are also wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But when we avoid pain, anxiety, or judgement- we cannot manage them. We have no authority over them. That’s why we have to first acknowledge and allow for them. Yes, it will feel terrible. But if you listened to the Feeling better NOW podcast, you will know that the terrible feeling you have when confronting, allowing, and processing your emotions PALES in comparison to the terrible feeling you have when you are experiencing dirty pain. 

Ok, so your acknowledging and allowing your pain to be there. Next is that you’re going to bring your pain with you. It’s kind of a misconception that you can compartmentalize emotions. When people say that they’re really good, what they’re really saying is “I’m really good at resisting my emotions.” They resist their emotions because they don’t want to experience it- it’s uncomfortable and/or inconvenient. We want these uncomfortable emotions because that is part of the human experience. This is the clean pain that we want to bring with us. Not forever, but we want to pick it up and take it along for the ride. 

And finally, the C- cast out the dirty pain. We don’t need that shit. Now, casting it out isn’t a habitual process for most of us. I still experience dirty pain, even though I talk about it all the time with my clients, because I am human. The first step to casting out our dirty pain is to become aware of it. And most often is it after you are already experiencing some dirty pain. And that’s ok. It’s not a problem. But notice if you’re wearing that heavy, weighted blanket that is super uncomfortable. The next step is to drop the judgement. And I’m talking about the self-judgement. Start with loving yourself no matter what. 

No matter the thoughts you’re having or the actions you are taking. Love the shit out of yourself. It will take practice. Loving ourselves is not something that comes naturally to women and is certainly not something that we practice. BUT, IF we can get better at it, we will experience so much less dirty pain. So much less suffering. 

So the parable I mentioned at the beginning is the Parable of the second arrow. 

The parable

In Buddhist teaching, the parable of the second arrow goes as follows:

The Buddha once asked a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow, is that painful?” The student replied, “it is.” The Buddha then asked, “If the person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student replied again, “it is.” The Buddha then explained, “in life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However. The second arrow is or reaction to the first. And with this second arrow comes the possibility of choice.”

Said in a different way: we can think about how we feel in a way that makes us feel better or worse. 

The first arrow for us, is our infertility. Is the reason that we have to do IVF in the first place. 

The second arrow, that is everything else that we put ourselves through. 

The self-loathing.

The resistance of our feelings. 

The shaming ourselves. 

An example of dirty pain that I carried with me for years is that I wasn’t worthy to be a mother. And that’s why we couldn’t get pregnant. That there was something inherently wrong with me, fundamentally. That even if I got pregnant, I wouldn’t stay pregnant. And Even if I stayed pregnant, something terrible would happen during delivery, and even if nothing terrible happened during delivery, I wasn’t going to take care of him right and something terrible would happen. And even if nothing terrible did happen then, I was still not going to be a mom. 

Our dirty pain is so heavily layered. That’s why it can be so hard to spot it. That’s why it feels so true for us. Those thoughts felt VERY true to me at that time. Unshakably true. 

But they weren’t. Not at all. 

With both of our pregnancies, I got pregnant, stayed pregnant, and aside from a few bumps during both, I had normal and healthy deliveries. Nothing terrible happened during that first, terrifying year, and we made it through. 

This might not be the case for you. Maybe you have experienced losses. Maybe multiple losses. 

But it still doesn’t make our thoughts true. 

When our transfer failed. I was completely devastated. I still am. At first, I totally blamed me. I had decided to postpone the transfer a couple of times, well, one of those times COVID decided for us so I thought it was my fault that we left our embaby on ice for too long. He had been on ice for about 3.5 years at that point. It felt so true that that was the reason and the fault was mine. It felt true that if we had done it when we had originally planned, then it would’ve worked. But that’s not true either. We have no way of knowing. What we do know is that the transfer was not successful and that is painful enough without all of the other shit. That was my first arrow. 

So, all of those thoughts of how it was my fault, how I should have done things differently- that was my second arrow. 

So, I teach clean vs dirty pain not in an effort for there to be something else you judge yourself about- that’s NEVER the goal. It’s the opposite. If you are living in dirty pain (like so many of us), it doesn’t mean that you have done anything wrong. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. Dirty pain just means that we are caught in a habitual thought pattern, An unintentional way of thinking. It means that we’re telling ourselves storied without knowing that they’re stories, without seeing that they’re optional. 

We don’t typically realize that we are taking our clean pain, our first arrow, and with our brains, turning it into dirty pain. That we’re making it exponentially worse than it has to be. 

These are the types of things that I work with my 1:1 client with all the time. 

You might recognize this tendency, this habitual thought pattern for you? 

Maybe you are hurting, and you snap or yell at your partner and then you make that mean that you’re a terrible or unworthy partner. 

Maybe you’re grieving a failed cycle, transfer, or miscarriage, and you have made that sadness mean that you aren’t progressing. That you are somehow doing all of this wrong. 

I’m not sure that you can go through infertility and IVF without experiencing pain. Maybe if you’re a sociopath but other than that, I’m not sure. Most of us experience a great deal of pain throughout and even after this process. 

The optional part is how we treat ourselves. How we just kick the shit out of ourselves. 

I’ve got a client that is very angry at her family and a few friends for how she feels they have treated her throughout her journey. Anger is a form of pain. But what she is creating on top of this pain is her judgment about herself for how she is handling everything. She’s telling herself that she should be able to let it go, but she hasn’t let it go. She tells herself that she should be the bigger person but hasn’t figured out how to forgive them, yet. She thinks she should be further along, or to be able to take the high road, and all of those shaming beliefs that we have. That is dirty pain. That is suffering and it’s completely optional. 

So, if this is you- remember ABC

Acknowledge and allow your pain

Bring your clean pain with you

Cast out your dirty pain. 

Until next week, take care. I adore you and you’ve got this.