We all have childhood pain to some extent, but we come up with ways of avoiding it or looking for something to take it away. You may set up your life to avoid feeling it by people pleasing or trying to be perfect to avoid criticism, but it doesn’t work. When you swallow your pain, you tend to strategize to make it go away, but what happens instead is that your emotional reactions are even more painful because you haven’t dealt with those feelings. You don’t realize how deep you’ve buried your pain, yet it manages to rule your life.

If you have a demanding mother who is controlling and manipulative, being around her will likely send you back to your old childhood pattern with her: compliance, keeping the peace, etc. You invalidate your own feelings to fall in line with what you’ve always done. You swallow your pain, but it’s behind your words, actions and reactions. This pain is magnified if she outright denies how she treated you as a kid, leading you to believe you imagined it or overreacted.

If you let your pain drive you, you’ll rely on other people to take it away or numb it, but it won’t happen because other people can never take your pain away. Turning it into blame, especially toward your parents, just perpetuates the cycle of pain. Those angry outbursts don’t actually make it go away. The only way through is to feel it. By allowing your pain to surface and tracing it back to the earliest time you felt it, you can actually let it go instead of keeping it locked inside. Understanding this old, deep pain and where it comes from can actually help heal your current relationships.