When our greatest pain becomes our greatest gift, my name is Andrea and this is adult child. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean.

Yeah, yeah.

What you holding on to,

what you're holding on to,

but just let it all go.

What's making you slow now?

Let it all go.

What's you got to do, yeah.

Welcome back to adult child, where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family.

And today, we are diving deep into the divine lens, the understanding that our emotional pain serves a higher purpose in our lives,

the perspective that the pain of the past, present, and future is a gift and not a curse.

Growing up in a dysfunctional family, we did not learn this lesson that pain can be a gift. We were taught pain is bad

that pain serves no purpose therefore we must stop the pain as soon as possible by using drugs, alcohol, or some other

compulsive behavior or just by flat-out ignoring and denying the underlying

source of pain. But guess what? Our pain continued. And for many of us,

the faulty belief is ingrained in us that not only is pain wrong, not only does pain mean we have done something wrong, but that pain means

that we are wrong and this follows us into adulthood or at least that was the case for me.

I remember being at a 12-step meeting in the height of the Brian Number Two Madness in the most excruciating pain of my life and I shared about how much pain I was in and I shared about the deep sense of shame that I felt.

Not that I was experiencing pain, but that because I was the

culprit and cause of my pain. Now the message that I had received in early sobriety from old-timers was that life

sucked, they got sober, and that life was pretty damn okay going forward.

Yes, life on life's terms continue to happen.

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