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

What the holding on to?

Let's just let it all go.

What's making you small now?

Let's not let it all go.

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, where at least that was the case for me.

I remember being at a 12-step meeting in the height of the Brian No. 2 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 continued to happen, painful experience did occur, but that painful experiences of our own making ceased the day we put down the drink.

Now whether or not this is actually what people were saying, it probably was not, but for some reason that was the message that I received.

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