Do you know someone who always gets offended,
whose life seems to be always full of drama and victimhood, maybe small issues get blown out of
proportion or their life is just always in chaos? How about you personally? Are you ever that person,
are you creating your own suffering? Sometimes I like to oversimplify, I do this because when
we try to put our problems into categories it helps us to clarify what we should do to solve
them. So in this video you're going to learn about two categories of pain- Clean pain and Dirty pain
and this is really important because when you can tell the difference, then you'll know what to do
about it because the vast majority of pain is the type that we cause ourselves. That means that
you can resolve the vast majority of the painful a friend who said I need to talk to you about
something but she wouldn't tell Rose what it was about. So they made a plan to meet over coffee, but
because of their schedules they had to wait two weeks. So for two whole weeks Rose worried about
it. She wondered what her friend needed to talk to her about, she wracked her brain, she wondered
if she had offended her friend or if her daughter had done something to her friend's daughter, and
Rose said- 'As time passed, all I thought about was what I might have done wrong. I played back
every encounter we'd had over the past month to the point where I became so distraught with the
idea of what I might have done that I was driving myself a little crazy. Rehearsing explanations
for my phantom behavior was causing me such great distress that I finally called a mutual
friend to see if I could find out what I had done. My friend assured me it had nothing to do with
me, but I didn't believe her. When the coffee date finally arrived my friend seemed nervous,
she had a hard time getting the words out and apologized saying this was very hard for her,
she eventually blurted out I'm getting a divorce.' This was the moment that Rose's whole perspective
shifted, she'd been assuming that this conversation was about her, but in that moment all of her
self-created fear, her worries, her sense of guilt, all of that fell away and she shifted to pure
compassion, she felt sadness with her friend. Now, Rose didn't know it, but she was experiencing
two types of pain here- the pain of her friend's divorce, and before that, her own self-inflicted
pain, which was brought on by her anxious thinking. So let's take a look at these two different
categories of pain that Rose was experiencing and talk about their differences. I know pain is
complex, but for our purposes I'm going to place pain into two categories and for lack of a better
word i'm going to call them clean pain and dirty pain. So clean pain is the beautiful and innate
emotions that come from our experiences from being alive and these emotions can include: joy, and
gratitude, wonder, hurt, grief, regret, sadness, etc. So think about this, like why do we listen to sad
songs or watch movies that make us cry or even scary movies that make us jump? We like
to feel alive and and to live with feeling. In Rose's story when she felt sympathy with
her friend she hurt with her, but this is a clean pure sadness that comes from compassion
and it's part of being connected to people. On the other hand dirty pain is the
suffering that we create in our lives by our thoughts, our choices, and our actions. Often
this pain is created by how we think and how we act. We feel bitter about missed opportunities or
we feel angry about perceived slights. In Rose's story she created huge amounts of stress and pain
when she spent two weeks assuming that this chat over coffee was about something she did wrong.
Like Rose, we tend to spend so much of our time making ourselves suffer and in this video as
well as throughout the rest of this course you're going to learn about a bunch of ways that
you may be creating your own suffering of things that you're doing that are keeping you sick or
hurting or angry and this includes things like- How we think about the world, blaming others, taking
offense, holding grudges, taking things personally, right? Distorted thinking patterns, things like- 'oh
everything is awful' or 'everyone's out to get me' or taking things personally. Shaming ourselves for
having emotions and trying to suppress our feelings, having a victim mindset, self-deception,
avoiding our problems, comparison and competition with others, making bad choices, being reactive,
or making choices that go against our values and there's chronic stress, which is believing you're
in danger when you're actually safe and there's so many more, but there's a bunch of things that we
do to create our own suffering. So does this idea that you're potentially causing a lot of your
own pain whether knowingly or unknowingly does that make you feel empowered or discouraged? Now
this is really important to check your response. For many people with depression or anxiety they
create their own helplessness in one of two ways they say 'oh this isn't fair, it's my genes, why
is everything out to get, me it's not my fault' or on the other hand they say 'oh everything
is my fault, I'm a terrible person', or maybe you do both of these things. Check yourself, when
you learn what you're doing that makes it worse you can then learn how to stop it. To be
clear I am not saying that it's your fault that you experience depression or anxiety, but I am
saying there's something you can do about it and we all have a natural impulse to blind
ourselves to our self-created suffering, we try to escape our responsibility for it and sometimes
that looks like wallowing and self- vindication. We want to believe that it's not our fault, that
there's nothing we can do about it other than just you know feel bitter. These are two mental blocks
that stop people from healing- it's blaming others or outside circumstances, or blaming ourselves. We
can't create change in our lives when we blame outside forces for everything. This is like saying-
'It's not my fault I'm depressed it's my parents fault' or 'I can't help it' or 'the world is such
a terrible place and everyone is so horrible they make me depressed', and we also can't create
change when we blame ourselves for everything. So saying things like- 'Everything is my fault, I'm
a terrible person' you know, thinking this way is just beating yourself up. When you label yourself
as broken you block yourself from taking the small actions that actually lead toward healing your
pain. Neither of these attitudes which are you know believing that we're completely helpless
or believing that it's all our fault, neither of these really help us take action. The reality
is that we do contribute to our own suffering. Our actions, our thoughts, and our responses can
greatly enlarge our pain. Blaming ourselves or others doesn't help us take any action to improve
our situation. If we want to be able to take action to change our lives and suffer less, then we
need to be able to know when our suffering is in some part caused by us and when our pain is
simply a natural and beautiful part of being alive. If we can distinguish between the two
then our choice of action becomes clear. So option A is dirty pain right, 'I'm doing
something to make my pain worse so I'll work to change it'. Option B is clean pain, 'this pain is a
natural result of caring so I'll continue to care'. Now of course this is an oversimplification
there's times when we don't know if it's our fault or not. There are circumstances where it's ninety
percent one way and ten percent the other way, or there's times where we feel like it's
our fault and it really isn't you know and then there's other times where we're deceiving
ourselves and I think it's not my fault or my responsibility and it really is. So there probably
should be an option C which is something like- 'I'm not sure if there's something I'm doing to make
this worse, so I'll keep doing my best to explore and to stay open to change while moving forward
in my chosen path.' I think the serenity prayer really illustrates this concept well- Grant me
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the
wisdom to know the difference. One of the best ways to let go of self-caused suffering is to let go
of victimhood and blame and to take responsibility. 'I am 100% responsible for what I am responsible
for.' This is almost a radical responsibility, we create suffering when we either resist
the truth of our own responsibility- 'it's not my fault' or we create suffering when we take
responsibility for things outside of our control, like other people's choices or trying to make
everyone around us happy or things like that right? True accountability is letting go of trying to
change the things that you are not responsible for. Stop putting all your energy into trying to
change other people and put that energy into improving yourself. So here's an example of how
you could apply the idea of clean pain/dirty pain. Mike's boss gave him a huge assignment at work, he
tried to work hard on it and some days he worked really hard and other days he got overwhelmed, some
days he didn't focus very well, some days he got distracted by social media, sometimes he couldn't
move forward because of the other members of the team hadn't finished the parts of their job yet
or he was waiting on a step in the supply chain. Now finally the deadline came around and the
assignment wasn't complete. Mike walked into his boss's office with a sinking feeling. His boss
throws a fit, he gets all red in the face, he yells at Mike, he tells him he's a horrible worker and he
ought to fire him and Mike is super furious right, he's ashamed, he's indignant, but on the surface he
just submits, he nods his head, he promises to get it done as soon as possible, and when the tirade is
over he walks back to his office, he shuts the door, and he wants to cry. He thinks- 'this is so unfair,
this is his fault, the assignment was too big, he didn't give me enough time'. Well now he feels
angry and like he's being mistreated. Then he starts listing in his head all the reasons why his
boss is a terrible boss and he starts remembering every little thing he ever did that bugged Mike.
So now Mike is fuming right and then Mike starts to get mad at his co-workers- 'they're idiots' he
thinks, 'it's their fault not mine, if they had done their part I wouldn't be here.' So now
Mike is feeling trapped and angry and helpless. Mike tries to get a little more work done
that afternoon but eventually the day ends and he leaves work feeling kind of shaky and tired.
When he gets home Mike slumps on the couch and he starts to think about all of his failures- 'What's
the matter with me? Why can't I get anything right?' He starts to compare himself with his brother and
his coworkers, who all seem to get the work done faster. 'I'm such a loser' he thinks, 'I hate my job,
but I'm just no good, I can't find a better one, it's all my fault.' Well now he's feeling
discouraged, depressed, and hopeless. He's upset because now he thinks the problem
is this incurable personality trait. In this situation Mike is creating some of
his own pain, he's making himself angry by remembering all of his boss's faults. He's making
himself feel helpless by blaming his co-workers. He probably makes himself feel guilty because
he doesn't work as hard as he should and then by using black and white thinking saying- 'I never
get anything right', he makes himself feel hopeless. By comparing himself to others and putting himself
down he creates a sense of discouragement and depression. All of this would be considered a dirty
pain, pain that Mike is creating by the way he is thinking or acting and the great thing about this
is that when you learn to think or act differently you can make the vast majority of your pain go
away. Let me give you an example of how this works. We often get all confused about our responsibility
when we say things like- 'Well I did this because he did that', in order to give ourselves power
to act and power to resolve our dirty emotions we need to focus our efforts on exactly what we
are in control of and let go of the rest. When we take full responsibility for 100% of the things
that we are responsible for it empowers us to free ourselves from the pain that we're creating in
our lives. It can be hard to know how to do this especially with really big, complicated problems
so doing the locus of control activity on paper can be really really helpful with this and you
can find that in the next video in the full course. But for Mike this might look like writing it down
on paper right? In this column says I'm responsible for- The skills I learn, how hard I work, whether
I communicate assertively with my boss about the scope and timeline of this project, I'm responsible
for how I choose to think about problems, where I choose to work, I can choose to have a
growth mindset and learn from this experience. I'm not responsible for- My boss's emotions, his
assumptions, his reactivity, I'm not responsible for my co-workers and how fast they work, I
can't control problems in the supply chain, but I am responsible to plan ahead and try
to predict problems in the supply chain. When Mike takes the time to clarify responsibility
he can focus on his area of control, he can choose to think differently about this problem instead
of exaggerating his own or others weaknesses, he can just focus his energy on accepting what
he can't change and changing what he can when Mike takes the time to write all of this down
he realizes that he needs to have a conversation with his boss. He remembers the times his boss
has helped him out, not just the times he's yelled, and Mike knows he needs to be assertive with
his boss and tell him how much time he really needs for the project. He needs to talk to his
boss about the obstacles that he's facing and he needs to give a realistic timeline for when the
work can be done. So he realizes that by thinking of himself as a complete failure that that is
black and white thinking, a cognitive distortion, and he replaces that with a little more
balanced approach saying something like- 'I've had some successes and some failures, but I
can keep learning and growing. When Mike creates clarity about what pain he's causing himself and
what he needs to let go of, Mike starts to feel a sense of hope and empowerment and he knows what
action to take. So this is the skill I call clean pain/dirty pain. The truth is that we create much
of our own suffering and this is awesome because if we can identify something we're doing to
create our own suffering, then we can fix it. We can take action to resolve the problem and
come to peace. When we can identify areas to change, we can turn our pain into peace, we can
heal our hearts from anger, fear, and depression.
