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How Emotional Pain and Depression Occur
By the age of four it is common for children to already be carrying emotional pain. By age eight many of them have already found an escape behavior. On average it takes fifteen years from the first involvement in an escape behavior to the point where the absolute bottom is hit. The bottom is becoming hopelessly powerless over the behavior, or lacking the ability to stop.
Pain events can develop in any area of human endeavor. If the events frequently occur in the same area of human endeavor it can be like walking on grass and wearing a path. The developing child is told over and over that they can’t accomplish worthwhile things. If this is repeated enough the child will come to believe it. Emotional pain can come in a massive overload that is far beyond the child’s ability to process. Continuous pain events can be as damaging as a single heavy overload such as death, family breakup or becoming uprooted.
Emotional pain events can be real or imagined, but even the imagined ones are real to the developing child. Pain events can occur at any and at all points along life’s way. They can burst forth in surprise or they can grow over long periods of time without notice.
Unprocessed emotional pain opens the door for the negative thoughts that contribute to depression and stress build-up that eventually creates the need to escape.
Most emotional pain in the developing child’s life is unintentional by those inflicting the pain. Every parent engages in some form of inflicting unintentional emotional pain. We cannot teach what we have never been taught. Thinking errors are common, difficult to see, and even more difficult to be replaced with accurate, healthy thoughts.
The best time to process emotional pain is in the very first step of human behavior which is known as perception or how we see self in the event. Our perception of self has everything to do with our ability to handle an emotional pain event.
Emotional depression is a product of failing to properly process emotional pain events. Negative thoughts and images that bring on depression sooner or later follow unprocessed pain.
Ron Wilkins
Removing Emotional Pain
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