What Can Unprocessed Emotional Pain Do?

    What can unprocessed emotional pain do? It can do far more than one would expect. Emotional pain carriers are clueless to what is happening to them. They slowly become discontented and restless. In time discontentment leads to depression and unless depression is removed with healthy thinking and attitudes, it will lead to escape behaviors. Like it or not, escape behaviors escalate into overpowering addictions and any addiction will result in strained and broken relationships. Broken relationships result in legal complications, and often the loss of freedom. The stress, chaos and building emotional overload can and often does bring on thoughts of suicide. Victims of emotional pain can be expected to go into deep denial concerning their emotional condition and escape behaviors. They cannot be expected to see their state of denial.

     What can unprocessed emotional pain do? It can kill. It can rob children of their childhood right under the noses of their parents. It can take away the quality of life adults deserve to have. It can pull good people down into the depths of despair and drive them to addiction. It can destroy strong families and divide good friends. It does it without its victims even knowing what is happening to them. If you had asked me anywhere along the almost fifty year path of destruction, I would have firmly stated that I didn’t have a problem with pain. It’s hard to deny you have a problem when your sitting in the dark, on the floor of a jail cell.

     How could a man who loved God and wanted to serve Him fall so far down he ended up in prison? How could a family man with three great kids and a fine wife land flat on his face? How could a man who was number three out of fifteen hundred in his business mess up so completely he would spend five and one-half years behind the wire? No doubt there were many contributing factors. The greatest factor had to be the lack of awareness concerning what emotional pain not properly processed can do.

     Ninety-eight percent of the people in our country carry emotional pain in at least one area of their lives. Most of them don’t even know it. I carried emotional pain for years and I was clueless about what unprocessed emotional pain could do to even a good person. I had absolutely no idea how it did what it did and I had even less awareness of what could be done about it. I knew I was slipping deeper and deeper into hopelessness and the darkness of self-destructive behavior. I increasingly believed there was no help but I did not see my unprocessed emotional pain and my need to get away from it all. 

     What can unprocessed emotional pain do? It can destroy your life and even end it.

 Ron Wilkins

Removing Emotional Pain