Take the Pain.

Well that sounds happy. Or; the intersection between Buddhist Monks and Cognitive Processing Therapy.

We are on the beach of Puget Sound. This is not a nice beach where people come to sun themselves and frolic in gentle waves. The sun is rarely seen this time of year, and no sane person wants to frolic in 45 degree water. This is a beach of rocks, not sand. Not the type you lay on willingly.

But I’m not here for vacation.

More than two decades ago, I was there for a Pre-Combat Diver Qualification Course(CDQC). This is the prep course for CDQC, and I’m there as a ROTC cadet.

I didn’t make it. After drowning 3 times, I was hospitalized. While recovering I chose to forgo commissioning as an Army officer, and instead deploy with my LRS unit to Afghanistan as an enlisted man.

But that’s a different story. Back to the beach.

We are in the top of the pushup position, also known as a plank, a few feet into the frigid water. When ordered, we lower our bodies, fully submerging our heads until ordered to push back up. The instructor has a bullhorn, and repeats a refrain that we must echo back after each push up. Some straight up GI Jane shit:

The instructor repeats over the bullhorn: “YOU GOTTA LIVE HARD!!!“

We scream back “YOU GOTTA LIVE HARD!!”

The instructor orders us to lower our bodies into the bottom of the pushup position, so we all dip once again into the freezing water, and await the barely audible command of…

Instructor: “UP!!”

We hold the plank. Can’t feel my hands anymore, my arms are like noodles but I try to not show weakness.

Instructor: “TO BE HARD!!”

And back we scream: “TO BE HARD!!”

Over and over this goes. We scream the mantra constantly throughout the school, usually in cadence with some form of physical punishment. It ends up becoming my guiding light through many a dark day to come in the following years. You got to live hard to be hard.

Different ways to interpret it, but I settle on this: You don’t just show up on game day. You don’t become tough by wanting to be tough. No one is actually tough. You rent toughness by doing tough stuff over and over. Stop doing tough stuff, and you cease being tough. Tough shit never gets easier, but you do figure out how to deal with it. Which finally leads us to the point of this post-how do you deal with tough shit?

I’ve found a couple different ways, and each has its place.

Let’s cut to the chase. There are two ways I know of which will get you through tough times. Be it physical pain and discomfort, mentally challenging tasks, or emotional turbulence, I know that these two work:

1. Distract yourself
2. Embrace it

Distract Yourself

My parents were in their 40’s when they had me, and in turn their parents were older when they were brought into this world. What’s that got to do with all of this? Stick with me.

This meant that my Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles were very old by the time I came around. And you know what old people do? They die.

Starting when I was 8, and going until about 12, I went to a lot of funerals of people that were a big part of my life. We had an active extended family that we saw regularly, and then we saw them for the last time in short order. This went on until it was just our nuclear family plus a couple that hung around.

The first funeral sucked. It sucked bad. I was 8, and didn’t comprehend the nature of death yet. Then my Grandma, who watched me multiple times a week when my Mom went to work, died abruptly. I cried a lot. I felt lost, as she was like a second mother to me.

Then the next funeral came a few months later.

Then the next one. And on and on.

Quickly I figured out how to not experience those uncomfortable emotions. I’d distract myself. Shove down those emotions, and instead think about anything else: Ooo, those are some interesting flowers up there. That was a cool story I read last night. How about I replay that in my mind…

Distraction. It works. And it works even better in the physical realm.

I did a couple of sports in high school; football and wrestling. Football was fun, but not too challenging. But wrestling? Shit man, that sucked. Practice there got close to some of the harder things I did in the Army. I was lucky to have a great coach. From him I learned a new method for distracting myself from physical pain.

Get fucking pissed.

Anger is considered one of the strongest emotions, and can override just about any other feeling. Harness that, and you can get through some serious tough shit. You stop feeling anything but the rage.

I got good at that…real good. By the time I made it to Pre-CDQC, I had that technique on lock. I’d used anger to push past the physical pain of Basic training, Infantry training, and Airborne School. I graduated each with ease at the top of my class. I used anger to get through my unit’s assessment and indoctrination program, a process that weeded out more than half the guys who tried out.

But there are problems with anger. For one, you’re angry a lot. That’s not fun or healthy. As it pertains to getting through tough shit, you can only keep anger stoked for so long. Eventually it burns out. As I continued with Pre-CDQC, my ability to distract myself with anger diminished. That course was insane. The level of physical stuff we did there was of another world.

At other courses I was required to run 5 miles in 40 minutes or less. At this one we started out the morning with a 5 mile run where 35 minutes was the cut off-go slower, go home. And that was the easy part of the day. Then it was pool work, where we’d be thrown in the deep end with our hands tied behind our back and our feet tied together. Either survive or quit. Next we’d do laps underwater, swimming 50 meters without a breath. Then do it again. And again.

The afternoon would come, and it’d be time to go swim Puget Sound. Sure, they’d let us have wetsuits most of the time. But only after we’d done plenty of physical training in the icy water next to the beach. Then back to the pool for more of the same.

Anger worked for the first half of day 1, but then it stopped working. It wasn’t the physical stuff that go to me. It was the cold.

The olympic pool we did our training in felt warm when we first got in. But after hours in there it would sap our heat and you could feel the cold seep into your bones. Especially after a dip in the sound. Guess this has to do with science or whatever, something about water being a much better conductor than air.

To deal with this, I had to figure out a different way of dealing with tough shit. Luckily, I learned to:

Embrace It.

I read 4000 weeks last month (thanks Choose FI book club), and it was superb. Oliver Burkeman describes this concept of embracing shit much better than I when he writes about Steve Young, some hardcore dude going through Buddhist monk training:

“…he had been authorised to begin the 100-day solo retreat that marked the first real step on the monastic journey – only to discover that it entailed living in a tiny unheated hut and conducting a thrice-daily purification ritual in which Young, who’d been raised beside the ocean in balmy California, had to douse himself with several gallons of bone-chilling melted snow. It was a “horrific ordeal”, he would recall years later. “It’s so cold that the water freezes the moment it touches the floor, and your towel freezes in your hand. So you’re sliding around barefoot on ice, trying to dry your body with a frozen hand towel.”

Then Burkeman goes on to the meat of what I’m barely able to put into words:

“Faced with physical distress – even of a much milder variety – most people’s instinctive reaction is to try not to pay attention to it, to attempt to focus on anything else at all.

For example, if you’re mildly phobic about hypodermic syringes, like I am, you’ve probably found yourself staring very hard at the mediocre artwork in doctors’ clinics in an effort to take your mind off the jab you’re about to receive.…..

At first, this had been Young’s instinct, too: to recoil internally from the experience of the freezing water hitting his skin by thinking about something different – or else just trying, through an act of sheer will, not to feel the cold.“

“And yet as icy deluge followed icy deluge, Young began to understand that this was the wrong strategy. In fact, the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonising he found them – whereas once his “attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable”.

After a few days, he began preparing for each drenching by first becoming as focused on his present experience as he possibly could so that, when the water hit, he would avoid spiralling from mere discomfort into agony.

Slowly it dawned on him that this was the whole point of the ceremony. As he put it – though traditional Buddhist monks certainly would not have done so – it was a “giant biofeedback device”, designed to train him to concentrate by rewarding him (with a reduction in suffering) for as long as he could remain undistracted, and punishing him (with an increase in suffering) whenever he failed.”

Sorry about the long quote. But Burkeman is way better at writing than I am, and he captures this concept so much more effectively than I could. Here’s how it looked like for me that first day of Pre-CDQC:

I was in the pool, shivering uncontrollably. Thinking oh fuck of fuck oh fuck oh fuck…, then trying to get pissed as a distraction, that working for about 30 seconds, and then right back to oh fuck of fuck oh fuck.

By that evening, I had a rare moment of inspiration. I was clinging onto the pool wall in the deep end shivering next to another student; we were waiting on our turn to get thrashed underwater again. The other man was shivering too, on the border of freaking the fuck out just as I was. Then he closed his eyes and said “take the pain”. He opened his eyes, they unfocused, and his breathing slowed. He still shivered, but he was no longer freaking out.

His words struck a chord. As a child of bad 80’s action movies, I knew exactly what he was quoting. A scene from the Vietnam classic, platoon:

Ridiculous, I know. But it clicked.

I shivered in the pool, and said to myself in my best Barnes voice “Take the Pain”. And stopped fighting the cold. Stopped trying to keep it back. I let it in. I concentrated on how it felt, everywhere, all at once.

It sucked. But I was no longer running from it. I was a part of it. I had no control over it, and that was ok, because it lost control over me too. The suffering went down from crazy intense to moderately annoying.

Huh.

So that worked.

It wasn’t like a switch I could flip once. I found that the cold would creep back in when I wasn’t paying attention, and the misery would return. But once I shifted my attention directly to whatever was causing me pain, the pain would shrink down to a manageable amount.

I got through that night. Then the next day, then the next. Until finally I pushed so far I wound up on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance.

Maybe I went a bit too far, but at least I didn’t quit. 😉

I kept this lesson after leaving the hospital as I went on to Afghanistan, and increasingly hard physical trials afterwards.

But I fucked one thing up.

Remember how I said there were two ways I’ve found which help with dealing with tough shit? Well there all sorts of tough shit out there. Pain or discomfort caused by direct stimuli is one. We’ll call this Physical Shit.

But there’s the pain caused by other shit. Like watching bad stuff go down that you can’t do anything to prevent. Going to funerals. Watching others suffer, and no way to help. We’ll just lump this into the Emotional Shit category.

I got pretty good at embracing Physical Shit. Taking the pain. But you know what I sucked at? You guessed it; embracing all that Emotional Shit.

Fuck, even as I write this, just saying emotional in my head gave me a slightly revolting tinge. There’s still that subconscious habit to try and distract myself from embracing anything which involves those pesky emotion things.

Yeah, we can go on about how this is caused by my outmoded script of an unhealthy machismo which was deeply ingrained by our patriarchal….blah blah blah. Let’s call it good before I devolve into yet another therapy session loosely disguised as a blog post(I already get VA provided therapy on the reg thanks to you, taxpayer !🙂) . Getting back to something applicable….

So I sucked at embracing Emotional Shit. But I was really good at distracting myself whenever some of that shit would go down.

Why is this a problem?

Let’s dive into metaphor land:

Say you get in a bad car crash. Some semi swerved into your lane, which pushed you into an inconveniently placed light pole, which then ran you right into a ditch. You were going like 70 MPH, and ramped right through that ditch. Your car flipped a few times, and when you come to you realize you’re upside down hanging from the seat belt. Like Luke when he wakes up in that ice cave on Hoth.

Bad day man.

As you shake the cobwebs loose, you realize shit is straight fucked. You can move everything, but you look down(up?) and see your right arm is bending in a way that suggests some joints have just been turned into silly putty.

Realizing this, you do what any sane person does. You puke. Like everywhere.

But then you smell something over regurgitated Chipotle. Smoke….and is that gasoline?

You now stop giving a crap about the arm. You use your good(ish) arm to try and get unbuckled. It’s stuck. FUCK. You get scared. Then get pissed. The adrenaline flows, and you scream something you won’t remember later.

You maniac that buckle, then drop free. The door won’t open, but it doesn’t matter. Your body has engaged the flight or fight survival response, which means you are in hardcore beast mode. You rip the headrest off and use one of its metal stalks to shatter the door window.

You crawl out and run from the wreck just as the fire starts. If this were a movie, you’d walk away slowly as the car explodes, refraining from looking back like a total badass. But this isn’t a movie, so the car just gets engulfed in flames. Not as satisfying, but still deadly.

Anyways, what about that pesky arm hanging all askew? In the combustion caused craziness, you forgot all about it. Hell, you even used that bad arm a bit in that mess. You were distracted by pressing concerns, like avoiding a fiery death.

Now that we’ve gone down this metaphor rabbit hole for what seems like a few years, we’re finally getting to the point. Which is, when do we start thinking about the obliterated arm hanging by your side?

The car being on fire was a great distraction from your extremely painful arm. And the adrenaline associated with that fire kept you from burning alive. Shit man, you crawled out of that thing like a boss. Good job!

But do you keep ignoring the arm now that you’re safe? Of course not. It fucking hurts. Also the rational part of your brain knows that if you don’t get that arm looked at and set, it probably won’t heal normally. Which would mean you’d never have complete use of that arm again. Plus there’s the chance you nicked the brachial artery and you could bleed out and die. So no, you will definitely not be ignoring that arm.

Makes total sense in the physical shit realm. But when it came to the emotional shit world, I was basically walking by all the responding hose jockeys and medics who were trying to get me in the back of an ambulance and telling them “nah, my arm’s fine. I’m good. Later bitches!” .

Yeah, metaphors are imperfect, but hopefully this gets the point across. When you get hurt physically, you may ignore it for a bit to get somewhere safe. But when you’re safe you address it. Maybe it’s something small, like a laceration or bruise. You still don’t ignore it, you clean it out and dress it, to make sure it doesn’t get infected and fester. If it’s something really messed up, you get your ass to a professional.

But when something bad happens in the emotional realm, it sure is easier to ignore it. I did this for years. And I’m betting a lot of people fall into the same reaction. Maybe someone reading this has too. Ignore, distract yourself, keep going. Let’s not think about all that bad stuff.

Unfortunately, just like in the physical realm, bad emotional shit doesn’t actually go away. If you ignore it, your brain will keep trying to process what went down. It’s worried about it happening again, and wants you to deal with it. But if you keep ignoring it, and instead think about something else (distraction!) , your brain will start doing new and exciting things to try and get you to deal with this shit.

Your brain will bug you randomly, trying to get you to think about and process this tough shit. Like when you’re sleeping. Or even when you’re awake. Say hello to nightmares and flashbacks! And because you haven’t processed this shit, and reassured your brain that:

A. such an event probably won’t happen again and

B. hey, even though it might happen again, you got through this last shit, you can get through it again if need be.

Your brain will now be super worried about it happening again. Just to be on the safe side, good ol’ brain will put you in a elevated state of vigilance against bad shit happening. We call that hypervigilance. Say hello to being jumpy all the time, and the associated stress of always being on high alert.

Well that sucks, doesn’t it? But there is a solution…..

Instead of distraction, embracing it seems to work pretty damn good. But just like the cold, it’s counterintuitive. We were built to survive, not be enlightened monks floating in the clouds. Our default mode is to ignore the bad and push through. So to actually sit and think about bad shit that has happened, to really feel all the associated emotions with those ugly events, is fucking hard. I know it was for me, especially after making distraction a habit for so many years.

This is where Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) comes in.

For years I’d dealt with the symptoms associated with ignoring all of the bad. First I tried the old fashioned way of dealing with it; you know-hard drinking, fights and other stupidity. Then I became a cop, and such misbehavior wasn’t going to fly. (Thank God, because that method numbed the pain, but I don’t think that would have ended well for me) So I went the other direction. Read everything I could about this stuff, and layered on coping strategies like meditation, yoga, gratitude, stoicism, even some occasional short term therapy. But really that was all just another distraction. Yeah, for sure those methods were physically healthier than trying to get punched in the face at a bar by some guy in an affliction t-shirt after I danced with his girlfriend, but it was still a distraction from the underlying pain.

Though I had layered on all of the healthy coping strategies, the underlying symptoms of not dealing with tough emotional shit would still rare their ugly heads. You can read an even longer, more boring account of this in my PTSD series, but for this post I’ll try to sum up the actionable stuff as you’ve been reading for quite a while already(Thanks for sticking with it BTW! I know, I know, when the hell is this post going to end? Don’t worry, we’re getting there).

Finally after trying everything else, I got my ass into VA funded (Thanks again taxpayers!) Cognitive Processing Therapy, or CPT. There’s a lot to CPT, and it wasn’t the best experience in the world, but all things considered I think it helped. At its core, CPT gets you to relive past traumas and then has you finally experience the emotions associated with them.

This sucks. A lot. Like a whole fuck ton.

But just like that dude going through Japanese Monk training/cold water torture, once I actually allowed myself to sit with those emotions and stop running from them, it sucked a good amount less.

The second part of CPT is teaching you how to change the habit of endlessly dodging emotions by using distraction, and instead start embracing them. Getting out of that habit is a bitch, but I found that replaying Barnes in my head -“Take the Pain” seemed to work. Having built the habit of embracing physical tough shit helped to layer on the habit of doing the same with emotional crap.

Given, you can’t always do this in the moment. Like if I pulled some banged up kid out of a burning car (ooooo, overlapping metaphors…) at my old job, it wouldn’t do to sit there and cry about how said kid just watched his mom burn alive right after I yanked him out. Because, you know, we’re in the middle of an intersection, and I should probably pay attention so we don’t get creamed by another drunk asshole. But the key is to actually allow yourself to experience all those messy emotions as soon as you can. The longer you wait, the worse it’s going to be. So I’d make sure to get my ass to a quiet parking lot after shit like that, tell myself to take the pain, and then cry like a baby. Fun stuff. But hey, it seemed to work. I’d feel better afterwards, and at least I wouldn’t have flashbacks about that specific incident.

Let’s bring this whole thing together.

I’ve been fortunate to go through some tough shit in my life. Given, plenty of others have been through much worse. But I was lucky enough not only to experience this crap, but also to run into some people (props to my wrestling coach, that dude at pre-CDQC along with the badass instructors, and my CPT therapist) and resources that taught me to deal with it so I could take a ‘lickin and keep on ‘tickin.

Specifically, I learned:

• You can either distract yourself from shit, or you can embrace it.
• It’s easier to distract yourself, but that method doesn’t last, and can end up being unhealthy if you do it for too long.
• In the end, it’s mostly better to embrace the pain, even though it sucks more at first. But as a smart dude once told me, never say never, and never say always. When it comes to emotional shit, sometimes you have to distract yourself so you can get through the moment. But better circle back to those emotions lest they come back to bite you.
• And finally, I guess watching all of those bad 80’s action movies wasn’t a complete waste of time.

Take the Pain.

What do you all think? Have you learned similar lessons that you’ve learned from? Do you have any other ways of dealing with shit?

I have a theory that perhaps once you’ve gotten really good at embracing emotions in the moment, you can completely function without any distraction as the half life of the emotion is so much shorter. I’m not at that level yet, but would be interested to hear if anyone has experienced this or at least heard about it.