Years ago, I sat opposite someone who had lived through more than most people would ever know about her.
She told me the story beautifully. That might sound like a strange word to use, but she did. The timing was perfect. She was articulate, reflective and at moments, very funny. We both laughed. If you had walked past the room, you might have assumed we were having an ordinary conversation.
Then she finished, smiled and said, “Anyway, I’m fine.” I remember thinking about the distance between the story she had just told me and the way her body had learned to tell it. Her words said she was fine. Her humour kept the conversation moving. Her shoulders barely moved as she breathed.
Pain has a language, although it doesn’t always sound like pain.
After more than twenty-five years working with people across trauma, addiction and some of the most complicated chapters of human life, I’ve learned to be careful about taking behaviour at face value. We are incredibly quick to decide that someone is difficult, distant, controlling, attention-seeking or emotionally unavailable. We name what we can see and rarely ask what the behaviour has been asked to carry.
One person drinks. Another works fourteen-hour days. Someone else becomes the person everybody calls in a crisis, while quietly having no idea who they would call in their own. There are people who leave relationships the moment intimacy deepens and others who stay long
after love has become painful.
From the outside, these behaviours have very little in common. Psychologically, they may be speaking dialects of the same language. Pain learns the vocabulary available to us. A child who discovers that crying changes nothing may stop crying. A young person who feels safest when they can read every shift in a room may become exceptionally observant. Someone whose needs were treated as inconvenient may become an adult who takes pride in needing very little. Years pass and adaptation becomes identity.
“I’m just independent.” “I’ve always been an overthinker.” “I work better under pressure.” “I’m not very emotional.”
Perhaps that’s who you are. I also think some parts of our personality deserve a second look. The nervous system is constantly learning from experience. It notices what feels dangerous, what brings relief and what helps us remain connected to the people we depend on. It doesn’t
sit down with a notebook and decide to develop a coping strategy. It adapts quietly, often before we have the language to understand what is happening.
This is where pain becomes particularly interesting. Some adaptations are rewarded. The person who can disconnect from exhaustion may become extraordinarily productive. The child who learned to anticipate everyone’s mood may grow into an adult praised for their emotional intelligence. Hyper-independence can look like strength. Control can look likediscipline. The inability to stop can look remarkably like ambition.
You can build a successful life around pain without ever knowing pain helped design it. I think this is one reason change can feel so unsettling. We speak about healing as though people are simply putting down something heavy. Sometimes we’re asking them to question the
architecture of the life they’ve built.
If I stop rescuing everyone, will they still need me? If I rest, who am I without my productivity? If I no longer live in crisis, why does calm feel so uncomfortable?
If I let someone care for me, what happens to the version of me who survived by needing
nobody?
These questions require more than positive thinking. They ask us to become curious about the behaviours we’ve spent years judging. Perhaps the question isn’t always, “Why am I like this?” Perhaps it’s, “When did this become useful?” That small shift matters.
It moves us away from shame and towards understanding. It allows us to recognise that pain isn’t expressed equally across families, generations or communities. Some of us were taught to speak about it. Some were taught to pray through it, work through it, drink through it or never bring shame to the family by mentioning it at all. We inherit more than eye colour and family names. Sometimes we inherit instructions for how pain should be carried. Quietly, productively, privately or with a smile.
The woman I mentioned at the beginning wasn’t lying when she told me she was fine. I think she had simply become fluent in a version of “fine” that had helped her survive for a very long time. There is a difference. Maybe the work isn’t forcing pain to speak louder. Maybe it’s learning
to recognise the language it has been speaking all along.
With clarity and heart,
Paula | Your Heart Therapist
