by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Sometimes, We Hold Onto Emotional Pain Because We Don’t Want To Let Go of Whatever Caused It In the First Place
There’s a strange but very human paradox I see again and again when working with people on going deeper into their own REALNESS.
It always unfolds like this:
People come to a point where they know that something inside themselves is holding them back, they can feel it in their body, they become aware of their patterns, they can name the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ like shame, guilt, trauma, fear, or resentment, and they can even pinpoint exactly where it all started and still – despite all of this awareness – they don’t want to let it go.
This isn’t because they’re ‘weak’ or because they’ve ended up falling into the trap of ‘enjoying’ their own suffering and becoming addicted to it but because letting go of emotional pain sometimes feels like losing something vital that we can’t imagine living without – a connection, an identity, a story, or even themselves.
This article is about this phenomenon:
We’ll explore why people hold on to emotional pain, what’s really happening underneath it, and how to move towards wholeness without falling into the Void.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Holding Emotional Pain: What We Cover in This Article
- Sometimes, We Hold Onto Emotional Pain Because We Don’t Want To Let Go of Whatever Caused It In the First Place
- The Moment People Wake Up to What’s Driving Them
- Why Letting Go of Emotional Pain Feels Impossible
- What We’re Really Holding On To When We Hold Emotional Pain
- Reality as Medicine: The Role of Grief
- Holding Onto Emotional Pain Blocks Our Relationship With the Truth
- Replacing the Old Self-Image With Something Real
- Letting Go of Emotional Pain Without Losing the Relationship
The Moment People Wake Up to What’s Driving Them
A phenomenon I’ve seen a bunch of times now when working with people to grow REAL and move towards a real vision is this:
They inevitably become aware of unhelpful emotions from the past that are still driving them and acting as blocks or obstacles to the present and a future they actually want to live in.
These emotions usually aren’t random because they’re almost always unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma picked up in relationship with an authority figure – most often a parent, but sometimes a teacher, religious figure, or caregiver.
This is ‘normal’ and something that happens to pretty much all of us because at some point in childhood, something happened that caused us to become split from ourselves and to have to create a self-image (a.k.a. ‘The Ego’) to live by as a way of surviving this.
This can happen for a load of different reasons but usually it’s things like:
- Parts of the real self not being welcomed or mirrored by somebody we look up to for guidance (parent etc.)
- Emotional needs not being met.
- Authentic expression of our realness being subtly or explicitly punished and so we end up trying to disown those expressions.
In all of these types of episodes (and anything similar), a child will do what children always do: adapt.
What ‘adapting’ means in this case is disowning very real ‘parts’ of themselves to preserve connection and so they end up creating the ego-based self-image mentioned above as a coping and survival strategy.
The cost of this is that the ‘parts’ of themselves that didn’t fit go underground and become part of the shadow self.
Fast-forward to adulthood and decades of living in this fragmented way and people start doing the inner work because they know that something needs to change (though they don’t always know what):
They reflect, they meditate, they read books, and they start to notice their reactions, emotional and mental blocks, patterns of self-sabotage, and the way that they resist and avoid life.
This continues for as long as it needs to continue until they eventually dig deep enough and hit something fundamental.
This is when they end up saying something like:
“I know this is holding me back… but I can’t let it go”.
This is because what they’ve actually reached is a cornerstone of their current personality.
Why Letting Go of Emotional Pain Feels Impossible
When they hit this cornerstone it can seem almost impossible to let go of because it seems like reality itself (which, of course, we can never let go of because reality isn’t going anywhere and so can only be ACCEPTED) – actually, it’s just one of the final blocks to fully accepting reality and getting a solid foundation on which to build our real lives.
This apparent inability to let go almost always comes down to two main reasons.
1. The Emotions Are the Fuel of the Ego
The shame, guilt, or trauma people uncover at this stage aren’t just ‘feelings’ but the fundamental drivers of the ego structure they’ve identified with for most of their lives.
This ego – despite being unreal and just a survival mechanism – still has a really important job:
- It helps to explain who they became.
- It justifies their behaviours and the choices they’ve made.
- It gives ‘meaning’ to their suffering.
- It offers a sense of control and predictability as they move through the world.
When someone doesn’t yet have a real vision for who they’re becoming in their realness, then it’s only natural that the idea of releasing these emotions feels like stepping off a cliff.
Instead of it being an opportunity for freedom, letting go (when we don’t have that real vision) simply looks like:
So naturally the nervous system says, “No thanks” and we keep clinging to all of the patterns that trapped us in the first place (as a reaction to all the ‘stuff’ we went through).
This is why people can get stuck at a very high level of self-awareness but still feel paralysed by thier emotional pain:
Awareness alone isn’t enough because without something real to move towards in the form of real action, the ego feels like the only thing keeping them alive.
(This is why in my coaching containers we always go through three stages: Awareness (Deconstruct Ego), Acceptance (Integrate Shadow), and Action (Trust Yourself and Life)).
2. Emotional Pain Feels Like the Only Remaining Connection
The second reason is more emotionally charged:
Those ‘cornerstone’ emotions are often the only remaining link to an important relationship from the past.
What this means is that – even if the relationship was painful, distant, or emotionally unsafe – the adult self (identified with the ego that arose in reaction to this emotion pain) might only have shame, guilt, anger, or grief left as proof that it mattered.
Sometimes, letting go can feel like erasing the relationship entirely and so even if what remains is suffering, it still feels better than nothing.
Underneath this is a quiet fear:
“If I let go of this pain, there will be nothing left of them… and nothing left of me“.
When you look at it like this it’s no wonder we sometimes find it so difficult to let go and move on.
What We’re Really Holding On To When We Hold Emotional Pain
Here’s the key reframe that can set you free if what you’re reading here applies to your own situation:
We’re not actually holding on to emotions themselves because once you drop the stories, emotions are just energy stored in the body – what we’re really holding on to is the thread those emotions create in the narrative of our life.
We hold onto this ‘thread’ because it has all kinds of information that helps us make ‘sense’ of life:
- This is who I am.
- This is what happened to me.
- This is why my life looks like this.
- This is what love is.
- Etc. Etc. Etc.
Because the emotions in question helped to shape our self-image, we fear that letting go of the story will cause us to lose ourselves completely.
For this reason we attach an extra level of ‘meaning’ to the idea of holding on:
- Holding on means I’m loyal.
- Holding on means I understand them.
- Holding on means I’m deep.
- Holding on means I’m not heartless.
- (Or anything else that supports how you need to see yourself).
At the same time, we attach another kind of ‘meaning’ to letting go (which really just means integrating – not forgetting about something completely):
- Letting go means I’m betraying them.
- Letting go means it didn’t ‘matter’.
- Letting go means I’m abandoning my younger self.
None of this is true – which is why part of healing your relationship with yourself is about testing the reality of the assumptions and beliefs you carry – but it definitely feels true when we’re filtering everything through the ego.
When you strip all of this away, the deeper motivation is pretty simple (though not always easy):
We’re not ready to face reality yet.
Instead of being grounded in the reality of where we are now as an ADULT who can make real choices, we’re still seeing the situation through the eyes of our inner child and holding on to what we thought we needed or hoped would happen back then instead of what actually was and now IS.
Reality as Medicine: The Role of Grief
Reality is always medicine because it allows us to find a solid foundation of acceptance on which we can build something that will actually ‘work’ (because real always works) but it rarely tastes sweet at first.
In this case, embracing reality means grieving the past properly (instead of blocking the grieving process with our ego and it’s belief systems)- not just grieving what happened but grieving what never happened but that we wish did.
This might be things like:
- The childhood we didn’t get.
- The parent who couldn’t show up in the way we hoped they would.
- The relationship that never became safe.
This grief is essential because shame and guilt linger when grief is avoided but grieving is a PROCESS leads to back to acceptance (which means reality is involved).
In other words, acceptance is what finally allows the nervous system to relax and the body to release stored emotional energy that keeps us locked in ego over realness.
Holding Onto Emotional Pain Blocks Our Relationship With the Truth
Here are some truths that usually need to be accepted so that we can start to find that real foundation and start living in the present instead of attempting to cling onto the past:
The Person Who Hurt Us Was Human
It’s hard to accept this initially but it wasn’t the real version of whoever hurt us that hurt us – it was the symptoms of their own disconnection from realness that caused them to act in an unreal way.
This doesn’t excuse harm, of course but it contextualises it so that we don’t have to take it as a sign that the shame and guilt (etc.) we picked up are actually personal or belong to us:
The Shame and Guilt Were Never Ours
We took a lot of this emotional ‘stuff’ on as coping mechanisms – not because it’s real:
They were strategies for preserving connection, not reflections of truth.
Letting them go isn’t giving up something real but about returning something that was never ours to carry.
We Can’t Get What We Wanted From the Past
This is the hardest pill to swallow for many of us:
We can’t go back in time and so we can’t finally make someone see us, love us properly, or become who we needed them to be.
Once this is fully accepted, something extraordinary happens:
We’re free to work with what actually IS right now so we can build something real.
If you’re ready to go deeper into all of this then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Replacing the Old Self-Image With Something Real
Letting go of this old emotional pain only really becomes safe when something real is there to replace the ego (which is why a lot of therapy etc. doesn’t work – they just poke around in the pain and leave it where it is).
This isn’t about inventing a new identity or anything like that – it’s about unlearning the conditioning that led to the unreal one so you can tap back into your realness:
The process looks like this:
1. Tune Into Essence (Realness)
Your essence isn’t what happened to you but what remains when you can let go of all those stories about what you happened and what it ‘means’ about you.
Values are a powerful doorway here and so are shadow qualities (the parts of you that were once disowned but contain life, creativity, strength, and truth).
When you know your core values and you know what parts of yourself you want to resurface you know who you would be without the emotional pain and you can start ACTING in alignment with this.
2. Create a Vision
A vision gives the psyche somewhere to move and allows you to shift your FOCUS so you’re not just looking at your emotional pain all the time (which is a bad idea because what you focus on grows).
Creating a vision doesn’t mean that you’re creating a fantasy of what you’d like (that would be ego) but a grounded sense of who you’re becoming when you live in alignment with your realness.
3. Break It Into Goals
Vision becomes real through structure and so goals allow you to translate essence into form by taking REAL ACTION.
4. Commit to Habits
Almost daily habits anchor growth in the body and this keeps you in process of growing real rather than trapped in a fixed self-image.
Growth replaces identity as you become something that MOVES towards wholeness instead of something that’s ‘fixed’ behind fragments.
Letting Go of Emotional Pain Without Losing the Relationship
When we accept that the past relationship can never give us what we wanted, we stop trying to extract life from our own emotional pain and that’s when its grip loosens.
Letting go doesn’t erase love, meaning, or impact – it simply removes what was unreal.
Once this happens, we can do something radically different and give ourselves what we didn’t receive:
We can embody the qualities that were ‘missing’ and bring bring them into our families, friendships, and communities.
By giving, we receive and by living in a real way, the past finally catches up with who we really are – not who we think we had to be.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to let go of the past and start living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear in a real way.
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