Feeling Relief After Hard Times? What It’s Teaching You

Life is full of repetition. We do the same things day in and day out, week in and week out. Repetition gives us a feeling of comfort, and the repetitive nature of life makes us feel secure.

If things kept changing and were always different, it would be stressful and tiring. But, of course, a little change is nice. However, this everyday repetition isn't the kind that I want to talk about.

The repetition in my life is usually the bad kind—the repetition of undesirable situations. But sometimes, it can be positive. There are two kinds of repetition in my life.

The first is situations that have the same elements as other situations I have been in, like chances that I've had to change my job or positions that I was excited about and that almost happened but then didn't. The second is when the exact same thing repeats itself, like getting the same headache on the same day three weeks in a row. These are the kinds of repetition I can't ignore, even though I can never fully understand why these situations repeat.

Sometimes, if I think rationally about it, then I can see that for certain situations, it was a good thing for me to do the same thing again. In some cases, I could do it better or I could appreciate more what was happening, but more often than not, it seems pointless and, not to mention, painful to do it all again. And it often seems like I'm finished with repeating a certain type of situation, but then months or years later, it will come back to repeat again.

I'll explain this in more detail. I just recently had what I would call an emotionally charged conversation with my wife. In this type of conversation, both of us are saying what we feel and are trying to make the other person understand how difficult our lives have been.

But this conversation has happened multiple times over the years, and it must have been many years since it happened last. And this time, as in the other times, we were both saying the same things that we always say and pointing out the same problems that we have always had. And when it happens, this is when I feel like my life hasn't progressed or moved forward at all, and I'm back where I started.

And it's no one's fault. I'm not blaming my wife or my relationship with her. It's my life that isn't living up to my expectations.

I base these expectations on the trends my life has been following and how good my life has been lately. So if I get hit with something from the past, it seems like a backward step to me. And although my initial reaction when I repeat these situations is that I'm back at the beginning where I started, what I really have to do is to look a little closer.

When a situation repeats, I expect it to go as horribly wrong as the last time, but each time it happens, I feel like I am being let off from how bad it was before. This can either be by the result being more positive, the situation being over more quickly, or me feeling less damaged from the experience. Also, when I look back over my life, it's clear that although these situations repeat, I have seen a steady improvement in each area of my life.

And it might be that the repetition punctuates the progress that I've made and gives me a chance to reflect on where I was and where I am now.

When Pain Becomes a Signal: Change Your Response

My health, and by that, I mean my general body condition, is important to me. I want to feel fit and feel good about myself, the same as everybody does. And I’ve always done some exercise in various forms since I was a teenager.

But I did also used to smoke, until my son was born, and then I quit. But strangely, even when I smoked, I thought I was pretty healthy. I guess it’s human nature to justify doing the things we want to do, even when it is doing us harm.

Like everybody, I have some things that I would call health issues, but in the last ten years, they have definitely multiplied. I probably get headaches every week and sometimes on the same day each week. These are the headaches that medicine won’t cure, and I just have to live with the pain until I’m released from it.

Going to the restroom is another example. I definitely go to the restroom more than anyone I know. And I’d say at best what I can get from it is...

feeling uncomfortable because I need to go, being embarrassed because I need to go again, and worrying about whether I’ll have the opportunity to go again in the future. These things are a constant problem and affect my whole day because I have to navigate through some tricky situations while also trying to cope with these health issues. Another thing that has multiplied in the last ten years is the amount of pain I have.

And by that, I mean actual physical pain. I’m not talking about anything major like fractures or breaks, but bruises, cuts, and scrapes have become part of my weekly routine. It’s honestly ridiculous.

I feel like there’s a weekly quota of pain that I’m unintentionally trying to achieve every week. And it’s probably the only area of my life where I really can’t see any rhyme or reason to it. Instead of "no pain, no gain," it seems to be more like "no pain....no pain!" But however pointless it seems, I still can’t avoid it, even though I’m very careful.

There are other times, though, when the pain does feel more meaningful. And it makes me think I should stop doing what I’m doing or that I shouldn’t have done the thing that I just did. There are times when the pain is like a wake-up call to change my behavior.

I’ll give you an example. I was at home in the shower recently, and I was stressing about a problem at work, and then I dropped the showerhead on my foot. It was painful, nothing serious, but it really made me snap out of my unhealthy thoughts and think that maybe I should stop stressing and think about something else instead.

And that brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about: stress. This period of my life has without a doubt been the busiest and most stressful. And I’ve been under a lot of pressure in every area.

But after years of this, I do feel that it has had a positive effect, in that it has made me better at prioritizing what’s important and better at decision-making. The stress always comes in waves, and each time it comes, it pushes me to the limit or even beyond the limit of what I can endure, and then it fades away. All of my health issues are like this.

There’s an element of them taking me just past what I can bear, and then finally being released from it. But the two most important things that I notice about these issues are the repetition of them and the timing of them.