Joe asks the participant to “welcome that hurt in a way that you always wanted it to be welcomed when you were a kid.” As a child, when they hurt, their father got angry and their mother guilt-tripped them. No one was simply present with the pain. The exercise is to become that presence for yourself now.
As the participant welcomes the hurt, they describe it as “almost feels like terror” — and Joe observes: “Looks like it’s half terror, half love.” This is the paradox at the heart of emotional healing: the feelings we’ve most avoided contain both the pain and the love we’ve been seeking. The terror and the love aren’t sequential — they arrive together when the heart opens.
“See what it’s like to welcome that hurt in a way that you always wanted it to be welcomed when you were a kid.”
“Almost feels like terror. Looks like it’s half terror, half love.”
The participant had been “tired of feeling the hurt” — it hit them randomly, unpredictably. But the hurt kept coming precisely because it hadn’t been fully welcomed. Once welcomed — even for just a minute — the participant’s entire perception shifted. They could see their parents differently, feel empathy they couldn’t access before, and sense a path toward the openhearted, boundaried relationship they wanted.
Related Concepts
- Love yourself how you wanted to be loved
- Welcoming not just accepting emotions
- Welcoming is self-love
- Seeing parents’ terror dissolves resentment
- If you can’t love the thing, love the resistance to the thing
- Loving parents requires both open heart and strong boundaries