How to Identify Pain You Have Never Had the Language to Name
Written by Tiara Armstrong, Therapist & Entrepreneur
Tiara Armstrong is a leader in her community known for her work with holistic wellness and liberation-centered healing. She is the owner and therapist of Healing Essence Counseling & Wellness, a community advocate, and a public speaker.
Do you have trouble sleeping because of ruminating thoughts? Do certain memories return when everything around you becomes quiet? Are there experiences from your past that still affect you today, even though you thought you were over them? Sometimes pain remains present long after the experience has passed because we have learned how to carry it without ever learning how to name it. Restorative writing offers a practical place to begin.
What does unnamed pain look like?
We often recognize pain by what happened to us, but we do not always recognize it by what continues happening within us.
You may not walk around saying, "I am still affected by what happened when I was twelve." Instead, you may say, "I overthink everything."
You may not say, "I am afraid of being abandoned." You may say, "I have a hard time trusting people."
You may not say, "I learned that my value comes from being useful to other people." You may simply notice that saying no makes you feel guilty.
The experience has language. You just may not have discovered it yet. This is where restorative writing begins.
Through my Restorative Writing Methodology, Release, Awareness, Identity, and Restoration, I teach people how to begin translating experiences they have carried internally into language they can examine externally. For this exercise, the process begins with three journals.
I call them Getting It Out, Knowing, and Becoming.
Do not begin by trying to write beautifully. Do not begin by trying to understand everything. Certainly do not begin by trying to become someone new. First, get it out.
Getting It Out: Release what you have been carrying
Purchase three separate journals. Physically label the first one Getting It Out. Put the other two away for now.
This journal has one assignment, release.
Write in it when you wake up and again before you go to sleep. Continue using this journal until every page is filled before moving to the next journal. This creates a rhythm of release.
In the morning, write before the demands of the day have an opportunity to drown out what is already speaking within you. At night, write about what you carried throughout the day.
Do not worry about grammar. Do not edit yourself. Do not ask whether something sounds intelligent, fair, spiritual, reasonable, or even important. This is not writing for publication. This is writing when the soul speaks before it has been organized, processed, or made presentable.
If you do not know where to begin, begin with what is present.
"I don't know why that conversation bothered me so much, but I have been thinking about it all day."
"Everyone congratulated me today, but instead of feeling proud, I kept wondering when something would go wrong."
"I told everyone I was fine when she mentioned my childhood, but I have replayed the conversation three times since I got home."
Do not solve these statements yet. Write them.
The purpose of Getting It Out is not immediate understanding. The purpose is to stop requiring your mind to be the permanent storage place for everything you have never said.
Research offers an interesting parallel to this practice. In a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) study on affect labeling, researchers found that putting feelings into words was associated with changes in brain activity related to emotional processing. This does not mean that writing alone resolves trauma, but it helps explain why giving an emotional experience language can matter.
There is another reason I intentionally begin here, you cannot examine what you refuse to put on the page.
Fill the journal. Then go back.
Knowing: Identify the patterns in your writing
Once Getting It Out is complete, label your second journal Knowing. Now your job changes. You are no longer only writing what hurts. You are beginning to investigate what your own writing has been trying to tell you.
Go back through Getting It Out slowly. Read your words as though you were studying the story of someone who matters deeply to you. Look for repetition. Which people repeatedly appear? Which memories keep returning? Which emotions occur in situations that appear unrelated? Which sentences have you essentially written more than once? Which words keep showing up? Which situations produce a reaction that seems larger than the immediate event?
Circle them. Underline them. Write them down in Knowing. Suppose you discover three entries, "My friend didn't answer me, and I immediately thought she was upset with me." "My supervisor asked to speak with me, and I spent the entire morning assuming I had done something wrong." "My partner got quiet during dinner, and I couldn't relax until I knew we were okay."
Those appear to be three different situations, but Knowing asks you to look underneath them. The recurring issue may not be the unanswered message, your supervisor, or dinner. The recurring thought might be, when someone's behavior changes, I assume I am about to lose safety. Now something that once appeared random has language.
Consider another example. Perhaps your first journal repeatedly contains statements such as, "I hate asking anyone for help," "I'd rather figure it out myself," and "I feel uncomfortable when someone does something for me." Knowing might lead you to ask, "When did needing someone begin to feel unsafe?"
Or perhaps your entries repeatedly say, "I should be further along," "Everyone is passing me," and "Nothing I accomplish feels like enough." The question becomes, "When did achievement become connected to my worth?"
This is the difference between experiencing pain and studying it. Continue writing in Knowing daily, but begin asking questions about what you write. What am I actually feeling? When have I felt this before? What does this remind me of? What did I learn about myself from that experience? Is that belief still true?
You are developing language for what was previously only a feeling, reaction, memory, or pattern. That is awareness.
Becoming: Separate your pain from your identity
Only after Release and Awareness do we arrive at the third journal. Label it Becoming. This journal asks a fundamentally different question.
Getting It Out asks, "What am I carrying?" Knowing asks, "What has it taught me to believe?" Becoming asks, "Who am I without it?"
Pain does not only leave memories. Sometimes it influences identities. A child who was repeatedly ignored may grow into an adult who calls herself independent without realizing that some of her independence developed because relying on other people once felt unsafe.
Someone who was repeatedly criticized may describe himself as a perfectionist without recognizing the fear underneath the perfection. Someone who experienced instability may become extraordinarily good at anticipating everyone else's needs while having difficulty identifying her own.
These adaptations may have helped you navigate difficult experiences. Becoming is not about pretending they never served you. It is about examining whether they still get to define you.
Perhaps Knowing revealed the belief, I have to be useful to deserve love. In Becoming, you might write, I am worthy of love even when I am resting.
Perhaps Knowing uncovered, if I trust people, they will eventually leave. Becoming might answer, What happened to me taught me to expect abandonment. That expectation protected me then, but it does not have to make every decision for me now.
Or perhaps you discovered, my mistakes mean I am a failure. Becoming might begin with, I can make a mistake without making the mistake my identity.
This is identity work. You are learning to separate what happened to you from who you are.
Why getting it out, knowing, and becoming happen in this order
Do not rush to Becoming. There is a reason the journals are completed in this order.
Getting It Out comes before Knowing because you need material to examine. Knowing comes before Becoming because you need awareness before you can begin questioning an identity shaped by painful experiences. Release, awareness, and identity. Through that process, restoration can begin.
Think of pain like baggage from a flight you were never supposed to board but somehow found yourself on anyway. For years, you may have carried the luggage simply because no one told you that you were allowed to put it down.
Restorative writing asks you to open the suitcase. First, take everything out. Then identify what is actually inside. Finally, decide what still belongs to you. That is the art of translating pain.
How to begin your first journal today
You do not need to understand your entire life tonight. You need three journals.
Write Getting It Out on the first, Knowing on the second, and Becoming on the third. Then put Knowing and Becoming away.
Tomorrow morning, open Getting It Out and answer one question, "What have I been carrying that I have never given myself permission to say?"
Do not make it beautiful. Make it honest.
Because sometimes the pain we struggle hardest to understand is not pain without meaning. It is pain that has been waiting for language.
Continue your restorative writing journey
If you are ready to continue the work beyond these three journals, The Art of Translating Pain, A Restorative Writing Workbook for Healing, Wholeness, and Transformation expands the Restorative Writing Methodology through Release, Awareness, and Identity, providing a guided process for putting language to pain and examining the story it has helped you tell about yourself.
To learn more about Tiara Christopher and the Restorative Writing Methodology, visit TiarasTestimony, explore her writing on the TiarasTestimony Blog, or book a consultation with The Restorative Methodologist.
Read more from Tiara Armstrong
Tiara Armstrong, Therapist & Entrepreneur
Tiara Armstrong is a holistic-based Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor & Supervisor, an EMDR trained therapist, and owner of Healing Essence Counseling & Wellness. She provides liberation-centered healing for BIPOC women, helping them shed limiting beliefs, realign their mind, body, & intuition, and show up authentically in the world. With the use of holistic-based modalities & an integrative therapeutic approach, Tiara cultivates a healing environment for clients that leads to self-exploration and growth from within.
