Why I Held On To My Pain For 60 years
When holding space for yourself deepens how you hold space for others
This week I was the client.
As part of my training to become a Compassion Key™ master practitioner, I sat on the receiving end of a session — not as the guide, but as the one being guided.
I chose to work on something that has followed me my entire life: the feeling of inadequacy that surfaces every time I step into something new.
A new program.
A new relationship.
A new challenge.
The nervous system fires up and suddenly I am back in that old familiar place.
You don’t understand this. You never will. You are on your own.
I knew exactly where it started.
The Classroom
I was six years old, sitting in the front row of my first-grade classroom. The teacher called on me.
How much is five plus five?
I looked up to the left — and I remember this clearly, even now, sixty years later, the exact direction my eyes moved — turning the question over in my mind, visualizing it, feeling my way toward the answer. I was pretty sure it was ten.
Before I could speak, my teacher’s voice cut through the room.
“The answer is not written on the ceiling.”
Something hit me in the chest. Shame moved through my body like a wave and I froze. Completely froze. The word was right there — ten — and I couldn’t say it. I had lost my confidence in a single moment.
She waited a few more seconds, then moved on to a boy at the back of the class.
He said ten.
I sat there. I knew it was ten. I had known it was ten.
What NLP Revealed Decades Later
Years later, I learned something that reframed that moment entirely.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) teaches us that we each have a primary way of processing information — visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. It maps the relationship between how we think, how we feel, and how we express ourselves. And one of the things it reveals is that our eyes move in predictable directions depending on what the brain is doing in any given moment.
Looking up to the left is associated with visual memory recall. The brain reaching for something it has seen before. Something it is trying to picture.
That six-year-old girl looking up to the left?
She was doing exactly what her brain was designed to do.
She was visualizing five plus five.
Trying to see what ten looked like.
She wasn’t lost. She wasn’t slow. She wasn’t avoiding the question.
She was thinking. In her own way. At her own pace.
Fast Forward to Today
You might wonder why someone in their sixties is still working on something rooted in first grade.
Because it never really left. It showed up when I left high school swearing I would never step foot in a classroom again.
It showed up fifteen years later when I enrolled in a PhD program in Transformative Learning.
It showed up at the start of this very training in the Compassion Key modality.
Anything new has the potential to activate the whole cascade. The nervous system remembers.
So there I was in the session, being guided back toward that original moment.
The classroom.
The ceiling.
The shame.
Ready, finally, to let it go.
Except I couldn’t.
Through the Lens of Expansive Living
As I was being guided through the process of releasing the shame and pain from that original moment, something stopped me. I didn’t want to let go.
I paused. I turned my attention inward, trying to understand what was going on. And then, suddenly, I got it.
In that classroom, when the shame moved through me and no one came — no teacher, no adult who said “don’t rush, take all the time you need, I will help you think it through” — I was left completely alone with my feelings. And those feelings, as unwelcome as they were, were the only ones present with me.
They were the only witness to what had actually happened.
Shame had stood by me when no one else did. And some part of me, without ever knowing it, had been loyal to it in return. To release it felt like abandonment. Like betrayal of the only friend who had shown up for me in that moment.
We spend enormous energy trying to release the things that weigh us down. We do the therapy, the journaling, the breath-work, the healing retreats. And sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, we wonder if this particular thing is simply ours to carry forever.
What if the reason it won’t release is not that we haven’t worked hard enough?
What if we are holding on — not to the wound — but to the only witness we had in the original moment?
What contracts us is not always an enemy to defeat. Sometimes it is a part of us that needs to be honored before it can release. The path through is not always force, or excavation, or harder effort.
Sometimes it begins with dignity.
With acknowledgment.
A moment of genuine respect for what has accompanied us, however painfully, through a long stretch of life.
What I Did Instead
I stopped trying to let go. And I honored it first.
I gave the shame and the pain the respect and dignity they deserved for having been my truthful and loyal companions for all these years.
Not because shame had served me well.
Not because I was grateful for the years of self-doubt and hesitation it had seeded in me.
But because it had been there. It had accompanied me. And it deserved to be acknowledged for that — the way you acknowledge anyone who has walked beside you through a long stretch of life, even if the relationship was complicated.
I thanked each of them for being my witness. For being present when no one else was.
And as I did, something shifted. The grip began to soften. Not all at once. Slowly. The way something releases when it finally feels seen rather than fought.
There was still grief in the letting go. A kind of emptiness where something familiar had lived. I honored that too.
And then — and this is the part I want you to stay with — something else moved in. Not immediately. But it came. A sense of ease. Of possibility. The exhale, followed by an inhale that felt different. Lighter. More curious than afraid.
Try This
You might be reading this and thinking of something you have been trying to release for a long time. Something you have worked on, circled back to, made progress with, and still found waiting for you.
I want to offer you this not as a prescription, but as a process. A way in.
Recognition — Bring to mind the thing you keep returning to. The wound, the pattern, the feeling you thought you’d be over by now. Notice it without judgment. Let yourself say: this has been with me for a long time.
Reframe — Consider that you may not be broken for holding onto it. You may have been loyal. This pain, this shame, this fear — it was present in a moment when you were left completely alone. It witnessed what happened when no one else did. You didn’t fail to release it. You honored it, without even knowing that’s what you were doing.
Permission — You don’t have to rip it out. You don’t have to re-live the original story or sob your way through it. You only need to acknowledge this companion for what it has been: your witness. Give it the dignity of being seen. Thank it — not for the suffering it brought, but for the loyalty it showed.
Opening — In that acknowledgment, something may begin to shift. The grip softens. Not because you forced it, but because it finally felt honored enough to let go. And in the space it leaves behind, something else becomes possible. A new thought. A new feeling. A new way of moving through the very thing that used to stop you.
You don’t have to keep the friendship. But you can honor it before you say goodbye.
And in that honoring, something that has been frozen for a very long time might finally be ready to soften.
I’d love to hear from you.
What stirs in you as you read this?
What do you discover about yourself in the process, and how does honoring your own pain deepen the way you show up for others?
Leave a comment. These conversations matter.
I send your way blessings of compassionate witnessing,
Anna