"Clean pain is the pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth…Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others."
- Resmaa Menakem
You may have noticed a trend in my writing. I’m engaged in a yearlong study of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem, and the book’s concepts have become the lens through which I’m seeing so much of my personal healing work and the challenges that my clients bring. Remsaa’s work integrates a focus on the body and the nervous system with history and action for social justice in a way that’s compelling and clarifying for me. Writing as I’m in process with this book has been a main way I’ve been integrating its lessons, and I’ll continue to share some of that writing here.
The distinction between what Resmaa calls “clean pain” and “dirty pain” has been particularly helpful in distinguishing how my response to a situation impacts how I metabolize the stress of that situation, or how that stress gets stuck or loops. (I’ll say that the terms “clean” and “dirty” don’t really resonate with me. For myself I’ve been thinking about “clear pain” vs. “murky pain” or “moving pain” vs. “stuck pain.” Once you understand the concepts, choose the words that resonate with you.)
Last month I wrote about how we must understand our personal patterns so that we can show up more fully to our personal and collective healing work. When I think about dirty pain as the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial, it becomes clear to me that codependence is a manifestation of dirty pain on an individual and family level. Patterns of codependence are rooted in avoidance, blame and denial, as well as patterns of control, compliance and low self-esteem.
(Side note: Being able to organize my patterns of relating into a framework like codependence helps me to notice behaviors that fit into the pattern more quickly so that I can interrupt them. This is a cognitive strategy that’s only helpful if it’s paired with the settling in the body that Resmaa outlines in his book. If your system doesn’t ike to make sense of things in this way, adding the label of codependence to ways of relating may feel pathologizing and unhelpful. As they say in 12-Step fellowships, take what you like and leave the rest.)
Codependence, like white supremacy culture, is a distortion of reality created to justify violence. In America, white supremacy culture (and whiteness in general) emerged to justify and “make sense of” the violence of genocide, colonization, plantation capitalism and chattel slavery. In families, codependence emerges to justify and “make sense of” addiction and other ways of coping or relating that overwhelm our nervous systems. In families, children inherit or develop patterns of codependence as survival strategies used to cope with an untenable and overwhelming reality. Their nervous systems are not equipped to make sense of the reality of their lives and, without more adaptive ways to cope, codependence offers relief in the short term.
That’s the thing about dirty pain, right? It offers relief in the short term. If we’re not able to tolerate the discomfort of the present moment and zoom out to view any given stressful situation from a broader perspective, the immediate relief that dirty pain offers can be very enticing. As Resmaa acknowledges, “clean pain hurts like hell.” But clean pain has the potential to transform inside our bodies and within our relationships. Dirty pain just creates more pain. In order to tolerate the discomfort of clean pain to get to the healing it offers, we have to practice settling our nervous systems to include that discomfort, not block it out or bypass it. Many of us are not yet resourced enough to do that alone, which is why doing healing work in community is so important and profound. We need each other to face clean pain, and we need each other to heal.