The Alchemy of Pain: Turning Hurt into Heroism

Why Feeling Your Pain Matters… and Why Staying in It Will Break You

You’re slicing vegetables for dinner.
Talking to a friend. Laughing. Not paying full attention.

And then it happens. The knife slips.
A sharp sting… the bloom of red.

You stop everything.
Look down. Assess. How deep? Does it need stitches?

That moment is what I call Feel. The pause. The acknowledgment. The willingness to actually register what just happened instead of ignoring it.

Then comes Deal. You clean it. Bandage it. Maybe drive yourself to urgent care. If it’s bad enough, you let someone stitch it up.

Finally… Heal. You protect the wound. You change the dressing. And, more importantly, you learn from it. Next time you cut vegetables, you slow down. Or maybe you take a cooking class so you don’t make the same mistake again.

This is how we handle physical wounds. Even if someone else walked into your kitchen and sliced your finger for you, it would still be your responsibility to go through those steps. Why? Because they may not help. They may even deny it happened. Fault is irrelevant in that moment. Your finger is still bleeding.

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The Big Idea

The same process should happen with emotional wounds… but most of us were never taught how.
We’re great at patching fingers. We’re terrible at patching hearts.

When we get emotionally cut, we tend to go one of two ways:
We either run around blaming everyone else for the pain and demanding they fix it… or we sit and wallow in it, waiting for someone to rescue us.

In the physical world, that would be like running to your neighbor’s house, shoving your bleeding finger in their face, and screaming “Do something!” Or collapsing on the curb, staring at your hand, refusing any help because you’ve decided the wound defines you.

Both are versions of the victim state. And here’s the hard truth: being a victim is necessary at first… but it’s toxic if you stay there.

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The Breakdown

Why Victimhood Is Part of Healing
When you’re hurt, you are a victim. There’s no bypassing that. To pretend otherwise is to deny reality. You have to feel it. You have to accept that something happened to you. Rejecting that stage stifles healing.

But the victim state is meant to be a doorway, not a destination.
Stay there too long, and it becomes your identity. You start to believe the wound is who you are.

The Danger of Perpetuating It
When pain becomes identity, you stop moving forward. Your story turns into a shrine for what happened instead of a bridge to what’s possible. This is a M.U.D. moment… a Misguided Unconscious Decision. Maybe it happened when you didn’t have the maturity, skills, or support to deal with the hurt… or maybe it’s a pattern you’ve chosen without realizing it, repeating the same reaction over and over.

And there’s an even darker form of stuckness…

The Villain State
Some people take their pain and use it as a weapon. If they’ve been cut, they cut others. If they’ve been bullied, they bully. If they’ve been betrayed, they betray. Their wound becomes an excuse to inflict the same hurt they suffered. This is the most corrosive state of all, because it spreads pain instead of resolving it.

The Victor (or Hero) State
Then there are the ones who transcend. They still have their pain… but they integrate it. They learn from it. They carry it without letting it define them. And they use it to help others avoid the same suffering.

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The Backpack of Pain

Imagine your pain as a heavy backpack. You can’t take it off. It’s yours now. That’s what most people don’t get… healing doesn’t always mean the pain goes away. More often than not, it stays.

The victim opens the backpack, stares at the bricks inside, and laments them… maybe even names them, organizes them, makes them part of who they are.

The villain pulls out the bricks and throws them at other people.

The hero looks inside, picks up the same bricks, and starts building. They create something useful, something beautiful, something that makes the weight worth carrying.

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Practical Takeaway

When you get hurt — physically or emotionally — give yourself permission to feel it. Name it. Let yourself be a victim long enough to acknowledge what happened.

Then… deal with it. Take responsibility for your own healing, regardless of fault. No one else can feel, deal, and heal for you.

Finally, choose your relationship with the pain. Keep it as a brick to carry forever if you must… but decide whether it will be dead weight, a weapon, or a building block.

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When Pain Gets Stuck in the Body

The victim state isn’t just a mindset… it’s a weight in your biology. When you stay in it too long, the stuck emotion gets imprinted into your energy body. It’s not just “in your head” — it lives in your nervous system, your cells, your posture, your breath.

If you’ve ever felt like a chronic illness, mysterious fatigue, or relentless stuckness in your life is somehow tied to deep emotional pain you’ve never fully processed… you’re not imagining it.

If you’ve noticed the same negative patterns repeating, relationships, money, self-sabotage, that’s M.U.D. (Misguided Unconscious Decisions) doing its work. It’s programming that sits in the subconscious, quietly pulling the strings.

And here’s the thing… the body keeps the score. But so does the brain. And the biofield… the energetic blueprint that holds your patterns.

You can’t clear this with talk therapy alone… the subconscious is not logical or linear, and it doesn’t respond to rational coaching. You can’t fix it with psychedelics or energy medicine alone either… those might open a door, but they don’t sequence the healing.

True resolution requires all of it… in the right order. That’s why I developed Rewrite, Rewire, Retrain.

We rewrite the story that created the wound (not erase… edit and integrate).
We rewire the emotion that drives the pattern.
We retrain the body and nervous system so the change holds.

Most modalities skip one or two of these steps… or do them in the wrong sequence. That’s why people relapse into the same stuckness.

This is the work we specialize in at Next Level Human — giving people the deep clearing they deserve at the subconscious level where the M.U.D. actually lives. If you’re stuck I can help.

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Closing Thought

We all have our cuts. Some are fresh. Some are decades old. The question isn’t whether you’ve been hurt… it’s whether you’ve learned to carry the backpack without letting it crush you.

And maybe, just maybe, whether you’ve started building something from the bricks inside.

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PS: If you’re ready to break free of the patterns that keep you stuck in the victim state and step into the kind of person who can transform pain into power, explore my Next Level Human Architect program today. Spots are limited… don’t wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching