My daughter came home last night and told me that there was some light on her dashboard. I asked her which one and she didn’t know what it was called. She said it had been on for a few weeks but she kept forgetting to mention it to me. I was horrified!! How can you just ignore a warning light? The longer you take to respond the more damage could be done, I told her. She didn’t know what the light was for and so it was easier to ignore. When we figured out it was the tire pressure indicator and I explained how easy it could be to fix, she set out the next day and got her tires adjusted and the light turned off in about 5 min!!
We often think of emotional pain as the problem! But actually, emotional pain is more like the indicator light on our dash! It’s not the problem, but it is trying to warn us about a problem “under our hood.” When we don’t know what it’s telling us, we can try and ignore it or worse, cover it up. That’s what addictions can be, the duct tape covering up an indicator. That emotional pain is trying to tell us something about our beliefs. When we try and escape the pain we miss out on the underlying message to the pain.
Sometimes we need help discovering what the warning light of emotional pain is about. We need a therapist (mechanic 🙂 ) to help us check “under the hood.” We delay because we don’t know how bad it could be, or how much its going to cost us. But often the delay just makes things worse. Checking out the indicator light earlier is better.
