Why We Remember Pain More Than Happiness?

Why We Remember Pain More Than Happiness?

Why I kept count of my pain while letting the joy fade?

 

I don’t live in the past painful chapters of my life but pain still lives inside me.

It’s a new day but I haven’t yet fully embraced it.

A part of me is often found going back, sitting there with those scars and wounds as if I can erase them or maybe I want to erase them.

They never left me; they followed me into this day. That realization is what keeps pulling me back, as though revisiting them might finally destroy their grip on me.

That part of my life is over, but I am still not over it.

Some chapters haunt us long after they are gone.
They suddenly bump into the middle of a beautiful chapter, reminding us of an ugliness nothing seems able to erase. We carry them into every chapter that follows.

They bring chaos, fill me with pain, and embitter my soul. Yet despite the indignation they stir within me, I fail to abandon them.
I have a choice to relive the chapters where I was happy but still, I find myself keeping count of the painful ones. This reminds me of the quote by C.S. Lewis:

“Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.”
— C.S. Lewis said, The Problem of Pain

I could not understand why every time I kept amplifying my pain by going back again and again to those past painful events.

My mind seemed obsessed with uncovering why it all happened as if detecting every possible reason might finally settle something within me.

Perhaps my mind had not yet made peace with the pain I cried in, crumbled in, and tormented myself within. It felt as though my soul was searching for justification for an unrest it had never found solace in.

When I go back and sit with my pain, I only become more entangled. And when I return, I lose a part of what I have now.

This unending time travel, with no worthwhile place to stop, only delays my future voyages.

For a long time, I had no control over these frequent revisits to the painful chapters of my life. But when I noticed myself counting pain while letting joy fade, I chose this time not to escape the pattern, but to understand it.

When pain trapped me in a dark den of thoughts, I realized that the den was the real suffering. It kept me from stepping into the wide, living grassland of the present moments.

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Like I wanted to be the savior of my life, a force from within pushed me to break this morbid loop. I wanted to cut the cord, not to disown my past but to not let it rule my present.

And in this pursuit of becoming my own Hero, rescuing myself from the Dark Den, I began an inner quest to understand my unhealthy attachment to pain.

A deep dive, long contemplation, self-assessment, and tracing my emotions around pain, I did it all. I did not grow resentment toward my past; I only wanted it to stop keeping me in anguish.

💍My first finding:

Pain and happiness affect us differently, which is why we respond to them differently. But it is not the effect itself that shapes our inner world; it is our reaction to it.
Our reaction determines whether we allow experiences to rule us or whether we become their custodian.

And I discovered something unsettling:
My reactions to pain and happiness were deeply imbalanced.

I was choosing one side of life while running away from the other.

I welcomed joy and asked pain to leave.
The truth was, I never welcomed life as a whole.

I expected an easy life; comfortable and pleasing to my senses. Pain felt like a threat, a nightmare I wanted to wake up from.

I was wanting life but not ready to welcome it all. I was being unfair to it. And the truth is, we all are.

We are wired to welcome happiness. Our mind does not see it as something new. It knows that feeling. It instantly feels home in that effect.

Because of that familiarity, the mind doesn’t cling to happiness. It flows through it. It passes.

We don’t ruminate on happiness, we live it.
And because of that, it gently dissolves into the next moment.

This means our reaction to happiness creates ripples of calm and peace.
One thought flow into the next, one feeling into another.

Happiness keeps us moving. Pain makes us stop and stare.

This difference in reaction stems from our attachment to joy and our disconnection from the pain.

Our mind is unprepared to receive pain. It appears like a stranger.
We feel as though we have landed in a foreign land, unfamiliar with its terrain and the emotions it fills us with.
These sensations wage a quiet war within us.

Because we are unable to process pain fully, we feel stuck in it. We wrestle with it, and in doing so, we prolong its stay in our lives.
Even when we move past the pain, the shock often continues to linger in our memory.

We revisit it again and again, waiting for something strong enough to replace it.
The mind cannot settle for pain the way it does for happiness.

Until we stop seeing pain as a threat but as a major chapter of life, carrying its own noble purpose, no replacement can make any difference.

This self-contemplation helped me understand why I kept count of the painful chapters of my life.
I had not accepted life in its entirety.
I saw life as unjust because it dealt me experiences that affected me deeply. My attachment to pleasing sensations kept me partial toward my own life. I accepted it half-heartedly.

The pain was not holding me back; my limited vision of life was.

I did not need to remove those painful chapters of my life to stop myself from recording them again and again; I needed to step into the mindset of allowing life to happen in its wholeness.

It was not about mending something in the past to get over those painful events, but about changing my narrative around pain.

I needed to stop giving an unhealthy reaction to all those chapters that were challenging, painful, and uncomfortable, and instead see them as the tools of life: tools to create balance, bring growth, and, above all, help me evolve by embracing change.

💍My second finding:

Happy days offer us ease. Pain demands change.

Because we can continue being who we are in that happy space, it feels like home-peaceful and familiar.

No pressure, no challenge, no transformation required.

The same version of you on repeat.

And because its familiar and looks certain, we embrace it.

But when pain arrives, it shocks us and then shakes us. It disrupts comfort. It demands evolution before it breaks us.

It turns survival into a trial.
Disturbance, discomfort, and an undeniable push to change.
There is no carrying the same self forward.

Pain doesn’t ask permission. It asks for transformation.

Because pain forces us into unfamiliar versions of ourselves, we resent it. We dislike the labor, the strenuous effort to survive, and the bitter emotions we are forced to live with.
And so, we reject pain.

My chapters of pain terrified me too. The shock and the pain made me numb.

They demanded change when I felt least prepared. And so I grew aloof and resentful.

They still hover over me because I have not fully evolved into seeing them as blessings alone.

Every time I see myself recording the past painful events, it dreads me how brutally they killed parts of me back then.

The disturbing thoughts that remind me of how I suffered inflict pain all over again. I struggle to accept it because I still see it as a chapter I was subjected to, one where I had no power to cope.

Happy days don’t haunt us because they didn’t demand anything from us.
Painful days do because survival itself required change.

Because I had to work intensely to survive those painful chapters, I built some sort of aggression towards them which only made things worse.

I had to ask myself: Why do I only look at what pain took from me, and not at what it gave me?

I needed to stop seeing painful chapters as setbacks and recognize them as growth elevators.

I found that it was ok to permit myself to feel sad or weighed down by those painful chapters but I need to fortify my peace with the awareness that I don’t yet know how it is all going to align in my favor.

💍My Third Finding:

My painful chapters have helped me grow in ways I had never imagined but in spite of the growth, the hurt they pierced my soul with weighs more on me.

The reason I keep recording the painful chapters of my life is because I still haven’t made peace with the hurt and sorrow. I know I have evolved; I know pain served me more than it took away my precious moments.

I understand the purpose of my pain.
But the child within me still mourns the harshness I was not ready to endure.

Growth does not erase the memory of the wound; it only teaches us how to carry it.

It feels as though the Divine is telling me: you carry gold within you, but it needs refinement otherwise it will remain unused.

But even if refining gold is sacred, it does not erase the burns it had to endure while burning.

The awareness I needed to step into is, I cannot cherish the gold if I continue to relive the burns.

The purpose of life is not to make us happy; it is to help us evolve.

I mistook life for happiness.

Life does not serve happiness, it gives experiences. And in those experiences, the soul grows to the next level. This signifies that evolution is the food for soul nourishment.

And while we go through those experiences, the challenge is to create happiness within them and not wait for it outside of them. True wisdom is not just about facing the challenges, but it is to build inner calm while we face them.

Happiness is not about the onset of a happy chapter, what it genuinely is, it is about cultivating happiness in every stance of life.

And it is only when we see our evolution as the most valuable asset that life offers us, we begin to feel an inner peace even in those painful chapters.

When we awaken to see our evolution as the highest perk, that’s when we stop attaching ourselves to the expectation of a happy case scenario on all days.

So, when the joy of seeing yourself evolve exceeds the pain of a bad chapter, that’s when we switch from recording the past painful events as setbacks to revisiting them as powerful growth initiating chapters of our lives.

When evolution becomes the reward, peace follows even in pain.

We don’t need to be comfortable with the pain, only have acceptance for it.

Pain is an uninvited guest, so its ok to be uncomfortable when it knocks at the door. We don’t need to welcome it with open arms; all we need is to allow it and let it in.

The discomfort is natural; the real problem is when we push away or escape pain before it can unravel what it has to offer us. Just because we don’t see what it has to offer, shouldn’t be the reason to dodge it.

Pain is a gift in disguise. But it does not demand celebration even if we have the awareness of its purpose. Pain does not expect a smiling face to give you its hidden gifts. What it is really looking for is to be the sport, participate and play it well.

Painful chapters only ask that you read them fully without skipping lines.

The moment we understand running away from pain comes with more challenges than staying in it, we start alchemizing it.

Pain does not break us; it breaks the weak within us.

We all hold a picture in our heads of the future we wish to be a part of, but the future does not yet see us ready to hold that picture.

That is when life takes on the responsibility of preparing us not just to live that picture, but to hold it and carry it well.

This is the modicum of truth we need to imbibe: to see pain not as a storm meant to break us, but as a wind that blows away the dust settled upon us.

Pain does not arrive as something warm or pleasant. It is a wild force we cannot resist. Yet in its fierceness lies no intention to break us, it seeps in to find the parts that keep us weak and hold us back from our truest strength.

When I unlearned my derailing perception of pain and began to see it as a vessel for growth, I started to recognize my past suffering as preparation, not punishment.

Pain strips away what cannot walk into the future with us.

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If pain is sitting beside you right now, and you are still trying to escape, PAUSE.

Reintroduce yourself to it!

Not as a victim.
Not even as a player yet.

Show up as a Champion🏆

Willing to accept it.
Unwilling to lose within it.

Form a new relationship with this chapter of your story, so that when you look back, you do so with a roar of pride.

Let this chapter be remembered as your turning point not your breaking point.

And once you are on the other side of this painful chapter, you will keep count of the pain not as a bitter memory, but as a rebranded one, a reminder of who you became.

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