Clean Pain Versus Dirty Pain

How do we respond when we are called in? 

This week we’ve shared about a friend calling us in to do better with our language and frameworks that contribute to ableism and anti-semitism. As we lean in and keep growing, I find it’s helpful to take a moment to pause and ask how am I responding? 

In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem, a trauma therapist, applies a framework of clean pain and dirty pain to address racialized trauma in the United States. I’ve found Menakem’s framework to be tremendously helpful in many areas when we are called in to grow. In times where we are approached with difference, conflict, something uncomfortable, etc. we will go through pain--it’s either clean pain or dirty pain. Clean pain leads to mending and building capacity to grow but it requires honesty, vulnerability, and integrity for people to move through their pain and metabolize it. The results of moving through the discomfort of clean pain is, “The body can then settle; more room for growth is created in its nervous system; and the self becomes freer and more capable, because it now has access to energy that was previously protected, bound, and constricted. When this happens, people’s lives often improve in other ways as well.” Dirty pain, the pain of blame, denial, and avoidance, on the other hand is when people respond to their most “wounded” parts and become “cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away.” One of the main factors in the perpetuation of systemic oppression and discimination is that many of us have not moved through clean pain and rather stay in the silence, dissociation, and denial of dirty pain. 

I earnestly believe the way of Jesus is the way of moving through clean pain. Remember the story of Jesus being called out to treat the woman from Canaan better in Matthew 15:21-28? Jesus grows. Instead of casting blame, being defensive, or avoiding, Jesus changes and grows in clean pain. 

This week, how are we leaning into the rhythms of growth? What are areas of our lives we feel God calling us to grow? Let’s sit with some of these painful emotions and not avoid them because they are “too political” or “too complicated.” Rather, let’s metabolize the difficult emotions and continue to lean in and grow.