Sometimes life’s toughest moments can also be the greatest gifts. Get inspired by stories of women who turned their own pain into power, and how mental health experts say you can do the same.
For the first 28 years of her life, Hannah Cutler viewed fitness as a means to an end: to change her body. Or, more specifically, to shrink her body.
“I used to almost exclusively do cardio because I believed that was what women were supposed to do to look feminine,” says Cutler, now 30.
During a low point about which Cutler admits “my only purpose every day was to eat as little as possible and exercise as much as possible,” she says she was constantly cold and “angry all the time,” and began watching her relationships crumble. As a result, Cutler decided to call in reinforcements. She was diagnosed with anorexia in 2020.
“I wanted more out of life and knew seeking help was the only way to do that. I just really missed myself,” Cutler tells DailyOM.
By March 2021, after a lot of professional help and internal work — and six years since she began teaching yoga — Cutler opened Rooted Yoga + Fitness in her hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. There, “we don’t talk about weight loss ever,” she says. Instead, Cutler makes a concerted effort to help all who enter reclaim joy in movement. Some members have felt moved to exercise in shorts for the first time ever; others have lifted more weight and finally recognized their own strength; several more have mastered a yoga pose they never had the confidence to try.
Cutler says the Rooted community has helped her find her purpose. “Whether they know it or not, they hold me accountable in my own recovery. I don’t think I can fully articulate the impact they’ve had on me, but no matter where I am 10 years from now, my life is forever changed because of them.”
You don’t need to start a new business or make a massive life shift to channel your pain into power. So how do you find purpose in your pain, and how can you tell if you can find purpose in past traumas at all? Read on to learn about the process of turning pain into purpose.
What Does It Mean to Turn Pain Into Purpose?
“Pain is a source of communication. Pain tells us something is seriously wrong, and we need to listen and take appropriate action,” Haley Perlus, PhD, a sport and performance psychologist in Denver, explains to DailyOM.
Turning pain into purpose means surrendering to the things you can’t control while claiming ownership of the things you can, adds Sonia Jhas, a Toronto, Ontario-based mindset and wellness expert and author of I’ll Start Again Tomorrow (And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself).
“You’ll be shifting from a state of breakdown to a state of breakthrough,” Jhas tells DailyOM. “You can learn something from every experience in your life, good or bad. But when you explore past trauma to find positivity and purpose, it’s important to remember that you’re not seeking to recast it in a positive light. Forcing a positive spin on something that was actually negative invalidates your emotions and experiences. Acknowledging the full extent of past trauma is the first step toward releasing any lingering negativity.”
Going from pain into power can be a healthy coping mechanism of trauma.
Instead, Jhas recommends getting curious to try to discover what you can learn from the experience, and how you can use this knowledge to move toward a brighter future, including healing, understanding, and/or growth.
Jhas has a personal example of how this might look in practice. In her early 20s, she reveals that she was stuck in a cycle of constantly chasing perfection.
“I wanted the perfect career, the perfect marriage, the perfect home, and the perfect body. I layered unattainable goal after unattainable goal onto my high-stress life, believing that if I chased fast enough, I’d end up happy — someday,” Jhas says.
At the time, she never opened up about how much pain she was in. Instead, she kept grinding in an attempt to unlock her impossible objective: absolute perfection.
“So, of course, I crashed. Swiftly and inevitably; straight to my rock bottom. I was fatigued, hungry, and unmotivated beyond any level I’d ever been before,” Jhas says. “For the first time in my life, I decided that I had to look inward. I had to actually get to know myself and what I wanted instead of chasing perfection for the sake of perfection.”
Acknowledging that she was in pain was the first step. Actually facing her feelings, rather than adding to a constantly growing mountain of goals, allowed Jhas to start articulating what felt “off.”
“Accepting that this was not how I wanted to feel allowed me to start exploring how I did want to feel. From here, I moved forward to start clarifying my core values. I used those values to build up a foundation of authenticity, honesty, and acceptance, and reinforced this foundation with the lessons I’d learned from my pain,” Jhas says.
That started the healing process, which allowed her to begin to move forward with purpose and start using this transformation as a spark to inform her work as a mindset coach.
Interested in learning more? Check out Heal Your Past, Heal Your Life
How to Find Purpose From Past Trauma
In order to turn pain into passion, power, or purpose, you first need time to process the trauma.
Rather than brushing the pain aside or pretending it doesn’t exist, “you need to feel the bad feelings with nurturing and care,” says Gail Saltz, MD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York City and the host of the How Can I Help? podcast from iHeartRadio. This can look like therapy, journaling, talking with a friend, stretching — whatever helps you process. “Then, you can search for ways to heal and reemerge in a functioning way and begin to consider ways that you might be able to help yourself, and possibly others with similar trauma, with your ideas,” Dr. Saltz explains.
Depending on the person and the traumatic event, a painful event might not be something that leads to a positive outcome, such as finding passion or purpose, Dr. Perlus says. “In these moments, when positivity seems an insurmountable task, an alternative approach is one of acceptance, forgiveness, love, and grace,” she adds.
The act of turning pain into purpose might be a possibility for later — or never. That is okay, too.
5 Steps to Transform Pain Into Purpose
How do you find purpose in your pain? The road will look different for each person, but Jhas says that this framework can act as a rough guide.
1. Speak Its Name
Whether it was a bad breakup (with a partner or a friend), a layoff, an injury, an illness, or something else, “naming your pain allows you to fully explore and feel it,” Jhas says. Keep in mind that if you experienced substantial trauma, physical or mental abuse, abandonment, divorce, a psychological condition, a death of a loved one, or another powerful source of pain, definitely consider professional mental health support. “Many people are capable of it, but may need some support to deal early on with the initial trauma on the path toward purpose,” Saltz explains.
According to a February 2022 study in the Journal of Pain Research, among those with chronic pain, those who exhibited the best physical and mental health outcomes tended to share one quality: “coherence.” The researchers describe this as the ability to incorporate past and current events — including painful experiences—with future projections, and visualize life and the world with understanding rather than worry.
2. List the Lessons
Once you’ve given the traumatic experience or era a name, grab a journal, open up your Notes app, or write yourself an email with a run-down of the lessons you’ve learned or memorable moments that have arisen as a result of that pain.
3. Define Your Why
Then it’s time to get clear on what you want in life — and why, Jhas says. This essentially means defining a self-growth blueprint. Core values can come in clutch here. So how do you define those? Ask yourself:
- What fills my cup?
- When and where do I feel most excited in my life?
- Where do I want to channel my energy?
Once you know what really matters, you can keep this in mind as you consider adjusting your actions to align with these.
4. Turn Those Hard-Earned Lessons Into Triumphs
Hop back to your lessons list and ask:
- How might I move from pain toward purpose?
- How can these lessons learned aid in transforming my life to be more in line with my “why”?
“Really think through the ways in which you are uniquely suited to attend to this mission because you truly empathize with the trauma and its fallout,” Saltz says.
5. Let Go
There are certain parts of the pain that won’t ever be positive. Say you lost a parent to cancer. Since we can’t completely rid the world of the condition (yet), sometimes it’s best to “release certain things that you can’t control or that live in the past,” Jhas says. Use that brain space to “shift your focus to the things that you do have control over, in the present and the future.” Going back to the cancer example, perhaps you can dedicate some of your nonprofit donations to causes that support cancer research or volunteer in the chemotherapy unit at a hospital, for instance.
The Bottom Line
Turning pain into purpose is a process of overcoming limits that your pain may impose, then emotionally digesting the experience and choosing to do something with your emotional outcome that feels helpful or gratifying. This is less about finding positivity or a positive spin from the trauma, and more about building resilience from the experience, Saltz says. As such, she adds, going from pain into power can be a healthy coping mechanism of trauma.
