Escaping Emotional Pain: What Extreme Athletes Really Chase

How far will people go when escaping emotional pain feels like the only relief?

Healing emotional pain is one of the most complex journeys a person can undertake, and it is a subject that has always been of deep interest to me. As an emotions therapist this has always been of deep enduring interest to me over the years… that is, the ways in which people handle their emotional demons. 

And now there’s a four-part HBO documentary out called “The Dark Wizard”, about an extreme athlete named Dean Potter. 

Dean was a record-breaking rock climber, slackline walker, and wingsuit flier who died in May 2015 when he and a friend attempted a wingsuit flight going at over 100 miles per hour while aiming for a notch in a ridge. 

Neither made it out alive. 

When I first heard about this through Jamie Wheal’s Substack, Homegrown Humans, I was once again struck by the lengths people will go when the act of escaping emotional pain becomes a matter of life and death.

The Journey of Healing Emotional Pain

When the pain of trauma is extreme, as has been explained in Dean’s case, the mind can construct situations where death is looming, not as an endpoint, but as an escape hatch from the relentless weight of the person’s inner world. For those who are uncovering the roots of deep trauma, this paradox is a crucial thing to understand

He wasn’t chasing adrenaline for its own sake. He was chasing relief from depression and self-doubt (namely perfectionism and envy), a feat that could override his emotional demons in an instant, in a way conventional therapy tools couldn’t seem to provide:

“I know the dark secret. I know my options. I can sit on a cushion and meditate for two hours and maybe I get a glimpse of something interesting – and maybe it lasts two seconds – but I put on a wingsuit and leap off a cliff and it’s instantaneous: Whammo, there I am, in an alternate universe that lasts for hours.” 

The fastest doorway out of inner pain

What he’s describing is a state researchers call “ecstasis” – a complete dissolution of ordinary self-consciousness, a falling into pure present-moment experience.

I would suggest not unlike the state of samadhi, which in yogic science represents the highest state of consciousness, characterized by profound peace, bliss, and the cessation of mental fluctuations. These states can feel like moving through periods of heavy depression because they offer such a stark contrast to everyday suffering.

And, yes, meditators can chase it for years. Psychedelics can sometimes produce it. And for action-sport athletes, extreme risk is the fastest doorway in (and, for many, a collision with death). 

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to frame Dean as simply reckless – a man who chose death and got what he asked for. Rather, I see a person in raw emotional pain who found the one thing that made him feel whole, and could not stop doing it even when he knew the math was turning against him. If this was his only way of healing emotional pain, at 43 with 27 years of extreme sports behind him, he could not stop.

Why?

When Escape Stops Working

In my experience in teaching and guiding, extreme adventure can loosen the grip of emotional pain and demons. But like so many different kind of “escapes” it’s only a passing balm.

We eventually realize that escaping emotional pain through adrenaline, danger, or altered states may bring temporary relief, but before long, another fix is needed. This is where you must commit to your own intentional healing in ways that do not rely on adrenaline or risk.

There are doorways to the same territory, meditation, breathwork, physical suffering, creative work, service to others. Of course, they don’t carry Dean’s price of admission. But they ask something of you as well. They ask you to be willing to feel things, which is, for many people, its own kind of terror.

In my work, I teach and guide that to release the demons, we must be open to feeling the emotions in order to meet them, hear what they’re telling us, and respond so they can be released. 

The invitation isn’t to leap off a cliff. The invitation is to take seriously the question of what your “escape” is… and whether escaping emotional pain in that way is actually helping you heal or simply helping you avoid yourself. It might be time to need a complete internal nervous reset if you recognize these patterns in your own life.

This is the heart of my work: where a person becomes exhausted with the emotional and relational turmoil in their lives and longs for it all to stop. For good. From there, the practice becomes learning how to stay present with what once felt unbearable, until it no longer needs to be escaped.

Ultimately, healing emotional pain requires us to be brave enough to sit with the silence.

Want to get a taste of this freedom? Come join our free online gathering later this month to try it one. The Elevation Ceremony is one of my signature gatherings, live (and recorded) to take a deep dive into whatever is knocking loudest on your head.

With Love,

Becca

P.S. If the intensity of life lately has you more stirred up than usual, and fear has reached a crescendo, my Elevation Ceremony later this month is a beautiful place to begin to soften it. Read more about it and register here.