Why do we cling to pain and suffering instead of letting go ?

Pain is unavoidable. But Suffering is a choice.

Some time back I was tapping on a problem, and underneath a bunch of issues I found traumas and pain from my past. So I tapped on "I have past traumas", and then suddenly I found myself saying "I want past traumas"... (Tapping means EFT, a powerful way of bringing out subconscious stuff). And that made me realise that I have a bunch of reasons for holding on to pain.

We all have had pain in our past, and most of us hold on to that pain.

Remember a painful, tragic, sad or embarrassing incident form your past. Do you still feel the pain / shame / sadness?
Why ?
Why feel negative emotions about something that is in the past, that is over ?

Why do we hold on to pain ?

We can choose to let go of suffering, to end that painful relationship, to forgive ourselves. That would be logical, I mean, everyone wants to be happy and all that, right ? But we keep on holding to all that negative crap. Why ?

Here are some reasons that occurred to me:

We hold on to pain...
* To get attention and sympathy from others (poor girl, your husband treats you so badly)
* The pain or problem is a part of who we think we are (I am the girl with the eating disorder) If we let it go we would feel lost !
* We have an excuse to do or not to do certain stuff (no wonder I have a drinking problem, after my partner left me life has never been the same)
* We think that remembering the pain that was caused by making that mistake will help us to remember that lesson (I was careless with my money, I lost it and then my parents shouted at me. Remembering my humiliation will help me to be careful with my stuff in the future). In fact the opposite is true: if something is associated with negative emotions, then our brain tries to avoid processing it. We remember better if we remove the negative thing attached to it.
* We are mentally lazy, it doesn´t occur to us that we can work on past pain; nobody ever told us about such things !
* Pride: we prefer to pretend that we didn´t go through pain, because we don´t want to appear weak. This is often truer for men, because of the social stereotypes of "boys don´t cry".  (Of course I wasn´t afraid of that ! Of course it didn´t hurt !)

So, that´s all I can think of. What other reasons can  you come up with ?

  More on the topic:
Are You in Love with your Pain ?
The Sedona method's four ways of releasing.