I think you nailed it. Learning to handle pain so we can stop building our life around avoiding it is a good summation of what therapy is all about. You can avoid pain but to do so you must give up everything that makes life worth living, including intimate relationships, love, living in the moment and being "present." It's way too high a price.
Instead we need to learn to handle the pain, 'cause no matter what you do, pain happens.
So much of my behavior was built around not allowing myself to be hurt again and it was making me feel miserable, isolated and incredibly lonely. A really significant turning point in my therapy happened when I was telling my therapist about a situation and saying "but then I'll be hurt!" (Honestly, I might have been a little whiney). And my T (who I must assure you is an unbelievably gentle, compassionate, caring man) looked straight at me and said (for shock value). "So what? It won't kill you." I think I literally rocked back in my seat. My thinking had never gone beyond what you did when you were hurt because I was concentrating all my resources on NOT being hurt. We were able to start talking about how do handle the hurt, how do you recover from it, how do you repair the relationship.
Thanks, it was good to remember this (since I'm much better talking about it then putting it consistently into practice.
)AG