Pain Hurts

Duh

Published on May 20, 2004 By notsohighlyevolved In Personal Relationships

In pondering the following story it is very easy to discern the benefits for physiological survival given by the perception of pain.

There was a girl who was born clinically insensitive to pain. As a child she bit the tip of her tongue of while eating her food, dislocated her hip and vertebrae while sleeping because she could not shift her weight according to how she turned and tossed in bed and she caused massive burns to herself while kneeling on a household heater.

While she did not register her suffering consciously, her body carried the marks of a prolonged and appalling suffering that would cripple a person without her condition.

Whatever lack of physical suffering would have been more than compensated for by her awareness that she was her body’s ultimate enemy, that she was her own torturer and abuser, that with out motivation and malice, without awareness, she would maltreat herself and no part of her body would impart the discipline needed to keep her alive. She betrayed herself on a daily basis without being responsible.

She finally died at the tender age of 29 after succumbing to massive infections caused by her injuries.

While the case above is heart wrenching, it made me think of that other pain that almost all humans suffer and avoid – emotional pain.

While it is easy to perceive the benefits of physiological pain it is another matter all together to figure out exactly why it is that we toil under the cruel burden of a mind the encounters pain that is intangible and, at times, hard to attribute to any corporeal cause.

Of course sometimes it is easy. Sometimes emotional pain is accompanied with physiological abuse and pain when the cause of that pain has an affective concurrency with physical abuse. We must learn to mistrust those who abuse us. The best way of accomplishing this mission is to have an unfavourable affective marker that labels that person or thing as being harmful to the individual.

I could have just answered my own question, and I am sure that further reading would satisfy my curiosity. But I was thinking more along the lines of the pain that relationships that are clearly useless and time wasting (while being non-abusive and causing no apparent real harm to a person) and the emotional pain that often accompanies misconceptions and follies related to the ego.

These are just two examples. I am sure that you could think of many others (if you do, add them, it would be interesting to see how extensive the list is).

But the main discrepancy that I find between the two types of pain – physiological and emotional – is that one is caused by objects that are easily defined, locatable in space and time and occur (usually) within a narrowly defined duration of time.

Think of a nail piercing the skin, or a flame burning your finger. Both objects have a name that applies to consistently similar objects and phenomena, both can be referred to in space and time and both have a time scale of occurrence.
It is a different story when it comes to pin pointing the causes of emotional pain. If we take a base point of assuming that it is other people who cause us emotional pain we encounter the difficulty of not being able to consistently defining particular cases of people, they do not always have to be present to cause the pain (do not require a physical referent) and their actions and presence often have time scales that make it hard to determine exactly when, on any given duration scale, the cause of the emotional pain occurred.

While in a relationship or dealing with other people we have close relationships with, we usually have a lot of other things going on in our lives that can act as confounders when trying to determine the origins of emotional pain.

Is it really your partner or sibling who’s causing you the pain or could it be your boss, the traffic you encountered in the morning, the starving children you cried over watching TV the night before, etc.

Given that the causes and benefits of emotional pain (excluding the examples I gave above, and you might not in any way be convinced anyway) are hard to put a finger on and do not seem to have the life preserving properties of physiological pain – what purpose could emotional pain possibly serve?

In my reckoning it seems that while physiological pain serves the individual, emotional pain serves the community. Community meaning family, loved ones, acquaintances and at a far extension the service that empathy gives to a wider, global community.

With socio-paths, their inability to emotionally suffer means that their actions of intolerable cruelty and sadism usually end up having no ill effect on them individually, even though they may end up losing freedom or life for their actions.

This is not to say that socio-paths at some stage did not suffer, and suffer terribly at that, but it appears that the massive dose of suffering they received early on had the same effect as those encountered by those who suffer spinal and neck injuries. They become severed from emotional sensation, unless under the most extreme and appalling circumstance, for life.

Emotional paraplegics.

The recipients of suffering and pain in the cases of socio-paths are the victims; usually in such quantity that you could safely say that it is the wider community who suffers. As an example you only have to look back on the reign of terror that took place in New York and had the Son of Sam as its king.

While emotional suffering might be a nagging inconvenience on the individual scale, it takes on massive importance and relevance when seen in a wider context.

Why I wrote this? I have no idea. I have the suspicion that this line of questioning has an importance in this age that could outweigh any relevance it might have carried before.

Sorry about the length.

Comments

Sally jacobs

on May 20, 2004

That was really interesting, and I'm so proud of myself I read it all and didn't skim, as I was so tempted to do (A.D.D) but I'm so glad I read it all, thanks to your writing skills more than anything

. I read a story about a little girl who was insensitive to pain, and it was so heartbreaking, she was only like 6 years old, and she 'd had all her teeth removed, because when she was teething, she chewed through her hand, so they had to remove her teeth, and wait till her teeth came through when she was about 8 or 9, and they could explain things better to her. She was losing her eyesight to, because she didn't know to blink, because she didn't feel it, so sad, I wanted to cry after reading it!

Emotional pain is alot more complicated, and you can probably go for along time suffering it, like these people who are insensitive to physical pain, without realising. Emotional pain, in general take alot longer to heal, if you ever do, hmmm. Nice article

notsohighlyevolved

on May 20, 2004

I almost cried when i read the case i refered to in my post. So many think it would be a blessing to escape the suffering of pain, but quite obviously it's not. Imagine how her family felt not being able to do anything about it.

Thanks for the comment. As always.

Marco XX

KarmaGirl

on May 20, 2004

Pain is a strange thing. Most pain meds (I say most because things like Motrin are also an anti-inflammatory) do nothing but trick your brain into no longer feeling the pain. The pain is still there, and the damage is done, but you no longer feel it.

The beginning of this article really hit a nerve with me. I have had long term pain (was diagnosed with Rheumatoid arthritis when I was 13 and was told I'd be in a wheelchair by 21). I am now 32 and don't let RA slow me down. But, there is an odd thing that has happened to me. I have been teaching myself to not feel pain. I was having real troubles with my ankle recently until a doctor told me that there wasn't much they could do until I couldn't move it anymore. Though I see it swell up and get red and it becomes stiff, I realized that I am no longer feeling the pain. It scares me. Pain lets you know when something is wrong. So, being the way I am, I decided to test my pain threshold. How did I do that? I thought of something that would hurt like hell then did it to myself. that something was piercing the upper part of my ear (in the cartilage) by myself. Yes, I took an earring and pierced my ear. Cartilage is actually a lot tougher than I thought. It was like sticking a blunt needle through leather. Did it hurt? Unfortunately, no. Didn't phase me. And that scares me. I think that my brain has decided to ignore pain. It's becoming its own pain medication. But, since I have health issues, I am afraid that I won't know when something is truly wrong. I just wish my brain would figure out how to turn off migraines....I guess I will have to work on that one some more.....

notsohighlyevolved

on May 20, 2004

Thanks Karma,

That was interesting. I wonder if it's your brain just producing a hell of a lot of endorphins all the time to counteract a chronic condition or if its a cognitive accomodation.

I pierced my own nose once, but the lack of pain (and generation of stupidity) came from the massive quantities i had consumed.

Marco XX

notsohighlyevolved

on May 20, 2004

consumption of alcohol. Sorry, forgot to add that in

KarmaGirl

on May 21, 2004

yeah, alcohol does that to a lot of people.

Did you keep the nose ring?

notsohighlyevolved

on May 21, 2004

No.

That was a looooong time ago.

It was also a different person. My suffering has become a lot more subtle since the times i suffered because i was stupid enough to let friends play with my anatomy.

Hold on. Come to think of it, a good percentage of my current suffering has the same root cause, just not as innocent.

Marco XX

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