A God who dangles carrots?

Thoughts on hope and disappointment

"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies.” 

So said Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, one of my favourite movies of all time. Love the movie, but can't count the times when I've wanted to argue with that statement, tell them that 
                          hope is not good, 
                                        hope is painful, 
                                                       hope is hard. 
Looking at quotes through history, it seems that hope is necessary, important, vital. Aristotle said that hope was a waking dream. John Armstrong, a Scottish physician and poet said that hope was the balm and lifeblood of the soul. Why, then, does it sometimes feel like hope is our enemy, that it is the gangplank that sets us up for a fall? The more the hope, the higher the plank is raised, the further there is to fall. 


Everyone hopes for different things. Love, success, money, a place to belong. Even if we don't admit it, or don't even recognise it, we live life with deep yearnings in our souls. So, why is it so hard?


I think hope is a risk. To hope is to risk disappointment. Proverbs 13: 12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” That's a feeling I have understood. I have hoped tentatively, that hope has been deferred and heart sick is what I have felt...it’s a heavy feeling in your chest...it’s looking at the sky and only seeing the clouds...it’s a sigh and a groan...it’s wanting to go to sleep for a really long time...it’s wanting comfort from anywhere and getting it from nowhere.


If that's what it brings, how can hope be so exalted, so sought after?
Maybe it's just that a hope that can be disappointed is better than no hope at all. A state of hopelessness is a state of apathy. If we always expect the worst, never dream it will get any better, accept that how we are now is how we will always be, we will never change. We will never work for anything, seek anything, strive for anything. What’s the point? If things aren’t going to get any better, why even bother? If we don’t hope that cancer can be cured, why bother looking for a cure? If we don’t hope that we will make that team, why bother putting in all the training?        


                            Without hope, all there is is giving up. 


I think I've been learning that I have something to hope in, that my hope is not a blind hope. My hope is not a blind hope because my life is in the care of the one who created hope, created me, created the plan for me. When I take a look back, sometimes it has felt that God has been dangling carrots in front of me, making it look like He's about to give me something, watching me leap to try to get to the carrot, then pulling it away at the last minute. But what I’m trying to remember is that that is so completely contrary to God’s character. The God who “delights over me with his song”, who loved me so much that he sent his son to die for me, who forgives me no matter how many times and how badly I mess up, who promises to never leave me or forsake me, , that is not a god who will treat me like a play thing, laughing at my striving. No, my God is a God who wants to give me a whole field of carrots. 


So, my hope is not just wishful thinking, my hope is based on who God is.


                            And that is why I can still have hope. 

Thoughts on Pain: Part 3

Time: the greatest healer?

We've been lied to for years... 
They always say that time is the greatest healer, but whoever 'they' are, I'm pretty sure they're wrong. Sure, things get healed over the course of time, but it is not time that does the healing. If something is broken, it will remain broken until it is fixed, not just until a certain amount of time passes.


I can't count the number of times patients have come in to see me a couple of months after injuring themselves and tell me that they thought it would just get better on its own. 


Let's take a little (very simplistic) trip down science lane, with pictures...
The fibres in your soft tissue (muscles, ligaments, tendons) are laid down in a uniform order, a bit like this:

When you get injured, your body throws new fibres at the injured area, but it gets lazy and throws them down in a random order, a bit like this:

This new tissue technically patches up the injury, but can cause more problems than it does good. Scar tissue is weaker and less flexible than the original tissue, making it more likely to get damaged again. Added to that, the nerves within the new tissue can conduct pain more effectively than in the original tissue, meaning more pain.

So it is with emotional wounds over time. If we don’t acknowledge and do something about our emotional injuries, the next time something similar happens...
               our capacity to cope is less
                                    driving the wound deeper
                                            making it even more difficult to heal.

With this sort of injury, physio treatment is aimed at realigning the tissue fibres, allowing the tissue to heal in an organised way, more similar to the natural way the tissue is supposed to be structured. The treatment hurts. Often, it involves rubbing hard across the damaged area. Anyone who has experienced will tell you it’s not pleasant! 

And again, with emotions, so often, you have to dig up the painful stuff, talk about things that hurt to talk about, confront things that that you would rather leave alone. It hurts, it hurts so much. But the result has got to be worth it. Getting to the other side, having healthy tissue and a healthy heart:

It’s difficult, but so is staying in the pain.

Thoughts on Pain: Part 2

The Pain-Gate Theory


As a physiotherapy student, I quickly learned that when I didn't know the answer to a question, if I threw "the Pain-Gate Theory" in somewhere, there was a pretty good chance I could talk my way round to the right answer.


What is the Pain-Gate Theory, I hear you cry? Let's get a little technical for a second...so there are two types (for the purposes of this illustration) of nerve fibres in our body – pain fibres (which carry signals about pain between the damaged tissue and the brain) and sensory fibres (which carry signals about normal sensation between tissue and the brain). When tissue is damaged, the pain fibres are activated and signals are sent to the brain, telling us we are sore.
However, when we, for example, rub an area of skin, the sensory fibres are activated and signals are sent so that we can feel the sensation. The sensory fibres are bigger than the pain fibres and the theory is, therefore, that when the sensory fibres are activated, their signals override the signals that the pain fibres are sending and the pain is therefore diminished. It’s why we automatically rub our elbow when we hit our funny bone. It’s a natural instinct that just happens in our body’s attempt to keep us free of pain.


Got it? Cool.


It's a good theory. It works. It's the reason why a lot of physio techniques work. But what happens when we start to apply it to other types of pain? When we're hurt by someone else's anger or jealousy, someone else's words or actions, when we're hurt by our own mistakes. When we're sad and disappointed and angry and lonely and just in pain.

What if, to stop the pain, we do more stuff? We watch more TV, eat more chocolate, work harder, run further, fight more. We do  and do  and do  and do  to try to cut of the signals that the pain fibres are sending. We do anything, anything at all to try to stop the constant reminders that it hurts.

Going back to the physical pain, the thing with the pain-gate theory is that it takes away the pain when the stimulus is applied but it does not fix the damage. Rubbing the sore bit lightly doesn’t make the torn ligament knit back together, it doesn’t heal a broken bone. When the stimulus is removed, the damage remains and the pain starts again. 

And how true that is of emotional pain. Eating more cake makes you feel good for a moment, but what about when the cake is done? Watching another Ryan Gosling movie distracts you for a couple of hours, but when it’s over? Doing more exercise keeps you healthy and gives you a sense of accomplishment, but does it really close the wound?

Damage is not fixed by avoiding the damage or the pain it causes. It is fixed by acknowledging it, admitting that there is something wrong, that it hurts, that something needs to be done about it and that something is not simply trying to dull it.

That is step two...

Thoughts on Pain: Part 1

The Problem with Pain

We spend a lot of our lives trying to avoid pain. Avoiding putting our hands in the fire, avoiding being hit by a car, avoiding the dangerous, sharp, terrifying edge of...a piece of paper (especially on our knuckles).

It makes sense to avoid pain. It is rational and sensible and normal and wise. It is all those things, but it is not always possible.

I suppose it is a fact of life…at some point, you will hurt. You will trip over and sprain your ankle. You will get hit on the head with a rugby ball. You will trap your finger in a car door. 

If only those were the only hurts we had to cope with and to get over. But then there is the emotional pain, the pain that hurts your heart. And as much as I wish it wasn’t the case, chances are, at some point, you will feel the pain of loss. Your heart will get broken. You will suffer from someone else’s mistakes. Those hurts, that pain, well, they can make us wish that the only pain we felt was from a broken finger.

I see a lot of people in pain every day. Torn knee ligaments, dislocated shoulders, broken elbows, spinal disc bulges, hamstring tears. And everyone responds differently to pain. One of the questions I ask patients on their initial appointment is, “on a scale of 0 to 10, how bad is your pain? 0 means no pain, 10 means the most severe pain possible.” Or as one of my friends used to put it “0 means no pain, 10 means the pain equivalent to getting a paper cut on your eyeball.” (Try saying that without wincing and closing your eyes tight.) 

It’s fascinating to see the variation in answers to this very subjective question. You get some people who come limping in, barely able to touch their bruised and swollen ankle to the ground and they will tell you that their pain is 6/10 at its worst. Then you get the people who walk in and sit down as normally as anything and tell you that their back pain is a constant 11/10 (I often fight the urge to tell them that this is a physical impossibility. I’m very professional.) Everybody perceives pain and therefore copes with pain differently.

Because we are all different.

Realising that, I think is step 1. When you are in pain, it's all too tempting to compare yourself to other people who are also in pain. Physically, there's the guy who plays 80 minutes of rugby 2 weeks after spraining his ankle and beside him is the guy with the same injury, who is out of the sport for 6 weeks. Why is there a difference? 

Emotionally, there are two girls overlooked for the same job, one moves straight on to the next thing, the other feels like her world has ended and that she's not sure if she can pick herself up from the disappointment. She looks at the first girl and wishes she could be like that, wishes she could move on, wishes she could not care and feels guilty for the pain she is in. The first girl looks at her and thinks she should stop moping, stop making a big deal of it. But neither of them acknowledge that the second girl has been rejected since she was young. Her parents abandoned her, her best friend turned on her, her boyfriend chose someone else. Her wounds go deep and this one just adds to it, freshens that sting of the scar. 

Pain can be isolating, because it is so individual. People can try to understand, some maybe get close, but no one can really feel what you feel. Acknowledge that. Acknowledge that you are an individual, there is no one the same as you. Own your pain. Own it...and then do something about it. Until you let go of the guilt of not being that person, the shame of not handling pain like they would, the fear that you are too broken to get over it, you will never be able to confront it and fix it. 

You are who you are.

                   Your pain is what it is.

                                 It doesn't matter what they would do with it.

                                            ...What matters is what you are going to do with it...