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...