Pain: What Is It Good For?

Contemplate that without pain, or some primitive equivalent, life itself cannot exist. The ability of cellular lifeforms to detect danger within their environment is essential for life. The organic quickly becomes the inorganic if danger goes undetected and life’s boundaries are allowed to be violated. Pain is a necessary signal of danger, an asset that keeps us alive. Thus, to be alive necessitates experiencing pain – there is no other way.

Does it make sense to avoid pain? Yes, as avoiding pain means avoiding danger.

Does it make sense to suppress pain? No, as suppressing pain turns off a necessary danger warning system and places us at risk for injury and death.

Pain should be accepted as an unavoidable consequence of being alive, but more importantly pain should be attended to by removing threat and restoring safety.

The touching of a hot burner on a stove is the classic example we use in discussing what we learn from pain signaling. We touch it, it hurts, it burns our flesh, it embeds a memory of the event and the pain, and thus we learn to be careful around the stove, to be conscientious to turn the burner off, and to let the burner cool off before we clean it.

As in the example of the hot burner, most physical pain relates to something in the environment that is too intense – too hot, too cold, too sharp, too much pressure, too loud, too bright…too much. Our multiple sensory receptors, our neuroception, tell us something is amiss. Our reflexes kick in to protect us even prior to our awareness that we are threatened – our hand snaps back from the burner and then we sense the pain, and finally, we realize we’ve been burned.

Emotions can flow with these physical threats – anger and rage, fear and worry, sadness and tears, dread and shock can all overwhelm us in moments of injury and pain.

There is little control over all these reflexes and responses within the moment, so we shouldn't despair if we don't like who we were in those moments — too aggressive, too anxious, too wimpy, or maybe passed out on the floor. Embrace the fullness of being human with the complete range of the human genome, associated phenome, infinite physiologies, and the multiplicity of associated responses, all designed to protect us.

We should have no shame in our responses, just humility in how little humans can actually control.

If we don’t keep our hand on the burner, the pain recedes, the emotions wane, the tissues heal, and sometimes scar to serve as a permanent reminder to not touch a hot burner again. Through this process, severe injury and even death can be averted. The lesson is learned.

Physical injury can cause emotional pain, but in humans, most emotional pain is not generated from physical injury but from social injury. Most of our emotional pain arises from the threat of a social death, not from the threat of our physical annihilation. Our emotional feelings and our visceral feelings, our interoception, also tell us when something is amiss. We reflexively withdraw when socially burned. We learn to be cautious around an inflamed person. We learn to turn down the heat and let the burner cool off before engaging again. If we are burned badly enough, we may bear an emotional scar that is a permanent reminder not to touch and to avoid a chronically inflamed, aggressive, and toxic person. In this regard, the lesson is also learned.

We may not like who we are within the moments of social injury and pain as well. Sometimes humble apologies may be needed, and sometimes compassion and empathy may be needed — after all, we are only human, and in these moments we can only control so much. A single moment shouldn’t define us, as our phenotype is forever changing. Threat and injury can make us less than we want to be. The preservation and restoration of safety allow us to be who we want to be.

Unfortunately, with regards to emotional pain, too often social contracts, financial constraints, and cultural constructs can convince us or enable us to keep our hand on the burner – to stay, the burnee, in chronic contact with the burner. In this case, it isn’t just our epithelial cells that are being singed but, out of sight and smell, our endothelia cells are as well. In fact, when in chronic emotional pain, all of our cells are bathed in inflammation and are undergoing catabolism and degeneration. Just as physical pain comes with emotional pain, in reverse order, emotional pain comes with physical pain. The end stage of chronic emotional pain is systemic disease, degeneration, depression, dementia, and cancer.

Chronic Pain Essential Reads

Chronic Pain Can Exist Without Physical Injury

How Unwanted Thoughts Drive the Experience of Pain

Our acute and chronic threat response, whether to physical or emotional conflict and threat, creates an inflammatory, catabolic, degenerative, and, at times, an oncogenic phenotypic shift in our physiology with relatively little specificity as to the source of the violation, injury, and distress.

To make this scenario even worse, too often we use illusions of control, repressions, distractions, and intoxicants to maladaptively maintain contact with the flame only to further cremate our bodies and our souls. No other nonhuman living being would ignore their emotional, visceral, or physical pain in this way.

Additionally, sometimes it’s easier to escape the traps other people set for us than it is to deconstruct and disconnect the chains with which we bind ourselves. When we disregard and repress our emotional warning system in favor of faulty or false contracts, constructs, narratives, and beliefs, or worse, anesthetize our minds, we become the arsonist that lights the flames of the hell in which we have chained ourselves – and we burn.

When we use these methods to repress, ignore, silence, or perpetuate our pain, the flame is not extinguished and the burning persists and expands. It is the equivalent of turning off the smoke detectors within a home, thinking that will prevent the home from burning down in a fire. Smoke detectors can be annoying, but they are not the problem; they detect the problem and they can be life-saving. The fire is the problem. So listen to the smoke detector and take action to extinguish the problem, not the signal warning of the problem.

Acknowledge the pain, clarify the threat(s), and work to remove them, then work to restore and preserve safety within our world. Avoid unnecessary narratives to explain our responses. Fires, as well as tigers, don't respond to narratives. Apologize and empathize as needed and with frequency, as this helps to dampen the flames and restore safety.

Pain is unavoidable. Pain is a necessary consequence of being alive. Complete and perpetual absence of pain is death. Pain and injury offer a protective threat response that includes both protective physical and protective emotional danger signaling. It is not the pain but being trapped in encoded, remembered, potential, perceived, predicted, relative, or real danger and the associated pain that creates suffering. The goal is to avoid being trapped in chronic threat and chronic pain, thus to avoid suffering, not to repress, distract from, disregard, nor anesthetize the pain. Perhaps, most importantly to preventing much of our suffering is the understanding of how we entrap and ultimately burn ourselves.

Pay attention to the pain….and take your hand off the stove!

Stay Safe and Stay Tuned