Palliation: Making Friends With Your Pain
It’s been said that pain can be our greatest teacher. This is because you can learn a lot from the pain you experience: it shows us that we need to take action in order to change our lifestyle — to stop doing some things we do and start doing some other ones. Any uncomfortable feeling, be it steady, throbbing, stabbing, aching, or pinching, is just your nervous system’s way of saying something is wrong. This system consists of two basic parts: the central nervous system, containing the brain and spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, containing nerves and nerve pathways throughout the body. Whenever you’re hurt or diseased, tissues in that affected area will release chemicals that communicate with your nerves. Those nerve pathways will carry messages from that area to the spinal cord and finally to your brain, where you will feel it and perhaps cry out ‘ouch!’
Pain is not a bad thing, contrary to what you or most people may believe. In the past you may have been told to ‘man-up’ and keep moving. To ‘drug-up’ and keep on trucking. This is because some people may view their internal pain as a weakness. For men, elements of toxic masculinity can contribute to their fears of letting the world know just how much they are hurting. According to clinical psychologist Dr. Leon Seltzer, women, on the other hand, are much more likely to worry that disclosing their emotional distress may lead them to be told (particularly by their spouse) that they're too "thin-skinned"—or, more commonly, "too sensitive" (which, literally, adds insult to injury). With that, we have the tendency to view our 1 pain as bad, and something we don’t want to own, even going as far as to outright ignore it. But that’s just bottling up how you truly feel... and we all know what happens to shaken up bottles or cans of soda once they’re finally opened.
We can instead accept how the pain makes us feel and even fully embrace those feelings in order to help ourselves in the long run. This very acceptance was observed in a study by Dr. Evan Forman and his colleagues at Drexel University’s Department of Psychology. This and several other studies found inspiration from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The latter form of treatment aims to increase acceptance of the full range of subjective experiences, including distressing thoughts, beliefs, sensations, and feelings, in an effort to promote desired behavior change that leads to improved quality of life. A comparative trial of ACT versus CT (Cognitive Therapy) in a mixed outpatient Finnish sample found that ACT resulted in greater treatment-related changes in experiential acceptance than in self-confidence, whereas CT resulted in the opposite. In addition to clinical trials, Forman and his team noted that a growing number of analogue laboratory studies lent support to the mediational role of experiential acceptance in coping with pain, panic attacks, and anxiety related distress.
Because of our biology, pain is very much inescapable. Like a loving friend or a parent, it will always be here for us, be it in a physical or emotional sense. We live in an imperfect world riddled with natural disasters, animals, and people, all very much capable of hurting us. And there is absolutely no escaping this fact: you will eventually get hurt, and, quite frankly, it’s going to suck. But what I believe, and what the research here has shown, is that what we choose to make of our painful experiences can make all the difference in our relative recoveries. So when pain talks, I implore you to listen to it. Take your nervous system’s warning message in stride, embrace it, and change your lifestyle accordingly.
References:
Seltzer, Leon. “Why We Hide Emotional Pain.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 28 Sept. 2011.
Forman, Evan M., et al. “A Randomized Controlled Effectiveness Trial of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Cognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression.” Behavior Modification, vol. 31, no. 6, Nov. 2007, pp. 772–799.
