What is Physical Pain?
As a practicing counsellor and therapist I come across emotional pain and suffering a lot in my line of work. As a life-saving alarm system, pain keeps us focused on distress, for the purpose of relieving it. Pain motivates behaviour that will help heal, repair, or improve. A pain in your foot, for example, will motivate you to take the rock off it, get more comfortable shoes, soak it in a tub of warm water, or visit a podiatrist.
If we do not act on the motivation to heal-repair-improve (or fail in our attempts to do so), the alarm of pain intensifies and generalizes. The toothache becomes facial pain; the sore foot seems to throb along the whole side of the body.
When pain intensifies and generalizes over time, it becomes suffering. Suffering is repeated failure to act successfully on the natural motivation of pain to do something that will heal, repair, or improve.
What is Emotional Pain?
Like its physical counterpart, normal psychological pain (that which is not due to brain disease or severe emotional disorder) is localized in the beginning, usually in the form of guilt, rejection, grief or loneliness. But when it comes to emotional pain, the behaviour choices that will heal, repair, or improve are more ambiguous. Psychological pain is, therefore, more conducive to suffering.
When psychological pain generalizes, it seems to be about the self – a kind of self-ache, if you will. As the alarm of pain intensifies, fixing our focus on distress, we become self-obsessed. Eventually we identify with the pain, in a subtle or overt victim-identity. At that point, we can scarcely perceive the pain of other people, which robs us of the unique power of social healing. Self-obsession makes the alarm of pain louder and more general (mental focus amplifies and magnifies) and isolates us from humane connections that heal.
Below are 4 types of emotional pain including some suggestions to heal them
1. The emotional pain of guilt
Guilt can affect us all in different ways, and that’s because it comes from within us. Your guilt may be caused if you feel you have done something wrong to someone else or that because your life is ok and others close to you have had to face hardship, even when their situation is not of your doing. There’s a saying that guilt is a wasted emotion and there’s a lot of truth in that. To deal with guilt, you have to apologise to the person you have wronged or accept that you cannot control other people’s destinies and forgive yourself for being ok when others are not. Feeling guilty does not help you, or the people you may be feeling guilty about. Guilt can play a big part in emotions when it comes to food too. But, feeling guilty will not help you going forward if you have emotional eating problems. Recognising and accepting the issue is stage 1 and then addressing the reasons behind it.
2. The emotional pain of rejection
There are many kinds of rejection – it may be in a personal relationship or in a professional context. It can be a minor snub like a friend not phoning you back or cancelling on you, or something major like a relationship break-up. Whatever form it takes, rejection can have a detrimental effect on anyone and make them question their self-worth. But don’t focus on the rejection, instead increase your value of self-worth by thinking about your strengths, spend time with other people so you don’t feel lonely and understand that rejection will occur at different times in life, and when it does you just have to keep moving on.
3. The emotional pain of grief
Unfortunately, grief is something we will all have to deal with at some point in our lives. While we may never fully ‘get over’ the death of someone close to us, time does eventually help us to live without that person. Most people will go through the five stages of grief in their path from the immediate shock of a bereavement through to eventual acceptance. The important thing with grief is to not bury or quash your emotions; instead reach out for support – either from a professional counsellor or from friends and family to see you through this difficult time.
4. The emotional pain of loneliness
Feeling lonely can cause a great amount of emotional pain and the longer you spend not relating closely to other people, the harder it can be to shake the sensation off. Making new friendships or getting back in touch with old friends that you may have simply drifted away from become insurmountable hurdles. If you feel saddened by loneliness, it’s worth forcing yourself to participate in new social activities, even if it’s something you don’t particularly feel like doing. Getting through the first steps of meeting new people is always the most difficult, but the exciting thing is that with every new meeting, you might be opening up a whole new social circle.
Of course, there’s a common theme in dealing with any type of emotional pain. In each case you need to find a way to move away from the current status quo, whether that’s through acting and thinking differently or seeking the support of others. When you find yourself in emotional pain, whatever you do, don’t stay still and hold onto it. Take action so that you can move on.
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