I recently read an Op-Ed, in which, Firoozeh Dumas, author, quotes a German anesthesiologist who advised her against using painkillers during post-op recovery from her laparoscopic hysterectomy.
“Pain is a part of life [he said]. We cannot eliminate it nor do we want to…pain will guide you. You will know when to rest…; you will know when you are healing. If I give you Vicodin, you will no longer feel the pain, yes, but you will no longer know what your body is telling you.”
While many of us wince at the mere notion of being advised to endure discomfort, this doctor’s humanistic suggestion for his patient to surrender to a healthy dose of pain, is to my own ears, music. Timely music, to the tune of a prescription that I believe, we as a community, desperately need to hear.
To be clear, I recognize value in the suppressing of pain under certain circumstances. In the case of combat wounds, during surgical procedures, for the management of acute traumas and in developing humane hospice care plans. Perhaps, there is also treatment value in the placebo effect of patients initially not feeling their pain and therefore, beginning to believe they are “better.” Yes. Yet, I write this post, because I believe wholeheartedly that killing pain (physical, emotional or psychological) as a dominant treatment strategy in our healthcare system, is sordidly misguided and is dangerously fracturing our health, wellbeing, and wholeness.
Here in the US (and not only here in the US), but for argument’s sake, here in the US, we are experiencing rageful, violent outbursts in our communities. While most of the conversation surrounding this issue is necessarily focused upon a dire need for gun control and regulation, I am interested in examining the underlying condition of the collective and individual human psyche that leads and permits people to participate in such violent behavior. To do so, I believe it is time to confront plainly the violent attitudes and behaviors we have adopted toward ourselves and enact, to some degree unwittingly, through our relationship to our own pain.
In order to clarify my standpoint, I’d like to discuss what pain actually is. I understand pain as a vital, evolutionary component of our human consciousness. In other words, as our physical and emotional bodies are imbued with consciousness, a consciousness that provides us with a continuous feedback loop, pain is an integral signalling system born of this consciousness. Unique, continuously updated biofeedback, pain enables us to make ongoing decisions in regard to our moment to moment survival. Every cell; tissue, organ, fluid and nerve fiber, participates in providing feedback and possesses an inherent knowing of itself that contributes to the balance and wellbeing of the integrated whole. Pain evolves directly from the source of our beingness; a brilliantly precise and nuanced preverbal communication device. As it speaks to us largely by creating uncomfortable physical experiences, pain grabs our attention with striking clarity and is quite often, impossible to ignore. It’s message is clear. “Pay attention!”
As pain communicates with us, employing its gnawing gravitas, one might infer that its content delivery is worth a download. Yet, we rarely think twice before swallowing a pain reliever; essentially pressing delete on our body’s voicemail box before its message is ever even heard. It’s also worth noting that Big Pharma is not the sole purveyor of pain numbing these days. Alcohol, internet pornography, the capitalist-driven addiction to busyness and incessant productivity, the scroll mechanism of social media, these are all activities that have been purposefully designed to keep us away from listening to and being with ourselves and each other.
I would like to point out, that while each of the above activities are certainly time-sucks and successful distractors, not one of them makes pain go away. These are not abracadabra, pain-dissolving cures. These “pills,” simply divert our attention (whether chemically or via activity), so that we are no longer focused on or listening to our pain. And again, I will repeat, none of this is accidental. Band-aid solutions that skip the search for a root cause not only blatantly ignore the potential for long-term resolution but they also function, intent-fully, to maintain individual and collective fragmentation. Ignoring the signals of our pain, our relationships with ourselves, our loved ones, our communities and our planet erode. These “drugs” uphold this dismal state, or stupor, of affairs and systemic distress and dis-ease proliferate so that the demand for continuous numbing persists.
If on the whole, we continue to silence our personal pain (mental, emotional and physical), then we are willing participants in a grand scheme that encourages the individual to be silent. We will remain ambivalent about our own wellbeing and ignorant to our own self-care, thus inhibiting our capacity to care for and promote the wellbeing of our greater communities and planet.
In writing this blog-post, a simple and perhaps obvious comparison has dawned on me. To kill pain is actually violent. Inwardly-directed violence; a literal killing of something that is born within us. While, we’re all familiar with the phrase, “Don’t shoot the messenger,” this is the exact war tactic the modern pain-management industry promotes. When pain arises, shoot it down. Instead of patient, responsible listening, we numb, sedate and eradicate the marvel of our body’s intuitive self-governance with alarming frequency. In a country that has one of the highest prescription drug addiction rates on the world stage, in other words, one of the highest rates of violence towards the self, is it really so surprising that we are also enacting so much violence towards each other?
I am not suggesting that pain ought to be tolerated with an attitude of pompous endurance. No. Instead, I am suggesting that the attitude shift we wish to see in the world around us, is one that we begin to first, extend to ourselves through our relationship to pain.
In US culture in particular, human pain and the emotional experience has been unnecessarily vilified. We need not fear our pain. Fear, on top of an emotional experience is what often leads to neurosis. Perhaps, in beginning to respond to ourselves differently, more empathically, we can sow seeds to cultivate change in the world around us. Joanna Macy, PhD, eco-philosopher and spiritual activist writes,
“Pain…is not only natural, it is a necessary component of our healing. As in all organisms, pain has a purpose: it is a warning signal, designed to trigger…action…It is to be named and validated as a healthy, normal human response to the situation we find ourselves in. Faced and experienced, its power can be used. As the frozen defenses of the psyche thaw, new energies and intelligence are released. The problem lies not with our pain…but our repression of it.”
Effectively directing our consciousness toward the experience of pain can be a terrifying prospect for many. Especially so for those whose pain is masked by fear as well as for those who hold dearly to diagnosis of their pain which give them a sense of identity and of being understood. To this point, I find Macy’s citation of the work of Polish Psychiatrist, Kaszimierz Dabrowski quite useful. She writes,
“It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to evolutionary and psychological transformations as the cracking of outgrown shells. An idea referred to as ‘positive disintegration.’ What disintegrates in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, but its defenses and ideas. We are not objects that can break…We do not need to protect ourselves from change, for our very nature is change. Defensive self-protection, restricting vision and movement like a suit of armor, makes it harder to adapt. It not only reduces flexibility, but blocks the flow of information we need to survive. Our ‘going to pieces,’ however uncomfortable, can open us up to new perceptions, new data and new responses.”
If pain indicates the need to respond, to shift in order to survive (and evolve), then we must respond to our pain and discontinue the pattern of self-suffocation that has led to so many painful eruptions on the national scale. I cannot help but see these violent outbursts across the country as a macrocosm of what is going on at the individual level. While guns, access to weapons and systematic oppression escalate and ensure a continued death toll, there are unspoken issues to be addressed that guide the fingers that pull these triggers. Healthcare is one of them. Mental health. Physical Health. Emotional Health. Spiritual Health. Community Health. Ecological Health. Global Health. Planetary Health.
I am hopeful that during my lifetime a paradigm shift in terms of the way healthcare is approached is being seeded. A movement away from the limiting, mechanistic and compartmentalizing diagnostic strategies that are pharmaceutically-driven and currently in place, toward a paradigm of preventive, integrative, holistic care that promotes and amplifies our individual and collective wellbeing in all its forms. I hope for people to have individual relationships with their healthcare practitioners and mental health counselors that aren’t pressured by time and money. I want people to feel empowered by their inner connection to the wealth of inner guidance that is their birthright. In truth, we all have varied backgrounds regarding trauma and disease that determine our pain thresholds for discomfort. Because every person’s history is unique, every coping strategy should be individually designed. And in my vision, there remains a place for appropriately administered and appropriately weaned pain suppression, but no more pain killing as a blanket treatment.
The teenage students who are raising awareness around gun violence here in the US and demanding that more laws and stricter regulations be passed, are putting their pain on the table for discussion. They are demanding national attention and focus for their grief. They are asking the country to hold space to honor their pain. They are making room to honor their emotional experience and they are channeling the energy created by it toward enacting change. Guided by their example, and all of the students who have preceded the Parkland group in protest, I hope we can all learn to do the same.