healthmedicinet

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I had a professor who once said that there’s nothing useful about  comparing our pain to other people’s.  What she meant is, our pain is our own, and there’s no sense in judging it.  The sense is in accepting it.

She wasn’t talking about dialectical behavior therapy, though she could have been.  Because DBT attributes a lot of our subjective suffering to the judgments we place upon ourselves.

I have a client with a pretty severe mental illness, one that is often debilitating.  She also has a number of physical limitations.  I notice that she is much kinder to herself when it comes to the physical than the emotional.

This seems to be true of a lot of people.  We’re harder on ourselves when things feel wrong emotionally, than we are when we have a physical ailment.  We’re allowed to take it easy, for example, when we’ve sprained an ankle, but not when we’re just feeling sensitive or raw.

That’s because we judge our emotional suffering differently than we judge the physical.  With the physical, we understand that certain things are objectively painful or uncomfortable–having the flu, or, in my daughter’s case, teething.

At 15 months old, my daughter is too young to differentiate physical from emotional suffering.  It’s all one big muddle to her, and that means she behaves in the purest way, without judgment.  She’ll cry for any type of discomfort.  She’s equal opportunity.

That doesn’t mean I can always alleviate her suffering as well as I want to, but it does mean that sometimes, it can be alleviated more easily than it will someday, say, when she’s older and has been indoctrinated into society.  That’s when she’ll learn how much certain things are supposed to hurt.  She’ll compare herself to other people and decide whether it’s okay to cry or if she needs to hold it in.  She’ll learn to judge her feelings, which can serve to magnify her pain (“I shouldn’t feel this upset, I’m being stupid,” is the kind of thought that actually makes a negative feeling last longer.)

I hope that by the time she’s older, we’ll all be more enlightened.  We’ll recognize that our emotional pain is real and legitimate and deserves to be attended to, just like physical pain.  I hope that she’ll take in the idea that whatever she’s feeling is okay; in fact, it’s good information.  It all comes down to what we do with that information.

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And they are apparently too stupid to realize how easy it is to ensure they are called out for their bad behavior.

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    Last reviewed: 1 Apr 2013