Durability of pain
I think we all agree that our subject, durability of pain,
is not a straight forward topic. It certainly needs to be clarified, but first
the origin of this topic was “the durability of pleasure and pain” but as we
know with two completely different topics in the title, one of them will end up
being the runt subject. Hence, why we only have pain in the title.
The pain in our topic is not the standard pain we feel
during a toothache or a broken leg. That kind of pain can be subdued by pain
killers (maybe) but certainly we do not say when everything is fixed and
remember the episode as “we can feel the pain" as we describe our
toothache. However, there are types of personal events and experiences that
make it legitimate to say for example, “it pains me when I remember what he did
to me” or “I can still feel the pain of having to leave my friends when I left
the city.” This is a kind of pain that is different from a toothache type of
pain.
Emotional pain is real and a very distressing type of pain,
but a) is it a “toothache” type of pain for use of better terminology (maybe
physical pain or raw physical pain might do?), and b) do we really feel the
pain when we remember bad experiences? Or is it the case that when we recall
past experiences we activate emotional type feelings that can in turn cause us
to feel emotional type of pain? A normal person (the person on the Clapham
omnibus) would not feel the actual pain when recalling the experience of a
toothache. We might recall the experience which in turn we start feeling so bad
that we end up with emotional distress and maybe even physical pain, but not
the toothache or raw pain itself.
Emotional pain is not raw type of pain by virtue for
example, that no physical nerves have been injured. At this point we might even
question whether there is pain involved at all when we are rejected or
experience a loss. Maybe it is not the event itself that causes us to feel pain
but the physical stress we find ourselves in that manifests itself into some
form of pain. After all, a function of pain to alert us that something is wrong
with the system and therefore must attend to it immediately.
If we accept this “alarm function” of pain, then pain is not
a characteristic of the event we experience but of our physical body. In other
words, it is not that a rejection causes pain, but rather a rejection causes
mental/brain states that can activate certain physiological reactions that
might trip the pain alarm system. So, in a way pain is not an element of what
constitutes a bad experience but sometimes associated with bad experience.
Before the nanny state and busy bodies took over the lives
of children we, when young teenagers, used to play a game to see who could
stick a needle in our hands the furthest and the longest. Some were quite
tolerant and very good at the game. In retrospect, we must have had long breaks
at school, but also people felt pain differently. I do not mean some people
tolerate pain from others, but rather they claimed that they had no pain
feelings. It was a matter for them on how to stick the needle.
Two necessary conditions of raw pain are that we are
conscious and the second is that we actually feel the pain. But for our topic,
durability of pain (i.e. emotional pain) we need a third condition: we need to
remember the pain and the experience of what caused our experience of pain.
In a way it does not matter whether the pain we experience
during an event is a characteristic of the event or our body. Surely the pain
we feel when rejected is a different type of pain when, say we move to another
country. In other words, Event-B causes pain-B whilst Event-C causes pain-C
and, thus when I remember event-B I remember or even feel pain-B: there seems
to be no question that I mix up pains when remembering an emotional event. This
seems to be true even when we recall a specific event in our dreams we do not
mix up the associated pain.
This is all very nice and I am sure five minutes searching
for pain will list numerous references from science and beyond. But our
objective is not to analyse physical pain, even if we accept that all pain is
physical, but why do we remember emotional pain events over long periods. It
cannot be that we remember emotional pain for long periods for survival
purposes. If we want to remember and learn from a rejection event we are better
off analysing our rational process when choosing people in our life. Remembering
that Person X caused us emotional pain-x won’t help us much next time we have
to make a choice of people to associate with. So what is the point of
remembering pain for a long time?
Last week we spent a lot of time discussing revenge: we know
that negative emotional events may cause pain to some people so we might be
tempted to challenge the emotions of people by using some hurtful words.
Insults are common examples in our life. Such language manipulation or language
games, which are only understood by the two actors (or number of actors)
involved, is an ideal weapon or strategy for revenge. This strategy also has
the benefit of repeating the pain every time the victim of the strategy
remembers the episode. As a strategy this is very cheap, its effects are very
long lasting and might even save us a stint in the local jail since we don’t
have to use physical force. Indeed, this methodology is so powerful that
presumably was first invented by
creatures such as P. vivax and P. ovale* who: “Malaria Relapses: ......In P.
vivax and P. ovale infections, patients having recovered from the first episode
of illness may suffer several additional attacks (“relapses”) after months or
even years without symptoms.”
But a human function of feeling the pain of negative
experiences over periods of time does seem to have a more legitimate and
positive effect on us. A powerful set of negative experiences are mistakes: we
associate emotional pain with mistakes. We are not only stressed for getting
3 points for our essay, but maybe also for making the mistake of choosing
person X who later rejected us: especially when we had a choice between X and
Y.
The positive function of long term emotional pain is that we
learn from our mistakes; and maybe the pain does not go away because we have
not yet learnt our lesson or worse we did not have the opportunity to learn
from past mistakes.
Maybe, at the end, our basic function of pain as an alarm
system is rather too limited. Maybe pain not only comes in levels and
intensities but also function. Maybe pain, and especially what I have been
calling emotional pain, is more important for us a teacher than just an alarm
system. The issue is why in some cases it takes us some time to learn from our negative
experiences?
*Section on Malaria
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
Best Lawrence
Durability of pain
https://www.philomadrid.com/2019/04/durability-of-pain.html
In the meantime, you can find the new guided tours of the British
Cemetery for May-June here:
Visitas guiadas, Cementerio Británico.
https://www.philomadrid.com/2019/04/visitas-guiadas-cementerio-britanico.html
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