How Do You Describe Emotional Pain?
Break an arm and the cast immediately draws out sympathy. People even ask to sign it in recognition of your obvious pain. Tell someone you have a headache and everyone empathizes because we all have had one. Tell someone you are in extreme emotional pain and they start filtering the words you use to see if you have a mental problem. It is difficult to touch and feel. It lacks physicality. People offer words of comfort but generally don’t have a similar experience against which to understand.
Therapists were created for such moments. They are trained to recognize and understand emotional pain as a tangibility. It has a definable reality for them even if they haven’t personally experienced it.
Psychological pain, mental pain, or emotional pain is an unpleasant feeling (a suffering) of a psychological, non-physical origin. A pioneer in the field of suicidology, Edwin S. Shneidman, described it as “how much you hurt as a human being. It is mental suffering; mental torment. There is no shortage in the many ways psychological pain is referred to, and using a different word usually reflects an emphasis on a particular aspect of mind life.”
Intense ‘unbearable’ mental (psychological) pain is defined as an emotionally based extremely aversive feeling which can be experienced as torment. It can be associated with a psychiatric disorder or…
