The Perspective of Pain
Last September I was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. In the past 14 months I went through four major surgeries, radiation treatment, and I embarked on a decade-long medical therapy. I lost one of my breasts and the ability to have more children, and my body is like a crime scene these days.
The emotional scars are significant too.
There’s not a day going by when I don’t imagine my daughter growing up without her mother, my parents having to bury their child, my husband taking care of a terminally ill version of me.
By the time I got into oncology treatment, the cancer cells already broke off the original tumor and started traveling through my body. I haven’t developed a distant metastasis but my chances of future recurrence are disturbingly high. There’s not a day going by when I don’t imagine my daughter growing up without her mother, my parents having to bury their child, my husband taking care of a terminally ill version of me.
One thing I’ve noticed about myself in this period was that my relationship with pain changed significantly.
Before my diagnosis I was the kind of person who tried to suppress discomfort (both physical and emotional) at all costs: I avoided situations where I would get hurt, and when I couldn’t, I applied bandages, painkillers and all sorts of self-medication.
I use pain to relieve myself of the tension that has built up inside, or to feel proud of, and empowered by what my body is/was capable of.
This year I not only stopped looking at pain as a useless phenomenon, I even started developing small rituals that help trigger it intentionally. I got into tattoos and body piercing, I purposefully watch videos that make me upset, and I frequently visit the Oncology Institute to be reminded of what I escaped last year.
But I don’t think these rituals make me a masochist at all. Quite the opposite: I use these practices to relieve myself of the tension that has built up inside, or to feel proud of, and empowered by what my body is/was capable of.
Pain as a ritual
Learning how to cope with acute discomfort can be an immensely gratifying and fulfilling experience.
All people experience deep pain at certain junctures of their lives: we break a bone, we cut ourselves, we get very sick, et cetera. The emotional list is even longer. This past year only some of my friends got a divorce, some buried their parents, others went through horrifying fertility journeys.
But while most of us are taught to move away from pain as fast as possible, or to think about it as a form of punishment (yes, that’s still a thing), the truth is that learning how to cope with acute discomfort can be an immensely gratifying and fulfilling experience.
Women who had non-traumatic birth experiences often report feeling strangely good afterwards, even though (or precisely because) labor pain is famously excruciating.
From a scientific perspective this isn’t a weird phenomenon at all. In behavioural studies there is a concept called the opponent-process theory which is often used to explain addictive patterns and non-suicidal self-injury. In the simplest terms, people who are exposed to a stressful experience can show greater physiological signs of well-being than those who were not exposed to the same stressor, which might explain why some people are drawn to BDSM, combative sports and challenges that verge on self-harm.
In biological terms pain is often described as a red flagging mechanism of the nervous system, one that plays a crucial role in our survival. It is known to drive humans (and animals) to pull back from dangerous situations, to protect their healing body parts, and it sends a warning to our peers that we need their immediate attention or care.
Pain can teach us to respect our bodies and to be more sensitive towards other living things capable of hurting.
But besides being a useful physiological phenomenon, pain also has several emotional, social and cultural advantages that are less easy to explain through a scientific lens. Pain can teach us to respect our bodies and to be more sensitive towards other living things capable of hurting. It fuels our creativity and helps express our feelings in profound ways. When the body is aching, there is no space for distraction — physical pain often provides temporary relief from emotional struggles, and vice versa. (Which might explain why people with a history of abuse are particularly prone to self-harm.)
Pain as a social norm
What if we normalised pain as an essential part of our lives? What if we started looking at discomfort as one of the most powerful instruments in humanity’s emotional toolbox?
Despite all these advantages, there are hardly any socially acceptable, safe and legal ways for nurturing pain –let alone triggering it intentionally. We’re not taught to look at discomfort as an essential part of our lives, nor do we learn how to facilitate pain for the sake of our well-being. As a result, people often turn to self-injury, aggression and other harmful alternatives.
A friend from South Africa once told me that it is customary in their community to mourn the deceased by triggering crying and screaming during funeral ceremonies. There is no such thing as grieving silently: when someone dies, everyone needs to experience pain’s purgatory potential together.
At first this all sounded extreme to me, but the more I thought about it, the more I fell in love with the idea of facilitating pain to relieve yourself of tension.
And it got me thinking: What if we normalised pain as an essential part of our lives? What if we started looking at discomfort as one of the most powerful instruments in humanity’s emotional toolbox? Would children with a history of abuse be able to heal more sustainably? Could people air their frustrations and aggression more constructively?
Pain is not a homogeneous experience –there are major differences between its consensual and non-consensual, chronic versus acute, functional and useless forms. If we want to be able to distinguish between those and use it more strategically, it’s high time we put pain back at the centre of the discussion.
©️ Julia Keseru 2022
