Pathways from Pain to Meaning

People today strive to live as pain-free a life as possible, treating both physical pain and emotional suffering with a range of medical and alternative therapies. But in our efforts to avoid pain, are we excluding an important part of our human experience?

In Pathways from Pain to Meaning: Short Thoughts on Pain in History and Personal Development experienced psychologist Iris Paxino explores different types of pain from the physical (through illness and injury), to emotional (loss and deprivation) and spiritual (the absence of meaning in our lives), how they affect us, and what we can learn from them.

In this extract Paxino explores what pain is, how we deal with pain and why its necessary for our survival.

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There is no one who can say that they have not experienced pain. Our life begins in pain and often ends in it, and in between pain appears in the most varied forms. It seizes us physically, sometimes as a dull warning or as something more sharply expressive; at others it can threaten us almost existentially, completely overwhelming us and breaking us down. And who does not know spiritual pain? The quiet melancholy in which it can sweetly hide, the sadness of the farewell mood that make us wave to the past on the threshold of the future, or the disappointment and resignation that make life taste so bitter? Nor is there any earthly fate that can match the devastating, heartbreaking pain of the loss of a loved one. And how often does the awareness of our own shortcomings – our guilt and failures, our mistakes and omissions – express itself through the pain of realisation?

But what is pain? Why do we refer to the sensation of cutting one’s finger in the same way as the mental experience of mortification, despair, loss or homesickness? Can the pain of the exhausted mountain climber be compared to the pain of a woman giving birth? What distinguishes ‘pain’ from ‘hurt’? Is it an indispensable part of being human? And what is it about our experience of pain that can separate us from or connect us to other people?

Generally speaking, pain is an indicator that something is not right with us; it is a sign of injury, disease, or some other disturbance to our well-being. We usually experience it as unpleasant and want to be rid of it as quickly as possible. This desire to be free of pain is common to us all. Through pain, we experience something that should not be the way it is, and it can feel as if the order of our humanity is strangely disturbed.

If we look more closely at pain, we find that it signifies a violation of boundaries, whether physically, such as when we cut ourselves and our skin is broken, or psychologically, such as when a friend says something hurtful and wounds our sense of self. The death of a loved one is also felt as a violation of boundaries: the connection we experienced with another person is destroyed. Pain is thus experienced through the cutting into, or being cut out of, a previously existing unity: be it with oneself, another person or something else besides. Nor does this unity have to be only of a bodily or soul nature. In a spiritual sense, human beings can also feel themselves cut off from a deeper, more meaningful context in their lives.

Yet pain is necessary for human survival. It would be very dangerous for us indeed if, with every contact with the outside world, pain did not remind us of our physical limits. If we were too slow to pull our hand back from a hot stove or too careless with a sharp knife, it would lead to serious, even life-threatening injuries on a daily basis. The absence of pain would mean a lack of self-protection. We can therefore say that pain is also there to keep us safe and free from harm. It serves as a warning signal and can be understood as a sign that something is wrong. The peculiarity of pain is that it is entirely subjective and personal. Only I can feel my pain; it is not an object of my perception that lies outside of myself. Tissue injuries and the associated irritation of pain receptors or changes to the activity in my brain can be objectively measured, but the experience of pain cannot be quantified. It knows nothing of receptors and nerve impulses; it remains directly connected to my own being. I ‘am’, in a certain way, my pain. And while I might be able to empathise with another person’s suffering, nevertheless I do not experience their pain as though it were my own.

Dealing with pain can vary widely in different instances. The usual approach is to turn our attention towards the pain and work out how to handle it. Bandaging a wound, caring for an injury, and weeping at the grave of a friend who has just died are all forms of giving attention to our pain. We perceive the pain and respond by trying to alleviate it.

But we can also reject and repress pain using the most varied tactics and displacement mechanisms, physical or psychological, and while these procedures represent one way of dealing with the pain, they do not allow us to integrate it.

In daily life we often demonstrate a mix of acceptance and rejection towards pain and suffering. We might be willing to have our aching back treated by physiotherapists, but we do not want to do anything about the emotional suffering that weighs heavily on our shoulders. Or, concerned about cardiac arrhythmia, we might go from doctor to doctor and dutifully take the prescribed medication, but we do not want to confront the pressure of life that we have lived with for years.

Over the course of human history, our relationship to pain has changed. Priests and doctors, healers and shamans, philosophers and scientists, artists and poets have devoted themselves to the questions of how pain arises, what it means, and how it should be dealt with. Human cultures have had, in very different ways, a pain-affirming or pain-rejecting attitude. Pain and suffering have been attributed to various causes and given different meanings.

The associations interwoven with pain have changed from culture to culture and from century to century. From this it is apparent that pain has contributed significantly to the creation of our world as it is today. It has shaped and formed humanity’s development. It has accompanied all our wars and served as a tool of oppression. It is present during all periods of transition, from the death throes of the old to the birth pangs of the new, and nothing great has ever been achieved without some degree of deprivation and agony. The overwhelming feeling of being at its mercy and the sense of fate contained in suffering profoundly shape our relationship not just to pain itself, but also to each other and our notions of the divine. It is a primordial phenomenon that takes hold of our whole being and whose appearance is often decisive in our confrontation with ourselves. In this we see pain for what it is and has always been: as an awakening force with the power to raise our consciousness.

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Find out more about Pathways from Pain to Meaning here.

By the same author