The relativity of pain
Pain is subjective. How you understand it, be it bodily or emotional, depends on what else you have experienced first-hand, and what you have seen others endure. If you aren’t very empathic or haven’t encountered much suffering, that second option will barely exist for you. The biggest pain you have ever known is the measure of how bad you think it can get (ie, that plus whatever you are capable of imagining is worse). For young children, every bump and frustration is a source of overwhelming misery.
Gradually, some of us learn new perspectives, a few of us don’t.
It can be all too easy to get into the idea that “my pain is bigger than yours, and that mine should be taken seriously, while yours should not”. I spent my childhood being told I had a low pain threshold, yet I’ve had 2 tattoos without so much as a whimper, and went most of the way through labour with no pain relief. I consequently find I have no idea how my pain relates to anyone else’s. If it hurts more than I can bear, I need help, or something to change. If I can bear it, I bear it. What else is there? What help is it to be told at that point that you’re making a fuss, over reacting, that your pain is not as big as you think it is?
It’s difficult encountering those people for whom a torn nail, the wrong actor getting the Batman role, a head cold or a bad day at the office seems like something of earth shattering proportions. I do find it hard watching the amount of energy people expend griping about what seems trivial to me. Whose perspective is wrong? Actually, it could well be mine. Perhaps I should be taking my own pain a bit more seriously, rather than assuming that I’m just being lazy or feeling sorry for myself.
Then there’s the knowledge that if any of us had been through a Nazi death camp, a Rwandan massacre, an epic natural disaster… we’d have a whole other perspective again. There are people who will get to watch their loved ones suffer and die, powerless to help them. There are people whose apparently whingey griping about pain turns out to be the undiagnosed cancer that kills them. Perspective works best when you’re looking backwards, possessed of all the facts. When you’re in pain, you probably don’t have that. You don’t know what was meant, or how much less an issue it will be than what tomorrow is going to bring for you. All you know at that point is how it fits with where you have been.
We all start out howling because the teddy falls out of the pram. We learn at the speed life sees fit to teach us. That might be a gentle curve. It might be in sudden shocks and bounds. We might coast along for forty years and then be crushed by something we were in no way prepared for. Life doesn’t always help us grow into a useful perspective before it really shits on us. Today, the worst problem is how to peel a pomegranate. Tomorrow, you are hit by a truck, but not killed.
The only answer is compassion, with ourselves, and with the people around us. No one knows what someone else is feeling, or how that fits in the context of the rest of their life. If someone is hurting, try not to judge them. Maybe you could sail through that problem untroubled, but maybe that’s because you aren’t as bruised already as they are. We don’t know. It helps to remember that.
