Your Pain Comes From a Futile Search For What You Want

“All your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting it must be found outside you.”

 

I just saw this posted on a “friend’s” Facebook wall. I put “friend” in quotes because we really were never more than online acquaintances. He’s now been removed from my friend’s list after the above comment. This is a great example of how some people really just don’t “get it” and never will.

Perhaps he was just referring to psychological pain and not physical, even at that the idea (and we’ve all heard it many times before) that we just “choose” to be sick or healthy is utter bullshit. If that is what he meant then he has no idea what PAIN really is and has never experienced psychological pain to the degree of being clinically depressed, or having anxiety attacks on a regular basis, or any of the psychological issues that are much worse and cause us great psychological pain.

The idea that we might be hurting physically because we made some wrong choice or because we are just searching for something and when we finally find it we will magically be transformed is lunacy. It fits in with a few other misconceptions that create stigma surrounding those of us who live with chronic illness. Misconceptions like these:

• Pain is just bottled up emotions – While I do believe that avoiding emotions and pushing them down can create a kind of stress that can negatively influence pain and illness. I don’t think it’s as simple as all that. Dealing with negative emotions can certainly make you feel better mentally and remove stress, which may decrease other symptoms. But, it’s not a one-shot cure for all that ails us.

• Pain is some sort of punishment from God – This misconception seems to believe that when we “get right” we will finally stop hurting. Guess what. It doesn’t work that way. I spent too much of my life in church and saw too many of the best people in the world spend their life suffering physically (and sometimes mentally) to ever believe that.

I really hope that the person who posted this didn’t mean it the way I took it. But, after seeing it and seeing the number of people who hit the “like” button, agreeing with his statement, I felt it was something that needed to be addressed. Pain is not the result of some search, nor is it a punishment, or the result of repressed emotions. Pain is pain.

Pain is the result of many different issues, damage to the body, infections, it is the body’s way of telling you something is wrong. Stress definitely plays a role in that and needs to be addressed, but it’s not the only thing.