'Sometimes we are willing to do anything to not feel pain
𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗲 𝗱𝗼 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝘀𝘂𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴
Substances, unsuspecting behaviors and work: sometimes we are willing to do anything to not feel pain. We spoke to an expert about it.
It takes courage to face pain and maybe, one day, stop suffering. To think of a love gone or a mother who is no more, to live with a disease for which there is no cure or with the ghosts of a catastrophic event such as an earthquake.
For all of this we usually say that it takes courage, nobody teaches us anything.
So many of us do everything, including harmful habits that add to the pain itself, not to think about it. Others, however, look for shortcuts.
The philosopher Emil Cioran was also convinced of this when he wrote that "the courage that most people lack is to suffer in order to stop suffering". How to blame us after all? We are human beings and it is not easy to make room for negative emotions within us.
«Pain is something so aversive that we are willing to do anything but not have to feel it. But often not wanting to go through it leads us to worse consequences than the pain itself», explains the psychotherapist Federica Cagnoni, one of the authors of The wounded mind, going through pain to overcome it (Ponte alle Grazie).
Substance abuse is one of them. There is alcohol, yes, but also drugs: "We live in the era of painkillers, not only physical but also psychic". We can thus delude ourselves, for example, that a psychiatric drug alone can easily resolve the consequences deriving from a trauma, only to then realize that most of the time it can only temporarily help us to soothe some connected symptoms.
Then there are those who abuse behaviors that we are not inclined to consider harmful: «People, for example, who sleep many hours during the day; in order not to think about what makes us suffer, we hide in sleep; for example, in those who experience the so-called post-traumatic stress disorder». A not so rare disorder that derives, as the name suggests, from a trauma: A symptom is the constant resurfacing of the traumatic event in the mind with images and even sounds linked to that experience". The force of a traumatic event projects its effects along the entire time axis: «An earthquake, for example, can cause three types of consequences. Caging the mind in a past memory that is continually relived; trapping ourselves in a present in which we live in constant alert that that event may recur; Even an unhealthy approach to work can hide a pain that we struggle to face Hyperactivity becomes another false strategy to stop suffering: so we fill our days with roadmaps that take our breath away In these cases when we stop we feel terrible, to the point of experiencing intense states of anxiety at the idea of having nothing to do". A form of horror vacui, fear of a void in which to find ourselves alone with the ghosts that haunt our minds.
𝐓𝐨 𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐧 (𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐣𝐮𝐝𝐠𝐞𝐝)
Too often we are led to minimize what concerns the lives of others. It happens with work, where we can convince ourselves that what others do is not as burdensome as what we do; but it also happens with pain, with the temptation to label what makes others suffer as something of little importance. Although a scale of trauma exists, awareness is however fundamental: «Although there are pains that statistically have a greater impact, even a trivial event can leave a mark and have such strong emotional implications as to generate traumatic consequences, to ensure that the aftermath does not is more the same as before". If it is true, as some statistics claim, that love mourning is the leading cause of suicide in the world, it is also true that the loss of a job can still ruin a life as well as a sentimental betrayal. In short, we should always avoid benaltrism, that is, the temptation to think that the real problems are always other than those raised by people with sensitivities different from ours. Because if life, as a very popular metaphor says, is a journey, everyone faces it with a different 𝒆𝒎𝒐𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍 (𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒄𝒐𝒈𝒏𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆) 𝒃𝒂𝒈𝒈𝒂𝒈𝒆 which is also «the set of skills that we have accumulated to cope with pain, fear, all anguish and anger, that is the main emotions that a trauma brings with it».'
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