arcticorangutan on Nostr: Pain is widely misunderstood or if it’s understood, the understanding is ignored. ...

Pain is widely misunderstood or if it’s understood, the understanding is ignored.

Whenever my daughter gets vaccinated, the doctor wants to give her sugar water to distract her from the pain of the needle. Apparently, this is something that doctors now do.

This is based on a false understanding of pain. Pain is not something to be avoided, it’s a signal. A signal that something is wrong. By numbing or distracting from the pain, we’re desensitizing our children and habituating them to a disfunctional habit that we later try painstakingly to disengage adults from.

In fact our various recreational drugs, when used habitually all serve the purpose of numbing physical or psychological pain. And once such a habit has been built over years, it is very hard to drop.

Let me pre-empt two concerns with this view:

Chronic pain: If pain is chronic, there may be value in numbing it but this should not be done mindlessly and without first testing whether there is a way to truly address the root causes. The reason is that once you start numbing the pain, you may raise the bar for the identification and resolution of its causes.

Overwhelming pain: Of course I would not want to expose my daughter or anyone to pain that is so overwhelming that it causes trauma and further issues down the road. The definition here is subjective but I don’t think a needle sting belongs in this category.

Lastly, there is an inverse view of pain that I want to mention:

One meditation practice is to go into pain and to experience it fully instead of shunning it. This is a difficult but powerful practice because it allows us to realize that the pain is separate from its observer.

Loosening our identification with pain is the only way to live from a more powerful relationship with it and to avoid the pitfalls of destructive coping mechanisms.