On Pain and Sense (repost)
So, how do we make sense of pain? I mean, in general, pain is your body's way of telling you something's wrong. You're getting burned? Pain. Hand pulls back, not so much pain, not in danger anymore. When the pain subsides completely, chances are you're on the fast track to recovery.
So... How do we make sense of emotional pain? Emotional pain is, of course, your brain telling you that there's something wrong, emotionally speaking. But what if you don't think there *is* something wrong? Or what if you want to shrug it off? With physical pain, you have pain killers. With emotional pain, you have drugs. Each is used to dull a different kind of pain.
It becomes interesting when you try to cope with the pain. If you try to face it, the pain becomes ten times more intense. It's one of those things you figure out at some point along the line with physical pain: ignore it and it will dull. If you ignore physical pain for long enough, you'll usually be good, since it'll go away. Emotional pain, however, is not the same way.
You see, emotional pain has to be faced, it turns out, or it eats at you from the inside. At some point or another, you have to face what's causing you your pain. And you have to understand it, and accept it. For example, if your parents act like they're disappointed in you, that's likely to cause emotional pain. So how do you deal with it? The best way, though it is the most arduous and painful, as is often the case, is to face the fact that your parents are disappointed in you, and either accept it or try and change it.
Trying to change it opens up a whole new can of worms, of course, since that can lead to days, weeks, months, years, decades of toil trying to accomplish a goal that may not necessarily be attainable. So that's another part of dealing with emotional pain: knowing when it can't be fixed. Realizing when you have to stop and just accept the fact of what is causing you the pain.
But sometimes it takes a while to come to that realization. So what do you do in the meantime? Do you face the problem every day and try and burn it out? Do you face it every day until you finally force yourself into that realization? Or do you pull out and consider it from afar until you feel ready to face it again?
That's a difficult question, and the answer varies not only from person to person, but from situation to situation. Sometimes, the best solution is to try both. If after a while of facing the problem you see that you're not bringing yourself to the point of accepting it, you try considering it from afar.
But, of course, there are the times when both of these paths of action take a very very long time to work. How can you know which to do then? Trust your instinct, I suppose. Our instincts are designed to make us survive, and as we have evolved complex emotions, I really do think that our instincts have followed us. We know, deep down, how to deal with these problems, or at least we have a good idea. The only issue is that we keep that knowledge buried under six tons of guilt, love, anger, jealousy, pain, and other emotions that bar us from seeing the pure simplicity of the solution.
I'm not one to think there's an elegant solution to every math problem (Differential Equations proved that, if nothing else), and in the same way I'm not one to think there's an elegant solution to every emotional problem. Sometimes it takes a long exposure to raw pain to get over something.
But I do believe in the old adage that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. We're built to survive. As Neal Stephenson said in Cryptonomicon, `Everyone and everything that [isn't] a stupendous badass [is] dead.' Yeah, we're stupendous badasses, every one of us. Those who aren't, in an emotional sense? They're the ones who commit suicide, I suppose.
It's this knowledge that leads me through every single emotional problem. I've tried one method now, it will soon be time to try another. Perhaps someday I'll look at now and think that it was a good thing that it happened. Personally, I doubt it.
So... How do we make sense of emotional pain? Emotional pain is, of course, your brain telling you that there's something wrong, emotionally speaking. But what if you don't think there *is* something wrong? Or what if you want to shrug it off? With physical pain, you have pain killers. With emotional pain, you have drugs. Each is used to dull a different kind of pain.
It becomes interesting when you try to cope with the pain. If you try to face it, the pain becomes ten times more intense. It's one of those things you figure out at some point along the line with physical pain: ignore it and it will dull. If you ignore physical pain for long enough, you'll usually be good, since it'll go away. Emotional pain, however, is not the same way.
You see, emotional pain has to be faced, it turns out, or it eats at you from the inside. At some point or another, you have to face what's causing you your pain. And you have to understand it, and accept it. For example, if your parents act like they're disappointed in you, that's likely to cause emotional pain. So how do you deal with it? The best way, though it is the most arduous and painful, as is often the case, is to face the fact that your parents are disappointed in you, and either accept it or try and change it.
Trying to change it opens up a whole new can of worms, of course, since that can lead to days, weeks, months, years, decades of toil trying to accomplish a goal that may not necessarily be attainable. So that's another part of dealing with emotional pain: knowing when it can't be fixed. Realizing when you have to stop and just accept the fact of what is causing you the pain.
But sometimes it takes a while to come to that realization. So what do you do in the meantime? Do you face the problem every day and try and burn it out? Do you face it every day until you finally force yourself into that realization? Or do you pull out and consider it from afar until you feel ready to face it again?
That's a difficult question, and the answer varies not only from person to person, but from situation to situation. Sometimes, the best solution is to try both. If after a while of facing the problem you see that you're not bringing yourself to the point of accepting it, you try considering it from afar.
But, of course, there are the times when both of these paths of action take a very very long time to work. How can you know which to do then? Trust your instinct, I suppose. Our instincts are designed to make us survive, and as we have evolved complex emotions, I really do think that our instincts have followed us. We know, deep down, how to deal with these problems, or at least we have a good idea. The only issue is that we keep that knowledge buried under six tons of guilt, love, anger, jealousy, pain, and other emotions that bar us from seeing the pure simplicity of the solution.
I'm not one to think there's an elegant solution to every math problem (Differential Equations proved that, if nothing else), and in the same way I'm not one to think there's an elegant solution to every emotional problem. Sometimes it takes a long exposure to raw pain to get over something.
But I do believe in the old adage that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. We're built to survive. As Neal Stephenson said in Cryptonomicon, `Everyone and everything that [isn't] a stupendous badass [is] dead.' Yeah, we're stupendous badasses, every one of us. Those who aren't, in an emotional sense? They're the ones who commit suicide, I suppose.
It's this knowledge that leads me through every single emotional problem. I've tried one method now, it will soon be time to try another. Perhaps someday I'll look at now and think that it was a good thing that it happened. Personally, I doubt it.