What is pain?
I felt a tremendous feeling of pain, recently, when I read from a friend. I felt that this friend was betraying our friendship by what she was saying to me, and I started to feel a pain inside. I actually felt this pain for three days.
What was happening during this time? First of all, I think that I understand physical pain pretty well. It’s obvious isn’t it? It is when your body hurts.
But psychological pain is a different story. It nags at us and undermines us.
As my husband saw how depressed I was by the letter, he suggested that I do a particular strenuous physical exercise. I did the exercise and accomplished it fairly easily. Then he asked me to do the same exercise while thinking of the letter which had caused me such pain. I tried it again, but this time I could hardly do the exercise at all. My arms felt incredibly weak.
By this small example my husband was showing me the power of thinking about a psychological pain. It had weakened me.
Do others cause us pain or is the pain already inside ready to be stimulated?
After reading the painful letter, I wanted to hurt the person who had written it, and I thought of all kinds of ways to do it. I thought of copying the psychological putdowns in her letter and sending them back to her. I might ignore her entirely. I could say bad things about her to other people.
I thought of all the things that might cause her the same kind of pain I felt. I blamed her for causing me the pain.
Is psychological pain in relationship caused by the image we have of ourselves?
What was she actually saying in the letter?
She was stating that she was not going to do the project that I wanted her to do, but was going to do another project and that she was very happy about it. She felt that the insights I had were not viable.
I had a lot of my emotion invested in bringing about an innovative and creative work, and I was very upset that she did not see the quality of the long research and hard work that I had put into my project.
Also, I was very aware that there were certain dangers in her pursuing her own project.
Was the pain I felt caused by her? Would I have felt the pain if I expected her to act the way I wanted her to? Was it my image of myself as an innovator and leader that lead me to feel her letter as a rejection? What did she do to cause me pain?
She obviously did not consider my feelings and was also attempting to show me that she was in a position of power to put forward her ideas at the expense of mine. She also did not acknowledge in any way the work I had put into the project and showed me considerable disrespect in ignoring my efforts.
Is psychological pain in relationship caused by the image we have of ourselves?
I find this difficult to answer, because it means that I have to really look at myself and find out what is happening when I am feeling psychological pain.
As far as I can see, I am feeling constricted inside my body, my heart feels heavy, my shoulders are tense. I am not attentive to my surroundings, I tend to forget things, I am irritable. I also tend to think about the problem all the time, incessantly going over and over it.
I keep wondering why this person did this to me. Why didn’t she do the project I suggested? It felt that she didn’t like me.
There are two things going on when I feel the pain.
One is physical and the other is mental. Is it possible not to have any images at all of oneself?
The mental is far more time consuming, thinking and thinking about the problem of her not liking or respecting me. It seems as if my physical discomfort is coming from my constant thoughts of being rejected and disliked.
Do I have an image of myself as not being worthy of acceptance? Is this really the cause of my pain? If I did not have this image would her rejection have bothered me at all? Would I have just taken it in my stride?
Why do we have images of ourselves?
From early childhood, we are encouraged to have images of ourselves. We are taught that we are of a certain nationality, that we are born in a certain place, that we come from a certain family, and that we are a certain type of person. People around us add to those images by commenting on our behavior by saying we are clever or stupid, nice or not nice, etc.
So we begin to gain images of ourselves from an early age.
Is it possible not to have any images at all of oneself?
Obviously, some images are useful. I need to have an image of where I live in order to return there in the evening after work. But psychological images are a different kind of image. Psychological images put me into the pain about the letter. This kind of image is not necessary and weakens us in our ability to deal with life.
Look at what happened to me when I tried to do a simple exercise while thinking of my pain.
If I can really understand this, perhaps next time I feel a pain when a person says something to me, I will realize that this pain may come from an image and not from reality. The person is not hitting me over the head and is not attacking me. I am safe and I have a chance to see that the pain is a signal alerting me that I have made an unnecessary image of myself, or that I am accepting the other person’s image of me.
