Pain is pain

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." - Plato

An idea that people in therapy and outside often struggle with and that can help gain perspective on emotional distress is: pain is pain.

In therapy groups that I lead, people are helped to share stories of the pain that they have experienced in their lives. Sharing the burdens we carry is therapeutic, as is providing support to others as they share them. However, as we listen to each others' stories, our analytical parts of the self begin to evaluate and categorize. We find ourselves tuning into the judgmental voices comparing others negatively in relation to our stories. We think of examples such as:

“Is that it? Your mother just shouted a lot at you?”

“You were just bullied in school. Give me a break.”

This perspective is not helpful. Emotional abuse, such as constant  shouting, can be equally traumatizing as physical abuse. In fact, some research has shown that counter-intuitively, emotional abuse alone is more damaging that emotional abuse coupled with physical abuse, presumably due to the relational aspects of physical abuse. Similarly, a person may only be able to verbalize only one set of abusive experiences at this time, such as being bullied. Looking down on others’ pain can give a feeling of superiority, but it is likely to be unproductive in the long term.  

The same experience can occur from the opposite standpoint of viewing our experience as less negative as compared to others. Examples include:

“Oh my God! She was sexually abused as a child AND a victim of domestic violence. I have gone through nothing as compared to that.“
“His father and brother BOTH committed suicide and he is struggling with a drug problem! What right do I have to be sad about my life?“

Looking down on our pain can be just as unskilled. Listening to the traumatic stories of others and consequently minimizing our own, can only provide temporary relief. This only contributes to masking our own struggles and is of no help in the moments when we do encounter our own pain. In the end, both types of comparisons are unhelpful and possibly misleading.

Modern neuroscience tells us that emotional pain is not even different from physical pain. The same regions of the brain appear to be involved in both types of pain. The differences in pain may be considered more due to their frequency, intensity and duration rather than their causes. However, in most cultures, we are taught that somehow physical pain is “real” but emotional pain is “all in your head.” We commit, in clinical psychology terms, what is called a fundamental attribution error in social psychology terms. We attribute external causes to physical pain but internal causes to emotional pain, as if we bring only one of these on ourselves.

It can be concluded that rather than differentiate categories of pain, it would be skillful to focus on the ubiquitous prevalence of pain. Comparing one person’s pain with another, emotional or physical, takes away more than it gives. The Buddha’s first Noble Truth is that “Life is suffering.” Plato exhorted us to be kinder, as he saw everyone fighting a hard battle in life. Nothing much has fundamentally changed on this subject in the millennia since these observations were made. Pain is still built into the human condition. In fact, all pain is pain. Let us respect that, and then we can go about alleviating it.