What to do when you're in (emotional) pain. (Hint: Act like a baby!)

I don't turn off my awareness of emotional pain when I leave the therapy office. Here in New York we see people expressing their troubles on the street or on the subway (or on the internet) in all sorts of ways. For most New Yorkers, overhearing someone screaming and yelling on the A train is just another Tuesday.

Strange as it may seem, there's a sense in which I actually find a lot of that "crazy" behavior to be pretty sane. Sure, screaming in public... I get it. But if we stop and think about it, isn't there an awful lot to be upset about? Given how much pain so many people find themselves in (and here there's no intent to deny the joy--there's a good deal of both!) isn't it odd we don't see more screaming in the streets?

"Get a grip."

"Pull yourself together."
"Calm down."
"Chill out!"

It's astonishing just how many ways there are of reinforcing the insane rule that the responsible thing to do with pain is to Shut. It. Down.

There are subtler ways this message gets conveyed. Aleksandar Hemon writes a touching essay about the experience of his youngest daughter's diagnosis and passing from cancer. A few weeks before her death he visited the family's accountant, needing to liquidate some assets to pay for treatment. The accountant, clearly not knowing what else to say, commented, "At least you look good."

No harm was intended, to be sure, but the comment speaks to a culture that's both helpless in the face of pain and seeks to mollify it, not by curing it but by imposing a view that pain ought be managed, kept private and covered over with optimism or some other marker of public decency.

To add to the lexicon alongside "At least you look good" (and of course its cousin, "At least you have your health") we can add "It'll take time," or the overtly sanitizing, "Look on the bright side."

It's even true in therapy

While I find these admonitions dismissive, I also recognize that not every context (your accountants office, the A train) is one where we're allowed much more. But the hesitation to draw attention to one's pain, I've found, extends into one place where it surely doesn't belong: The therapist's office.

Rarely does a day go by that I don't find myself remarking here in my therapy office something along the lines of, "If this isn't the place to be in pain, to share it, to grieve over it, I'm not sure where is." And yet even here, in the most appropriate place imaginable, the habit of holding in all of that pain persists.

Our great challenge in therapy is to embrace the sanity of letting it out. The only sensible response to pain is to call attention to that pain.

Why would that be? Why would evolution leave us put together as human beings with this nearly automatic (though repressible) response of screaming when we feel pain? Surely it must be because we need to draw attention to our pain in order to heal from it. And yet drawing attention to the pain is the very reason so many people don't scream and shout.

Pain is pain

We must address as well the illusion of a hierarchy of pain. Real pain, the thinking goes, is physical pain. Emotional pain is ranked as something less. This disturbs me as a humanist, as one who bares feelings, as one who seeks to get close to the pain of others. What could the virtue be in creating a hierarchy of pain? To create this differentiation seems only to serve to delegitimize so much suffering. Nonsense! Enough!

What if I can't stop screaming?

Maybe you shouldn't stop. If you hurt, the most sensible thing to do is to scream and scream until you get help to make the pain stop. And yet we must adjust to a world that doesn't work that way. There is an expectation that we will tuck our emotional shirts in and go on about our business. While I may object to that aspect of our culture I'm well aware that those are the rules we all must live within, at least much of the time.

And so we pull ourselves together. We do "get a grip" and go on about our day so that we can hold onto our jobs and be with our loved ones who ask of us that we take pauses from the screaming. We elect not to frighten our fellow passengers on the A train. I understand the need to carry on. I'll even help. But please, let's just not mistake that for sanity.