The Question of Pain

I was going to call this "the Gift of Pain" but I thought it might have a lot of people questioning my sanity or wondering what I was smoking.  It wasn't meant to suggest that pain was a gift but rather Pain came with a gift.  I also wondered if the distinction was too semantic or maybe philosophical.  In any event, I didn't call it that so why am I going on about what I didn't call this post?

I suppose the universal experience of pain is at the heart of empathy and compassion.  I don't know anyone who has never felt pain so I guess I don't know anyone who cannot, at some level, understand what another person's pain is like.  I think that is the gift which comes with Pain.  Having just gone through a few days of some of the most intense physical pain I've ever felt, I was struck by how it made me mindful of others.  I was thinking of other people I knew who were having different pain in their own lives. I was thinking also of friends & family who expressed concern and I also was thinking about the doctors & nurses in the world who pour their energy out in this particular arena.

So now we come to what I do have as the title, "The Question of Pain". 
I am struck by the variety of answers people have to pain.  This past week what really struck me personally is how our answer to pain can include or exclude community.  For myself, I will be paying attention to to my pain in the future, not to focus on it but to see it in relation to a community.  Typically we will all have some deep pain in our life at some point but our response my lead us into isolation - away from others.  What good does that do?

Community can be as little as two or as large as the world.  Pain can scale from a child getting a bee sting to a major catastrophe like 9-11.  I'm beginning to see that whenever there is pain, there follows in it's wake an opportunity for community.  It's our answer to the question.

Snap out of it!

I know a few people who've told me they have a mental illness.  I haven't actually dug into their experience of it - how they live with it on a day to day basis, I'm just aware they deal with it.  Should I ask questions? Will it make them snap? What do I say?

Depression is possibly the first thing many people think of when they think "Mental Illness" and it doesn't take too much reading or talking to uncover the wide range of opinions about it.  The one that must be most stunning is, "Snap out of it!"  What if I told someone with Cancer or a torn ligament to shake it off - if they didn't hit me or yell at me they'd surely think I was the crazy one.

I'm guessing plain old ignorance is a large part to blame for attitudes that are off base.  Is it fair to heap all the blame on Ignorance though?  Is there something a little more sinister hiding in it's shadow?  What about Stigma?  It not only keeps the ones with mental illness in the shadow, in many cases it also keeps friends & family from even wanting to find out. Why?

I read a book a while ago, not too many pictures.  The writer talked about how so many  of us are careful who we associate with because we don't want anyone or anything to affect our social standing in a negative way.  We want the people we value (ie good looking or smart or rich) to value us...it's all about us and we're
not letting any negative stigma push us down the social ladder.

What if we could affect the Stigma monster? What if we could shrink it with a magical ray gun and make it so small that it didn't matter.  I don't expect we'll ever get rid of Stigma, just like we'll never get rid of ignorance or people leaving their left blinker light on long after they've turned the corner but we can shrink it.  We can chose to care about real people with real problems and when we care for someone else more than ourselves, great things can happen.

We won't wake up every morning with flowers in bloom but Stigma will matter less to us and so have less impact on those around us.  Really, we'd be freeing ourselves just as much as the the who is Stigmatized.  How cool is that?

This blog is a part of the www.mentalhealthmatters.ca website and we invite everyone to read, think and chat about mental health matters.  Welcome.