Listening to Pain

If you break your leg, you will feel intense pain. The pain is telling you there is something very wrong with your leg, and the pain is so strong you do not attempt to use the leg, which of course would cause further damage to the leg. If you went to the emergency room and the physician just treated the symptom of pain, he or she would simply use drugs to make the pain go away and send you home. Of course that would be ridiculous because everyone knows the physician would have to treat the cause of the pain and provide an environment for the bone to heal. You will instead go home with your leg in a cast and probably with some pain medication to help while your leg begins the complex process of healing itself.

Emotional and psychological pain is very similar to physical pain because the “pain” is telling us that something is wrong and needs attention. However, many times we do not listen to emotional pain and simply treat the symptom thus ignoring what is causing the hurt. At these times, it would be like leaving the emergency room with a broken leg, a lot of painkillers and no cast.

Emotional pain can come in different forms, like feelings of sadness, fear, anger, hopelessness and helplessness. If you or someone else has one of these feelings, it is a sign that something is wrong. Whether the pain is very small or very large, we often try to ignore the feelings and just make them go away. This approach can be very inadequate because we fail to provide the environment for healing.

Emotional healing is also a complex process. The environment for emotional healing is usually found in relationship. Emotional healing occurs when we are able to trust another person to listen and understand. It is safe environment of that holds and accepts the feelings, much like the cast holds the leg in a safe place while it heals. Hopefully our family and friends are the primary environments for our emotional strength, but sometimes more is needed to heal emotional or psychological pain. Counseling and psychotherapy provide the environment and expertise for healing emotional and psychological pain.

Listening to pain is always important. Turning a deaf ear really doesn’t work and can cause even worse damage to the wound.