Emotions

Dealing with Emotional Pain

There are clinics for treating physical pain all over the United States, but emotional distress, one of the chief obstacles in the path to a normal existence, is often neglected or treated inappropriately. Everyone, of course, experiences emotional pain at one time or another. Some problems are temporary and specific to a situation; some are chronic and permanent parts of a person's life.

When the topic comes up in a discussion, people suggest ways of feeling better, of making the pain go away. They try to help people feel better and avoid dealing with the causes of the pain. Unfortunately, just feeling better does not solve the problem. Getting at causes, however, may be a matter for intensive psychotherapy.

Transient emotional pain

Many of life's discomforts are caused by current situations. People lose jobs; have fights with loved ones, or experience illness. Such things usually cause temporary emotional pain, but action and time itself tend to heal these wounds. Sometimes, under certain circumstances, we convert transient emotional pain into something more serious and lasting.

Chronic emotional distress

This is the kind of emotional pain that usually begins early in life and continues over long periods. Sometimes it yields to medication, sometimes not. If transient situations are intense and disabling, they can make a long-term difference in our moods, especially if they occur when we are very young or living through very difficult times. If you lose a loved one when you are only six years old, the effects can be lasting and devastating. If you lose a loved one when you're an adult, it's difficult, but most people manage to deal with it and get on with life without personality damage.

Addiction

Addictions cause distress when financial losses mount and social life deteriorates; abstinence along with work on the Twelve Steps can relieve this transient, temporary, or situational pain. But, when one loses control of addictive behavior in the first place, it is often the result of some deeper, underlying and chronic emotional pain that arose in earlier times and circumstances. When addiction is used to escape chronic emotional pain, abstinence is likely to bring a return and intensification of the distress that was present before using ever started. This is why slips are so common.

The symptoms of chronic emotional pain

Signs of lasting, chronic distress show up as self-defeating thoughts, values, and attitudes. Here are a few samples of irrational, distress-related ideas:

• I must never show failure
• The world is a fearful and dangerous place
• I'm going to make some terrible mistake
• Being wrong is an unbearable sin
• Good enough is never good enough
• I must be perfect
• I must please everyone
• No one can be trusted
• I am better than you and I'll prove it
• Special people like me deserve special love and respect
• Criticism is the most painful thing that ever happens to me
• The world needs me to fix it, lead it, and watch over it
• If you win, I lose
• I can't stand people
• I can't live without people

The list is endless; so, find a little blank piece of paper to write down your own favorite nutty idea, the one that's causing all that pain you wish would go away.

Remote causes of chronic emotional pain

It may not really matter much whether or not we can identify the original causes of life-long chronic distress. The past is the past and can't be changed, and insight alone has little curative effect. The beginning of chronic distress might lie with a drunken, abusive parent. Perhaps you were given unrealistic childhood responsibilities or experienced traumatic events, injuries, neglect, starvation, severe illness, or physical disabilities.  Whatever it was, it left you with an attitude that will be difficult to change.

Unexamined attitudes that cause emotional pain

With chronic, durable emotional pain we usually see a pervasive, underlying mood or feeling-tone that has become part of personality structure. There could be specific fears, general anxiety, rage and anger, suspicion, endless yearning for something just beyond your grasp, profound feelings of inadequacy, flighty and scattered thinking, strong feelings of special entitlement, or general sadness and gloom. Now we are face to face at last with those difficult defects of character the removal of which can be so baffling that we are tempted to think of it as a spiritual experience when it starts to happen.