Facing Pain And Overcoming It Makes Us Stronger
Pain is one of the emotions inherent in our existence. From the moment we are born, we are exposed to the inconsistency that life itself means, and the frustration that arises from the dissatisfaction of our desires. Therefore, knowing how to face pain and move forward is essential for moving through a degree of suffering that we can assume.
First, it is essential to differentiate between pain, sadness and melancholy. Making this distinction is fundamental because many times, in colloquial language, these words are used in the same way, but they are not synonymous.
Does facing pain mean feeling sad or melancholy?
Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, proposes an important distinction between these concepts, because although they are similar, or at least the collective imagination equals them, they are different. In his masterpiece “Mourning and Melancholia”, he tries to establish the points where both concepts differ.
Thus, literally, Freud states that “ Grief is the reaction to the loss of a loved one or an abstraction that takes its place, as an ideal, freedom, etc. With the same influences, in many people one observes, instead of mourning, melancholy ”.
Freud explains that grief is an affection that does not need to be pathological and is suffered by the subject who has lost the loved object. However, it establishes itself as a way of feeling that responds to absolutely normal parameters, while melancholia would be more related to the pathological.
Both mood processes have similar characteristics, except for one fundamental point. In both states there is pain, a lack of interest in the outside world, and an unwillingness to invest in a new love object.
However, in melancholia there appears a disturbance in the feeling of pain, adding to the harassment of the ego, which does not happen in the course of normal grief.
Coping with pain allows you to know yourself fully
Emotional life is directly linked to the human psyche and therefore directly or indirectly affects physical or biological well-being. As a general rule, today’s society, and the individual in particular, underestimates the importance of emotions.
When a person has a symptom, such as insomnia or depression, they want it to disappear as if by magic, and resort to some medication that will solve their life. However, it is very difficult for the symptom to be absent, at least permanently, if psychoanalytic work is not done in an integral way.
Medicine, more specifically psychiatry, reinforces the stimulus-response behavioral theory to combat any type of symptomatology. The idea is that, with the right medication, any patient could be reintegrated into their daily routine, because the symptom disappears or significantly diminishes, at least for a while.
However, the medication, in many cases, is just a mat that covers the symptom, the manifestation, leaving the final cause of the condition to remain dormant.
Thus, when the medication is withdrawn, it reappears, and even if the medication is kept, it can take other forms to become visible, harming the person’s quality of life.
Certainly, the symptom is an informative element that something goes wrong in the subject’s psychic life. That way, silencing your voice will only lose information about what is happening and it will be more difficult to intervene about it. That’s why a good clinical evaluation is so important before starting any type of intervention.
In this way, psychotherapy offers us the opportunity to establish new parameters to see the world from a new perspective. A new point of view that implies less pain and more satisfaction or fulfillment.
Let’s think that all our suffering has an important degree of subjectivity, therefore, it is the person who, in the last case, knows what really hurts him. On the other hand, through his report, the psychologist will be able to understand what the dissatisfied desire represents as the source of his discomfort.
