Let’s Talk Pain
Pain.
You can find it practically everywhere you look, everywhere you go and often in the way you may address a person or an event.
The never thought of pain can be found with words like paint, painted and paintings. They symbolize something good that has been done.
Then there are the remarks:
“You are such a pain in the ass.”
“It pains me to know this.”
“I have gone to great pains to having this post completed.”
″ I feel your pain.”
“To know love, is to know pain.”
Then there is the acutal pain. Final stages of Cancer where treatments no longer work.
Alzheimer, where pain isn’t even a remembered option any longer. Brain and heart surgeries that didn’t go as planned leaving one on a contunual road of healing but never fully getting there.
We can move from this to other disorders that cause a vast amount of pain such as bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and post traumatic stress disorder just to mention a very few. If I left out what you may be experiencing, it wasn’t on purpose. But to say none of these disorders does not have a form of pain attached would be a farce, a bold lie. People such as these live with pain every day of their life. Of course their physician prescribes a medication to lessen the mood swings which can become volatile.
According to Smitha Bhandari, MD, "Someone with Multiple Personality Disorder or more commonly called today as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This is a mental disorder characterized by the maintenance of at least two distinct and relatively enduring personality states. The disorder is accompanied by memory gaps beyond what would be explained by ordinary forgetfulness. And each distinct person has some form of pain. Each personality is unaware of the other’s pain. A pain that is heavily deep-rooted in the mind and can take years, even decades before the cause is found. And in almost all cases, the trauma, or pain, can be found to go back to early childhood, as young as three which causes the separation of one character into two separate people, or more."
A case in point I found, is Kim Noble, recorded as havug 100 different personalities, each with a different name and each either a dominant or submissive type person, to just a regular 9-5 next door neighbor type.
If you have never seen The Three Faces of Eve, I encourage you to watch. Just ignore the foreign sub-titles --- this is based on a true story -- https://youtu.be/WRUyU18qq5c
Pain. It has been around as long as the word love has. For as long as humankind has taken a breath of air, and fought to survive on this planet.
Going back to, “I feel your pain.” you cannot. But you can try to understand the who, what and why, the way they are. Even those with serious physical ailments, especially with Covid-19, the best form of advice I can give is to just listen.
And keep in mind the vast amount of pain families go through each and every day having to deal with a family member in dire straits.
This for me, is a mind-blowing statement. According to a World Health Report, one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Around 450 million people currently suffer from such conditions, placing mental disorders among the leading causes of ill-health and disability worldwide.
Remember: to know love, is to know pain. It is impossible to embrace one and not the other, but we can try, can we not?