The Emotion Machine

§3-4. Overriding Pain

Sonja: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”

—Woody Allen, in “Love and Death.”

Some of pain’s effects are so quick that they’re finished before you’ve had ‘time to think’. If Joan had happened to touch something hot, she might have jerked her arm away before she even noticed it. But when that pain came from inside Joan’s knee, her reflexes gave no escape from it, for it followed her everywhere she went and kept her from thinking of anything else. Persistent pain can distract us so much as to thwart all attempts to escape from it. Then we’re trapped in a terrible circle. When pain gets too good at its principal job—of focusing you on your injury—you may need some way to override pain, to regain control of the rest of your mind.

If Joan urgently wants to cross that room, she can probably do it ‘in spite of the pain’—at the risk of further injury—the way that runners and wrestlers do. Professional boxers and football players are trained to take blows that may damage their brains. Then, how do they override pain’s effects?

“About that time, G. Gordon Liddy began a new exercise in will power. He would burn his left arm with cigarettes, then matches and candles to train himself to overcome pain. … Years later, Liddy assured Sherry Stevens that he would never be forced to disclose anything he did not choose to reveal. He asked her to hold out a lit lighter. Liddy put his hand in the flame and held it there until the smell of burning flesh caused Stevens to pull the flame away.”

—Larry Taylor

We each know tricks for doing this, and see some of these as commendable, and others as execrable, depending on the culture we’re in.

Another way to deal with pain is to apply a counter-irritant: when a certain part of your body aches, it sometimes helps to rub or pinch that spot—or to aggravate some different place. But why should a second disturbance offset the first, instead of making you feel worse? [36] And why do such drugs as the opiates have such specific effects on how much we hurt? Researchers have varied ideas about this but those theories are still incomplete. The simplest idea is when there are multiple disturbances, it is hard for the rest of the brain to choose one to ‘focus’ on—and (somehow) this makes it harder for a single large cascade to grow.

Usually when you attend to a pain, that makes the pain seem more intense—and this in turn intensifies your goal of getting rid of it.

If you keep your mind involved with other distracting activities, then a pain may seem to feel less intense. We all have heard those anecdotes about wounded soldiers who continue to fight without noticing pain—and only later succumb to shock, after the battle is lost or won. So the goal to survive, or to save one’s friends, may be able to override everything else. On a smaller scale, with a mild pain, you can just be too busy to notice it. Then the pain may still ‘be there’ but no longer seems to bother you much. Similarly, you may not notice that you’ve become sleepy until you perceive that you’re starting to yawn—and your friends may have noticed this long before. (In my own experience, the first awareness of being tired usually comes when I start to notice certain kinds of grammatical errors.)

Shakespeare reminds us (in King Lear) that misery loves company: no matter how awful one’s lot may be, we still may draw comfort from knowing that the same could happen to someone else.

When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffers suffers most i’th’ mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind;
But then the mind much sufferance doth o’erskip
When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.
How light and portable my pain seems now,
When that which makes me bend makes the King bow.

Many other processes can alter how pain can affect our behavior:

Aaron Sloman: “Some mental states involve dispositions, which in particular contexts would be manifested in behavior, and if the relevant behavior does not occur then an explanation is needed (as with a person who is in pain not wincing or showing the pain or taking steps to reduce it). The explanation may be that he has recently joined some stoic-based religious cult, or that he wants to impress his girl friend, etc.”

—In comp.ai.philosophy, 20/7/96.

This applies to the treatment of pain-ridden people.

“The degree of awareness of one’s own pain may vary from a near denial of its presence to an almost total preoccupation with it, and the reasons for attending to pain may vary. Pain itself may become the focus of the self and self-identity, or may, however uncomfortable, be viewed as tangential to personhood. One of the most powerful influences on the way in which symptoms are perceived and the amount of attention paid to them is the meaning attributed to those symptoms.”[37]

Finally, in Chapter §9, we’ll discuss the seeming paradox implied by the common expression, “No pain, no gain.” There are many common activities, such as in competitive sports, or training for strength, in which one tries to do things beyond one’s reach—and where the greater the pain, then the higher the score.

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Prolonged and Chronic Suffering

When an injured joint becomes swollen and sore, and the slightest touch causes fiery pain, it’s no accident that we say it’s ‘inflamed.’ What could be the value of this, once the damage is already done? First, it can lead you to protect that site; thus helping that injury to heal; then it can make you feel sick and weak, both of which help to slow you down. So pain can promote recovery.

But it’s hard to defend the dreadful effects of those chronic pains that never end. Then we tend to ask questions like, “What did I do to deserve this?” Then if we can find to justify punishment—it may bring us relief to be able to think, “Now I can see why it serves me right!”

Most victims discover no such escapes, and find that much has been lost from their lives—but some others find ways to see suffering as incentives or opportunities to show what they can accomplish, or even as unexpected gifts to help them to cleanse or renew their characters.