Pain

Posted by Alicja Aratyn on 14th Apr 2016

Recently I was reading a book, which in a big part was dedicated to the problem of pain. How to befriend it? How to deal with it when it is present in our life 24/7? Or how to live your life without experiencing pain at all. Two extremities – both horrifying!

Specialists say that we need to get acquainted with pain. By acknowledging it we will have actually influence on it and it will cooperate with us. If you are one of these rare groups of people who haven’t had to deal with serious pain throughout your life, you may not be aware of the importance of understanding pain.

My Mother, who survived WWII, was sick due to it for a majority of her life. She used to live with permanent pain. Constantly. I was growing up with this problem, however my Mother very rarely would show that she was in pain. She has never read books about pain, as many of the people from her generation, but I remember her saying to me when I had asked if she is in pain: “This pain is my best friend. I talk to it, we are together for soo many years, we learned how to be together”. Telling the truth I was afraid. I could not imagine how one can possibly like pain. When I asked, her answer was always the same: “I hope you will never have to understand it”.

Today we have pain clinics, specialists etc., but people still suffer. Pain still is the most effective alarming system in our body (next is temperature). We would do almost anything to avoid pain. Quite often pain (or its possibility) is used as a great motivator.

The book I have referred to at the beginning was actually about the woman with quite opposite problem - she couldn’t experience pain due to degeneration of some genes. I must admit, that after reading this book I am sure, that if we are afraid of pain, we should be even more terrified of the possibility of living without an ability to experience it when necessary. Her description of how carefully she has to examine her body inch by inch every night to check if she is fine, checking her gums and teeth etc. this has definitely widened my horizon on how hard and complicated life would be without pain.

I did not know that majority of people with no ability to experience pain do no survive 3-rd birthday, since they injure themselves and do not signal it at all or it is spotted too late by their parents. Those children must be under a very close supervision 24/7.

It all made me think that we all should begin to appreciate pain when it appears in our life. It may be harsh love, but love, as my Mother said. That we should be grateful to our body for the ability to create pain. Well – it is always nice if it is not very strong, but – I guess – that also depends on us, our lifestyle, choices we make, food we eat etc. All those aspects of life are worth paying attention to. At least the book motivated me to do so.