Dealing With Emotional/Psychological Pain (Part One)

Lately, I've been thinking about pain and how we deal with it. Of course, as we are different, so we have different ways of dealing with things including pain. Do not be misled to think I'm talking about physical pain. That will have its place, but this article is actually centering on mental/psychological pain. Much like physical pain, there are a lot of things that can cause us psychological pain. These includes, the loss of a friend, a loved one, a job, an appointment, failing an exam, the end of a relationship, failure to meet our needs, rejection, disappointments etc.

Before I delve into this proper, it is worthy of note to drop this excerpt from livescience.com 'Pain is a danger signal, said Geoff MacDonald, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. When you place your hand on a hot stove, for example, a network of neurons in your brain activates to send a message: Something is very wrong. "If you stub your toe, for a brief moment, your entire world is that toe," MacDonald told Live Science. "Pain is really good at disrupting attention and getting you singularly focused on making the bad thing stop."........Many psychologists think the experience of emotional pain "piggybacked" onto the already existing physical pain system in the brains of our early ancestors, said Ethan Kross, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and first author of the 2011 PNAS study.'

So basically, we feel emotional pain, just the same way as we feel physical pain. One of the ways we deal with physical pain is to use painkillers, others would rather not take painkillers but pretend it's not there until they actually forget it's there, while some would let it run it course and get use to it along the way. In the same vein, emotional pain is dealt with by summarily three methods. These methods will be treated individually.

Gloss It Over

Have you not encounter certain people who deal with unpleasant experiences like they never happened? They just pretend like nothing happened and continue their life. Take the retired soldier who now runs his own multimillion dollar security firm; he just lost his father this morning and an hour later he was attending a high level dinner, doing everything that's expected of him at such a dinner, including drinking champagne and smiling at everybody. This man is dealing with his pain by drowning it in a sea of activities.

This method is usually the first choice of supposedly antisocial people, introverts as well as high-end business executives. Why this may seem like a good way to deal with pain as it seem to not affects one's productivity, it actually isn't. The pain is not necessarily gone, but rather covered and sooner or later something will disturb that delicate arrangement and bring it back to the surface. The thing about pain is that it grows when ignored. It would seem to get better and then one day you realize it was all a facade and the pain has multiplied tens of fold.

I'll be stopping here for today. I'll treat the other methods tomorrow, as I don't want to make this article unnecessarily lengthy, thereby tasking and boring to read. Slow and steady,they say wins the race, right?

Thanks for reading....