Pain sucks… really?

There are many people smarter than I who have written about pain. One of my favorite examples is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis. He wrote an entire book called The Problem of Pain. For your sake and for my own, I’m going to keep this much briefer than a book. There are only three things I am going to address in this particular blog. One is the fact that pain sucks. Another is the fact that pain is awesome (This might be hard to believe). The final part will be about balance. We know pain sucks. On a good day we can usually admit that it has a purpose that is good and healthy. How do we balance the two views? I suggest we look at it as part of our design.

The challenge of pain:
It would be foolish of me not to recognize that each of you have pain that is very real and possibly traumatic in your history. The pains you have felt may have shaped defense mechanisms you still use today. I call this scaffolding and will likely blog separately in the future. In some cases, the mechanisms are unhealthy and can recreate different forms of the pain you felt the very first time you experienced it. For example, sometimes little children are taken from their homes and put in foster care. They may experience the separation as a terrible loss of their primary care giver or they may experience the separation as an extreme relief due to the poor attachment to their primary care giver. Both situations cause real and memorable pain and both situations can cause unhealthy mechanisms that may lead to additional future pain. Boldly put, the suffering part of pain sucks.

Let’s take the same example and fast forward ten years. The little child is now sixteen years old and has their first boyfriend or girlfriend. They begin to feel very close and even express that they are “in love”. The child who, at age six, felt relief from the experience of separation may find themselves wanting to break up because the emotions are too intense. The defense mechanism that helped them survive an early trauma can prevent healthy attachment to others.

The positive side:
We are designed to heal! It may be very difficult and it may take an entire lifetime but our brains are designed to take in new information all the time and the brain is even designed to “trim” unnecessary paths (Badenoch, 2008). In English, this means we can take bad situations and make them unbelievably positive points of change in our life.

I have a bias toward finding positive things even in the most hideous of situations. The reason I feel it’s important to give you this disclaimer at this point is because I am going to take the example from above and show some positive aspects to the difficult situation. There is no intent to minimize how difficult it is to make changes and to heal wounds that run as deep as many of you have. With that said, there exist other perspectives to every situation. Sometimes it’s helpful to learn new ways of viewing old stories. It might create a paradigm shift that will change your life forever in very good ways.

Let’s take the six year old child and say that they felt relief after being removed from their home. Let’s also say the child gets placed in a home with adults that know how to create a healthy attachment to children. The child may feel scared and nervous as they attach to the surrogate parents but with patience and empathy, the child is able to create a healthy attachment. The child has worked through the pain. The key is they didn’t ignore it and they had someone who showed them appropriate empathy. If these things happen, pain can be an awesome thing. Awesome is a powerful word and appropriate because pain can improve resilience. When difficult things arise in the life of a person who is resilient, they can often feel as though it will work out in the end. People who have suffered and worked through the pain often carry more hope. This is one way how the terrible thing of pain can be an amazing and powerful benefit.

A balancing act:
For those of you who are up for a challenge, I’m going to get a little psycheducational now. Pain is felt physically and mentally. If you ask someone who has a bad back problem, they might say the most annoying pain of all is the one you can’t see but still puts you on your knees in pain. Emotional pain can be just as intense as bad back pain for many people. It can make a person curl up in the fetal position and sob uncontrollably or it can make a person completely irrational. The pain is real! I don’t have all the answers as to why this happens. I wish I did. I have learned a few things about the healing process that might be helpful though.

First, everyone is unique and their situation is also unique. You don’t have to try to be special because you are. It’s amazing to me how many people are trying to be unique rather than being who they are. At the same time, anyone who assumes they have the answers for you probably needs a little more humility in their life. I, by no means, believe that what I suggest to folks is going to heal them. Sometimes I get lucky and look like I work miracles but my suggestions are merely an attempt to empathize with people and present other possible outlooks. The real work and growth comes from the people I have the privilege to know.

Second, empathy is a requirement in healing. We cannot heal ourselves no matter how strong we are and no matter how much we want to. It’s the reason I have chosen the counseling profession. I may not be able to work miracles but I can be present for a person in need and sometimes that’s enough. Many counselors use treatment techniques to promote healing. I’m still learning about the techniques. It seems to me that the techniques being used are generally different ways of showing people empathy. If I’m right, I don’t know for certain if I am, then empathy is the healer more than any given technique. If empathy is the healer then we all have the power to heal by listening to the story of another unique person.

For those of you who want a more scientific explanation, this part is for you. There is a place in the brain called the hippocampus. According to Paul David Nussbaum in his book titled Save Your Brain, the hippocampus is said to be an area of the brain that decides what will get stored in long term memory. An interesting thing happens when we feel pain that is physical and/or emotional. The hippocampus is highly active. Joy has a similar effect on the hippocampus. We can only make a conjecture about the meaning. It seems reasonable to guess that we were designed to remember pain and joy. If this is the case, then I believe we were designed in this manner as a means of staying balanced and protected simultaneously. We’re supposed to experience pain and joy.

To all you logical people out there, feeling pain and joy lead to intelligence. Intelligence leads to improved decision making ability and improved decision making ability leads to hope. Even though hope is an emotion, it is a logical emotion because the logical path comes from preparation just as hope comes from preparation, also known as pain and joy.

Thanks again for taking the time to read a little about my perspectives. I hope you find the content to bring you appropriate joys and struggles. I also hope you have people in your life that support your growth. Remember that there are counselors in almost every community that would love to get to know your personal struggle. They are bound ethically and legally to keep your information confidential in almost every case. Please feel free to read my very first blog if you would like to know more about why I think going to counseling is a good idea.

Badenoch, B. (2008). Being a brain-wise therapist: A practical guide to interpersonal neurobiology. W.W Norton Company.

Counseling Religion

For all those who are returning, thank you for taking the time to read my blogs. For all of you who are new to my blog, welcome.

As part of my educational experience at George Fox University, I have been challenged by several instructors to learn how to get to a place where I am comfortable talking about religion in sessions while simultaneously holding my personal values aside so the client doesn’t feel judged or criticized. I’ve been thinking about this lately because it is a real and, at times, difficult thing to do. Some questions that come up are as follows. 1) Can a counselor have a different belief system than a client and still be the right fit? 2) Can a counselor truly set aside their view of anything, let alone religion?

I would like to make a point of clarity for the sake of neutrality. I view religious perspective and the belief in any specific deity to be different things. For example, a person can believe in God and still have misconceptions about God. The misconceptions would be what I call religious perspective, while the fact that the person believes in God is their decision. As a counselor, I think it is very important to make this distinction. I believe it’s my duty to challenge religious perspective when it is causing dysfunction but I believe it is completely inappropriate to challenge someone’s belief in God. One of the great things about living and working in the United States of America is the fact that we have the right to peaceably assemble for religious purposes without persecution. Plus, who am I to judge someone else’s life as right or wrong. Being a counselor doesn’t give me the right to judge people. It gives me a platform to challenge inconsistencies in people’s lives. This applies even if the inconsistency is a client’s religious perspective.

Now we’ll take a closer look at the questions that came up earlier. The short answer to question one is yes. Many people believe that a counselor needs to have had their experience, in this case religion, in order to provide insight. I don’t agree with this thinking. In many cases similar thought can keep people in ruts that they otherwise might be able to find their way out. For example, it’s often seen as advantage to go to a marriage therapist who has experienced a long marriage. Though there are times where it is helpful to have the insight of someone experienced in marital endurance, the fact that they have stayed married doesn’t necessarily make them more qualified to handle any specific kind of marital issue. The same is true for religion in counseling. If you find a counselor who matches up with your religion and is still able to challenge your religious perspective then that’s great. Just remember, counseling should not be comfortable all the time. If it is comfortable all the time, you’re probably not progressing at a rate that you are capable of.

Question two is one of the hardest questions to answer from my perspective. The truth is, I don’t believe a counselor can be authentic in the relationship and set aside all their views. Nor do I think they should try to. In everyday life we set things aside in order to make other things possible. At times a counselor should and will do so. First and foremost, a counselor should feel like they can be in an authentic and professional relationship with the client. When it isn’t possible to set aside personal emotions in order to learn about the client’s struggles and successes, then it’s probably time for the counselor to seek consultation or to refer the client to a counselor better suited for their needs. For example, a client who was raped at one point in their life may, at some point, need to describe the rape in detail or draw the rape artistically in order to relive the experience and feel the empathy they didn’t feel from people shortly after the original trauma of the rape. If they are seeing a counselor who was also raped earlier in life and has not processed it at length, possibly in their own counseling, the counselor might re-experience their personal rape. This could be a problem for the client and for the counselor if the counselor is not very careful and attentive to their own care. So, I feel like I’ve talked around the question a little so I’ll try to make sure I’m blunt for those whom that works best for. I think a counselor can set aside their views on things and stay focused on the client’s reality. It requires purposeful attention by the counselor in order to do so and often times is very difficult because counselors are people too, which makes it easy to fall back into the trap of the idea that “it’s just who I am”. If I were to suggest a type of counselor to you, I would always suggest a counselor who strives to learn about themselves as well as their clients.