Feeling emotional pain

Emotional pain hurts more deeply than any physical pain a person might inflict on one’s body. The soul carries more pain receptors than the flesh. Losing a daughter to cancer, a friend to suicide, a coworker to disease or a father to dementia hurts to the core of one’s being and the pain lingers.

Often the cure for acute pain is a trip to the doctor’s office resulting in a prescription for a drug to block the pain, but where does one go when one’s soul is aching? How might one find relief from a broken heart?

Physical pain is an interesting thing. The human brain does not remember pain. Although intense, life-threatening, severe and numbing, once pain is gone, our memory for the pain is gone. There is not a special place in one’s brain which holds onto the memory of physical pain.

Emotional pain is different. The brain reserves numerous areas to capture memories, ensuring one holds onto emotional pain for a long time. Smells, visions, familiar places once visited, friends of friends, friends who remind us of the one who is lost. Family members who look like those no longer with us. Unrelated strangers who share similar traits as those no longer in our lives makes one’s heart palpitate and skin moisten.

Understanding the long-lasting emotional tug of a lost relationship, one might attempt to block the painful emotions by working long hours, engaging in meaningless, physical relationships, by drinking or taking drugs to numb one’s brain or by simply disappearing from society. Although temporarily successful, each coping mechanism one uses to push emotional stress from one’s cognition only delays the inevitable pain.

Coping mechanisms are like an emotional Band-Aid applied to hide a wound. Eventually, the Band-Aid must be ripped off to view the sore and determine if more attention is needed to ease the pain. Often, once the Band-Aid is gone, one can address the pain and begin to heal.

Temporarily stalling one’s commitment to grieving is not always dysfunctional. Often, one must arrange a funeral, continue working when in emotional pain, parent children who require the best of a parent in tumultuous times or be strong when all around one are weak. Sometimes a Band-Aid is required.

Grieving is living. Humans celebrate life as a baby enters this world. Humans also grieve when that life leaves this world. What matters is what that human does between his or her entrance and exit. Hopefully, while that human is on this Earth, he or she leaves a permanent, indelible mark on the hearts and souls of most who encounter him or her and hopefully, when that child leaves the Earth, many grieve.

Send comments or other suggestions to William Rutherford at bprutherford@hotmail.com or visit pensiveparenting.com.