When I was much younger, I believed that I could only heal from my traumas if I never felt the pain associated with them again. I desperately tried to make myself immune to it. I berated myself every time the past caused my heart to hurt. I was weak. I didn’t want to get better. These were some of the thoughts that swamped my mind. It was like I was trying to erase my memory.

Pain, in any form, is part of the human experience. It is one of the ways that we learn about the world and the people around us. One of its primary functions is to tell us when something is wrong. The memory of it also decreases the chance of it happening again or us recognising it sooner.

I have a scar across the bridge of my nose. When I was four years old, I split my nose open on the corner of a wooden toy box. However, despite this being well over thirty years ago, it sometimes still hurts. I have also broken a couple of toes over the years. These occasionally ache, especially in damp weather, despite healing. I have never told myself off or felt weak for this. So, why did I feel so differently about my psychological pain?

There are various reasons why I felt this way. They all add up to how the society I live in views psychological pain and the problems it can cause. It goes to great pains to teach us that psychological pain is trivial and not as serious as physical pain. We are reminded how our forebears “just got on with it.” We are also often told that it is “all in our heads.”. I never really understood that. A brain tumour is also all in our heads. Should we treat that trivially or deride the sufferer? We are taught to move on and leave the past in the past. Now, the past does, indeed, belong there, but that doesn’t mean that it can just be forgotten about. Our experiences shape us, after all. To truly forget, we’d have to revert to how we were before and erase our memories. We’d never learn anything. It would be awful for all that pain to have been for nought. We do need to move on from the events that cause us pain in our lives. Being trapped within them is unbearable. However, in my experience, trying to eradicate any trace of them can be part of what traps you.

I truly started to heal when I processed the experiences and the associated feelings and accepted that some pain might return occasionally. How I responded to it would be the vital difference when it did. I no longer try to repress it and tell myself it is not there. I let the pain come, listen to, process, and learn from it.

I firmly believe that all societies need to start teaching people how to listen to their pain, not how to hide it away until it causes even more damage.

Written By Lorna Smart

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