Pain Masking Other Pain

Recently I discovered I had a rib that was popping out of place. I got it to pop back in a couple of times on my own, then ended up going to a chiropractor to get it put back in. Immediately, all of the pain in that area of my body was gone. But if you think that means that all of my pain was gone plain and simple, you would be wrong. What happened was that once that very pressing and top level pain was gone, I was able to notice smaller levels of pain in my body. But I couldn’t do that until I’d dealt with the rib popped out.

I think this has to be true for everyone and it’s not just about physical pain. We humans deal with problems as they press on us. We deal with the worst ones first, because most of the time, they make it impossible for us to see anything else. Then we work on smaller problems. But we never come to the end of problems to solve because that’s just not the way human life is. There will always be things to improve. Call that a feature or bug of being human, but there’s no perfection in being mortal. So no, we’ll never stop complaining. And we will never stop reaching for what is beyond our grasp.

I live in a mortal body and that means there’s always something going wrong. I admit, there was less that was going wrong when I was twenty years younger, but even then, there were menstrual cycles, pregnancy and then childbirth and recovery, and I had to eat so much food and kind of got tired of chewing and swallowing in that stage. This is less of a problem now, again feature/bug, but I just finished recovering from a hysterectomy and then I remember that I’m dealing with a long-standing Achilles injury. But until the massive problems my uterus was causing were yoinked out, I couldn’t really think about the Achilles. Until the rib problem overtook the Achilles problem.

The same is true for my psychological life. The biggest problem (suicidality) sometimes overtakes everything else. And when people around me think they can see simple solutions to that problem (get a different job, learn to set better boundaries, speak up for yourself), I can’t do those things because I don’t have the energy to do anything but survive and even that is iffy. When all you can see are problems, you have no energy to deal with any problems. Yes, trying to notice good things can help with a pervasive sense of meaninglessness, but where does the energy come from? Where do you get hope when everything is awful?

One of the things that keeps surprising me as I move away from Mormonism has been that I keep discovering pain that I actually didn’t notice before. It was there, causing problems, but it was unacknowledged pain and that made it all the more difficult to deal with it. This is one of the miracles of Mormonism, convincing me that I was happy when I was actually in pain all of the time. It was very effective at getting me to direct my efforts at fixing things in the wrong areas, instead of at the real pain. But being in pain clouds your mind so that you can’t see things clearly, so in the end, until I relieved the unacknowledged pain, sometimes just accidentally or just flailing about, trying to find something or anything to change to make it better, I couldn’t even see what was wrong.

Pain is a tricky thing for humans. We are minds and bodies (yes, I know, minds are parts of our bodies). Mind over matter is real, up to a point. But in many ways, it’s a bad things and not a good one. Ignoring your body or telling yourself lies isn’t going to do anything but confuse things and make it take a lot longer to heal. Which is why it takes so damned long to un-Mormonify yourself, if that is even something that I will ever be able to do. I can hope, though.