More Space for Collective Discomfort

When I got into studying non-pharmacological interventions for chronic pain ten (?!) years ago, the most frustrating thing I saw in the field was a tendency to pathologize discomfort. A lot of the brain-based solutions (coming from pain neuroscience and pain psychology) were oriented around the notion that there are good and bad feelings, and that by using the power of our minds we can change our thoughts and inevitably our feelings to focus on the positive. I watched pain patients being trained to be vigilant against emotions like sadness, grief, anger. The implications of this—particularly during early 2017, as our country was undergoing intense social and cultural change—were maddening for me. 

In fact, those implications (which I will own as being projections of my own position and biases as much as the clinical intentions) were a large part of what, for years, steered me away from adopting these brain-based solutions for my own pain. I wonder now if I’d been able to make those interventions my own (tinker with them, as my discipline encouraged me to do), whether I would have resolved my chronic pain condition years sooner. 

Now, as I am steeped in these brain-based solutions to chronic pain via Pain Fermata, I’m seeing them framed a lot differently. We’re in a different moment. There’s a lot more space for discomfort, discursively speaking. And by space—I mean respect. I could go down a whole rabbit hole of how this came to be (and I will someday!), but for now, I’ll just say that I am pleased to see it. 
Even the most efficiency-minded forms of pain management and alternative therapies that I’m seeing all seem to be honoring the necessity of difficult emotions. The party line no longer seems to be about guarding your thoughts and feelings, but instead about building capacity to be with discomfort so that it can have its due and find resolution. This was always my hope for pain medicine—that we could acknowledge how much our resistance to being with what hurts is keeping us in pain. 

As much as I wish that we were living in more peaceful times, I do relish the effects that this intensity is having on our collective ethos. From where I sit, it seems we can be with one another’s discomfort with far more grace and kindness.