Welcome to From Insults To Respect. Today we explore the question, Is it helpful or harmful to view our anxiety and grief experiences as painful?

Let’s begin this exploration with a diary entry from a mental patient that appears on page 224 in Richard P. Bentall’s fine book, Madness Explained:

Rhoda [a friend] asked me if I were spoiled and I angrily said no, but feel hurt, as if I was born for a purpose I hide from, covering myself with warm blankets. Go to hell, World! I cannot die in peace and safety. I cannot face the slightest breath of real life or death or ugliness. But I hurt for being a coward. I was always a coward – socially, physically, mentally, sexually, emotionally. If I go insane, am I brave? I will, because then, and only then, I am brave, not a coward. I hate people. They compete and want stimulation. I hate them all, all. None loves, none cares, none understands or ever will understand. I am dead, dead – very, very limited, afraid and hurt. Go to hell, World!

There is a lot we might wish to unpack in this quote, but for today, let’s focus on the fact that the patient mentions three times that what he is experiencing hurts.

In our society, many of us are taught, beginning in our earliest years, that to experience anxiety and grief is cowardly and symptoms of mental illness. From such teachings, many come to believe people who don’t have such feelings are brave and viewed with great respect. All of this occurs despite the fact that pretty much all of us regularly experience anxiety and grief, even those who act in the most courageous manner. The swirling emotions that come about from this misunderstanding is often experienced as painful.

Once we, in our modern society, come to associate anxiety and grief as painful, this leads many of us right into the idea that we best manage it as we do when we experience physical pain, that is, by distracting our minds to something pleasant and washing the feelings away by consuming alcohol and other drugs. And yet, even when dealing with physical pain, these two approaches are often far from optimal.

In research studies, when distracting oneself from pain was compared to a “sensory focus” approach, sensory focus came out distinctly better even for when dealing with the particularly challenging pain that occurs while giving birth (see HERE for a review of this scientific research).

Sensory focus involves turning your attention to observing the painful physical sensations. If the sensations bring forth words such as pain, or awful agony, you accept this without judgment. You very gently, when you feel ready, return your focus to the physical sensations as if you are tasting, for the first time, some fresh mountain water from a tropical island. You just observe the sensations as they wash over and through you.

As for using alcohol and other drugs to deal with physical pain, the problems that can occur are no doubt already known to most of you. Nevertheless, I will bring to your attention a few of them.

Millions of people who turn to alcohol to relieve pain end up with a serious addiction and liver damage. For those who turned to prescription opioids to manage their pain in 2018, there were nearly 15,000 deaths from overdoses. Drugs that contain acetaminophen, like Tylenol, are the leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States, and some studies indicate that it can be harmful to kidneys as well. Each year, the side effects of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which are commonly used for pain, cause nearly 103,000 hospitalizations and 16,500 deaths. More people die each year from NSAIDs-related complications than from AIDS and cervical cancer in the United States. Common over the counter NSAIDs include ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil) and naproxen (Aleve).

So, because of the common tendency to deal with pain by distracting and taking drugs, conceptualizing the experiences that come with anxiety and grief as pain may not be ideal. So, today, let’s take a few minutes to consider another approach, and then we’ll compare it to the pain approach.

An Alternative Approach to Experiencing Anxiety and Grief

Let’s begin here with a series of studies indicating that how we conceptualize emotional arousing experiences can dramatically alter the experience.

These studies began in earnest back in 1964 when a team of researchers presented a film showing primitive adolescent “subincision” rites to their subjects and found that it produced marked stress reactions. However, when some subjects were coached to view the film as if they were objective scientists, their stress reaction was markedly reduced. The findings supported the conclusion that the same visual stimulus varies in the amount of stress produced depending upon the nature of the cognitive appraisal the person makes.

Subsequent studies replicated this study by using a series of films that showed horrific workplace accidents, and again, altering the cognitive appraisal strategy of the subjects, altered the level of stress experienced. So, perhaps altering how we appraise our experience with anxiety and grief might alter our level of stress for the better.

What might a better alternative to how people in modern society typically view anxiety and grief? Let’s try this one on for size.

We have, for over two million years, been evolving ways to address our concerns so we have a better chance to survive and to pass our genes on to subsequent generations. Two of our most common concerns involve perceiving a risk of future danger, which we experience as anxiety, and perceiving we have lost something or someone important to us, which we experience as grief. Recognizing these types of concerns is the first step in a more complete process of finding ways to minimize the risk of danger and to successfully move forward despite our losses.

These types of concerns are a type of memory that brings to our attention that we have some processing to take care of. One of the characteristics of dealing with these concerns is that we often can delay attending to them for a limited period of time so we can engage in other tasks viewed by us as having higher priorities. When we put off dealing with these types of concerns, they don’t just go away; they come back again and again reminding us that we have to adequately address them. Despite our efforts at putting them off, as our concerns begin to accumulate without being fully addressed, it becomes harder and harder to delay dealing with them. Our memory begins to remind us of them more frequently and more intensely until we reach a point at which we must attend to them, like it or not. If we put off taking time to process our concerns for too long, our functioning for dealing with many aspects of life can begin to deteriorate, and at some point, we may end up having what some people refer to as a mental breakdown.

So, with this understanding, anxiety and grief are part of a wonderful process, rather than a sign of mental illness that we need to distract ourselves from or to take drugs to manage. Part of this process requires that we devote enough time to process these concerns or the level of intensity is liable to become more and more challenging.

When we are reminded of our perceived dangers and grief, rather than automatically perceiving such experiences as painful, we can allow ourselves to observe the physical sensations that come with it. If words such as, “Man, this is painful,” “Man, this is hurting,” or, “I can’t stand this suffering,” we can observe them without automatically accepting them as accurate. What is accurate is the physical sensations, and the specific concern to be addressed as best as you can fathom. Once the sensations go through us, we naturally begin to spend some time thinking about some ideas to address the concerns.

An Example of Someone’s Personal Experience Dealing with These Types of Experiences

Kerin Jervert

In a recent Mad In America post titled, “Can We Allow Suffering,” Karin Jervert tells us how she was treated by psychiatry over a 20-year period. She found that the entire industry is based on this very human, very common, reaction to suffering, the inability to allow it—the inability to hold it with nonjudgmental compassion—whatever its manifestation. When those in psychiatry perceived that she was suffering, they drugged her without consent, leading to some awful side effects. They also isolated her and involuntarily committed her. The terms they used were “disease” and “a broken brain.”

As Karin so eloquently put it,

For years, I never thought of my suffering as something that deserved anything but force in response: suppression, drugs, hospitalization. Until I started to look back on all this and it all seemed like punishment for suffering too greatly, too powerfully; that I was not allowed to suffer this way. So, I began to broaden my idea of what was acceptable suffering, and my healing began. My fears of my own and others’ suffering lessened. What before was something to pounce on, to solve, to fix, became something to witness, to honor, to allow.

So, there you have it, some thoughts about conceptualizing anxiety and grief as emotional pain, and what might be a better alternative. I hope you give this some thought, and please join us again soon right here at From Insults to Respect.

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on.  This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence.  To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

AnxietyDepressionemotional painfearGrief