I saw my friend Elaine limping the other day. “It’s just a sprain,” she explained. “It’ll be better in a few days.”
I felt relieved. It could have been worse. Torn ligaments which would take longer to heal. Osteoarthritis might never improve.
We know how to deal with a sprain. We even know how to talk about it.
Strange, isn’t it, that we have developed such clear categories of physical ailments that we all understand both how serious they are, and how long they’re likely to last. A root canal without anesthetic may be excruciatingly painful, but it only lasts a short while; cirrhosis of the liver may ultimately prove fatal, but have few initial symptoms behind minor discomfort.
We have far less precise ways of talking about emotional pain. In fact, we typically don’t want to talk about emotional pain at all.
“How are you?” someone asks.
“Oh, I’m fine,” we reply, even when we’re not.
Perhaps we’re in denial. Perhaps it’s too painful to admit that we’re in pain, when there’s no physical symptom to display. Perhaps we don’t really think that emotions are real.
Try telling parents whose daughter died in a car accident that their pain isn’t real. Try telling a distraught mother who has to feed her children mustard sandwiches because she can’t afford anything more that her tears are self-indulgent. Try telling the refugee family fleeing a civil war to get over it; everything’s OK now….
I wonder if we need some more concrete ways of relating emotional pain to physical pain.
So an insult might be like a bruise—sore for the moment, but no lasting damage.
Losing a job, or uprooting to a new city, might be like a broken bone. Extremely painful and disabling for a while, but an injury from which you will eventually recover fully.
The death of a spouse might be more like an amputation – you will never re-grow that limb, but in time you can learn to get along without it.
I don’t know what would correspond to a heart attack, aggressive cancer, or third-degree burns. To be honest, I don’t want to know.
But as I write this column, I realize I’m upset by some bureaucratic incompetence. When I apply my own insight, my state of mind might compare to an intestinal disorder. That is, my guts are churning. I’m feeling under pressure; my movements are constrained. But I also know this is temporary; the conflict will soon be resolved, one way or the other. This too shall pass.
There, I feel much better now!
It helps, I think, to have a physical experience to correlate with an emotional experience. A woman may look the same after the death of a spouse, but she’s not. She shouldn’t expect to bounce back, any more than one can learn to function “normally”—whatever that is—with only one leg, or one arm.
We don’t have any difficulty discussing our process of recovery from the loss of a gall bladder or an appendix. We seem to have enormous difficulty discussing the process of recovery from the loss of a spouse or a business.
Emotional injuries are just as real as physical injuries. We need to find ways of discussing our emotions too.
