Signal
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Proliferation. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
This is the fourth installment in a discussion of emotional factors in chronic pain. Here are the first, second, and third parts.
Sometimes what we hear from pain is a lie.
That may sound misguided or extreme to some people and wildly obvious to others. Either way, it’s not to advocate ignoring the advent of pain or “driving through” it with a willpower divorced from attentiveness and self-compassion. It’s not about toughing it out, which, when that has been my own mentality, has usually just made my pain worse and longer-lived.
But there’s a subtle distinction here. It’s one thing to be a runner who blows past all the feedback from her own body to achieve something with no built-in relationship to that body as it exists now, a something that is usually a number—a time, a weight, a ranking.
It’s another thing to notice pain as one signal among many and, crucially, a signal whose information might not actually be about the body per se.
My mistake in the past was that I had a strong tendency to read pain as a stop sign, an indication that something was wrong and poised to get worse. That tendency arose from several times when that was the right way to read it. I’d just broken a bone! Indeed, for many of us chronic pain or other symptoms begin with an acute injury, and we tend, both consciously and not, to keep interpreting it with the same urgency, and the same meaning, that it first carried.
The greatest impact of John Sarno’s work connecting pain to emotions that are hidden from us was in persuading me that I could acknowledge pain as a signal without submitting to it—that, in fact, sometimes moving in spite of pain was the best way to find out more about what was going on. To this day, running when something has been hurting for a while will often instruct me in something that I’ve been keeping off my conscious stage: anxiety about the viability of my novel, or about my boyfriend moving away to the house he’s renovating upstate, or anger at my terrible landlord, or some new excavation of the cascading shames that are my inheritance from Mormonism. These are big feelings, big stressors, so big and obvious that I make the mistake again and again of thinking I’ve factored them in everywhere I need to, that I see them clearly, when in fact what I’ve done is reabsorb them into my baseline sense of normal. Because that’s what we do: We can’t perceive every blow that life lands on us as perpetually new, even if its effects persist undiluted. We’d be overwhelmed. So we recalculate, and in that recalculation we put huge burdens within the perimeter of our normalcy, like a hoarder who ran out of room in the garage and starts stacking things on the kitchen counter—where they fester and fiend and eventually riot.
The most challenging part is that we’ve been doing this since way before we can remember. Which means we’re left at times to reverse-engineer the psychic lacks and lashes of (every) childhood by their legacy in our bodies.
I believe one of the most damaging distortions of the world we live in is in our regard for and treatment of pain—our inability to relate it to deeper processes both individually and collectively, our insistence on mechanical and superficial treatments whose plainest legacy, in the United States, is more than half a million dead people. Less plain, but plenty damaging, is the enormous weight of all that unexpressed emotion, which like dark matter gluing galaxies together works invisibly on our relationships and beliefs and allegiances. More than half of Americans have a chronic physical condition. Some of these have undisputed nonpsychological causes; many are murkier.
What I take from this, as a writer, as an athlete, as a teacher, as a lover, is that the deceptions of physical pain come with some of the highest stakes there are. Were we to free ourselves of those deceptions—to understand the vastly broader base of phenomena that pain can be a signal about—it might not fix everything, but it could nullify whole swaths of spiritual and social injury. Misguided beliefs about pain are too widespread, I think, to shift quickly on a civilizational scale. But every person has the power to investigate, and in doing so to discover that her domain of freedom is larger than she thought. The callings of the creative person and the athlete meet in the search for that freedom, which is the opposite of certainty, the enemy of despair.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.