About Mental Pain
Understanding how we react
Introduction
It is hard to deal with mental pain. My inability to do so, has cost me dearly. I believe that it costs most people far more than they realize.
This post takes a closer look at our most common responses to it.
This is the third post in an ongoing blog. The rest can be found from Index and FAQ.
Contents
Highlights of Some Past Posts
This is for selected reminders of past posts. There will be only one this time, but two the next. The descriptions are from Index and FAQ.
Too Important To Be Able To Think - Making mistakes about what we care about.
We are least able to be rational about what we feel is most important. This often makes us worse at what we most care about. This made me a worse husband and father. Many other examples exist.
Responding To Physical Pain
Mental pain works similarly to physical pain. But our response to physical pain is more obvious. So we’ll start there, with a few common scenarios.
Fight: Someone is charging you with a stick. You’re angry, see a stick, and pick it up. The two of you begin to fight. Every time you’re hit, you get angrier and more willing to fight.
Flight: Someone is charging you with a stick. You have no stick of your own. So you run away from the threat.
Laughter: Someone is charging you with a stick. But their stick is actually a nerf bat! It doesn’t hurt! You start laughing. Every hit makes you laugh harder.
Compliance: Someone is charging you with a stick. You try to run. They catch you, and beat you. You submit and would do anything to avoid this.
Generating Mental Pain
Physical pain is easy to cause - just hit someone. But how does mental pain work?
My model of it goes like this.
We observe something. Maybe it is something we saw or heard. How we observed doesn’t particularly matter.
Our mind associates it with likely potential beliefs. By potential belief I mean, “A statement of fact. Which we might or might not believe.”
The potential beliefs come with feelings. Some of those feelings involve pain.
Is this model right? I don’t know. But it is accurate enough to help me understand and change myself.
In particular, I have found it valuable to focus on:
The potential beliefs I’m likely to think.
The associations that tie to them.
How I feel about them.
The ways that I use this idea will be covered in future posts.
Responding To Mental Pain
Our responses to mental pain are analogous to physical pain. Here is a description of how each response to physical pain, has an analogy with mental pain.
Fight. Blame turns pain into anger. Anger distorts perception to fit our blame. We want to fight. Often we’re fighting about our misunderstandings.
Flight. We avoid thinking the unpleasant potential belief. Our mind alters facts. Our attention slips to something else. We use indirection to distance the thought. We might make excuses for these behaviors. But we won’t remember what we didn’t want to think.
Laughter. Jokes are often funny because they touch on painful things. If you watch a comedy show, it is usually easy to see what.
Compliance. It takes a lot to make someone submit. But it can happen. Especially when pain is delivered by someone in authority.
Personal Examples
It really brings things home for me to go from, “People do this,” to, “Here is how I do this!”
I responded in each way to the events described in Graduating Down a Rabbit Hole. Here are examples of how. I recommend finding your own examples of how you react in these different ways.
Fight. I blamed my ex for a lot of things in my divorce. She also blamed me. That’s why we were in divorce court!
Flight. I didn’t know that I was in bad shape before my son’s graduation. That was inattention caused by flight. Also, while writing this blog, I keep finding complex language. That usually hides something that I should think about.
Laughter. I found my ex’s legal missteps hilarious during my divorce. They are less funny now.
Compliance. After I realized how bad my son’s experience of public school was, I told my ex that he had to go to what is now The Craig School. She refused, and pointed out that our voluntary agreement gave her control of his school. And threatened to sue for full custody if I didn’t accept that. Faced with possibly losing my children, I complied.
Tests and Deeper Dives
The highlights section is an experiment. My hope is that reminders based on a Fibonacci sequence will help connect ideas. I don’t know that it will work.
My list of responses to physical and mental pain is incomplete. For example gratitude can help us handle pain. I will return to this in my next post.
I believe that actually trying to visualize scenes that I describe will help with understanding. It is up to you whether to try that. If you want to know why I think that, I recommend reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. Particularly the section of chapter 16 called, Can Psychology be Taught?
I thought hard about how much to say about my model of mental pain. Ideally there would be psychology research that I could simply refer to. Unfortunately, I think that Cargo Cult Science got it right. Psychology is a pseudoscience, and we should be careful about what we accept. Unfortunately psychologists rejected Feynman’s speech. If they’d taken it seriously, the Replication Crisis would have started 40 years earlier than it did.
I therefore decided to describe how I think it works, and not try to convince in any way. You should find your own ways to test how reasonable you think the idea is, and only accept that which works for you.
Finally, about my personal examples of mental pain. I can describe these far more calmly now than I could a few months ago. That’s because I’ve been reprocessing my memories. If this sounds interesting, I recommend learning about EMDR. What I’m doing is different, but it centers on the same key ideas.