Recovering from pain~Day 10
In life, we walk on this tightrope between overwhelming pain on the one hand and too much comfort on the other. During the last five weeks of this course, we’ve all shared times where the pain in our lives was so extreme, we felt like God had forgotten us.
To read some of your blog posts has been harrowing. As I read some of them, I couldn’t help saying, “How on earth did this person survive?” It was just too much.
Most of us can’t live in places of throbbing pain like that. We need some level of comfort. We need someone hugging us and giving us a measure of hope along the way if we are to survive intact.
It’s important to know that high levels of pain need high levels of comfort to restore balance. Maybe you’ve run across cases where people experienced such trauma that they have to put emotional distance between themselves and the extreme pain that they experienced.
Psychologists call this dissociation and tell us that it can lead to something they call dissociative personality disorder. It’s defined as ranging from “mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality.”
Pain may make us disconnect from reality and unplug from our emotions. In other words, the inability to process pain may keep us from seeing and feeling the world as it is. And that’s why we have to go through it to see the world as it is. If pain has separated us from ourselves, we have to go through the pain to reconnect to that part of ourselves that we’ve lost.
I’m not talking about minor pains on the comfort continuum. There are minor pains in life that we power through or buffer with comfort. It’s Sunday afternoon and I’d rather be watching football than writing this post now. The pain of doing the work is something I buffer by sitting on my favorite couch, dog asleep next to me.
Life is filled with minor pains that we buffer. You get on a long flight, sit in the same seat and can’t move. If you’re in the window seat, you have to make other people uncomfortable, sometimes waking them up, just so you can go to the bathroom. So you’re forever making calculations about how bad you really have to go. That’s a pain.
There may be a small child behind you kicking your seat and making a racket the whole way. But you take along your neck pillow and earphones. You take sleeping pills, and somehow you survive.
Pain can change us. Clearly, some level of pain abatement is a good thing. If I have a headache, Advil is my friend. The problem is that we can become addicted to comfort. Deal with chronic headaches and you may find yourself craving Advil too much or having to move on to stronger meds.
Too much buffering of minor pains and we may become neurotic. Too much pain all at once and our bodies respond by going into shock.
Emotional pain is like that. If it’s the pain of broken relationships, just as with physical trauma, we may shut down the part of us that feels the pain. But then that kind of coping mechanism has its own consequences – future relationships can go dysfunctional, for instance.
B.F. Skinner, one of the most influential psychologists of the last century, showed us how animals and people adapt their behavior to avoid pain. It’s at the heart of most motivations.
To reiterate, comfort and pain exist on a continuum. We need them both to live happy, productive lives. Go too far down the comfort continuum and you have the opioid crisis that is currently ravaging our country.
As Proverbs says, “Give me enough food to live on, neither too much nor too little. If I’m too full, I might get independent, saying, ‘God? Who needs him?’ If I’m poor, I might steal and dishonor the name of my God.” (Prov. 30:8)
In other words, it’s a good thing to be dependent on God, to have enough need in your life that you don’t just get up and go to the freezer, but instead pray, “Give us our daily bread.”
How are you doing with that balance? Is there enough pain in your life to keep you dependent on God? In our house, frankly, we often tilt toward complacency. Our freezer is full. The thermostat is set at 75 degrees. Our car has gas in it. If I pray for anything, it’s not my daily bread, but “keep me from eating too much today.”
If too much comfort is an issue, I need more pain in my life. I need more dependence on God and a greater awareness of my own mortality. I really am not a very good representative of Jesus when I’m too comfortable. I need pain to sharpen me, to get me on my knees.
Jesus came to bring comfort to those in too much pain. His beatitudes are a catalog of pains that will be blessed.
When they were young, our kids asked us to kiss their “owwies.” Jesus promises to kiss our brokenness and make it right. In fact, he begins his ministry by specifically targeting those in the greatest pain – the poor, the blind, the sick, the oppressed. (Luke 4:18-19)
But some of us have been comfortable too long. And at times we’ve become numb to things of the spirit. We may need a change to feel again. And so, the answer to our prayers for intimacy may be pain. We may be asking “Why me, Lord?” When that’s his answer.
One antidote to too much comfort is to recalibrate our sensitivity with a fast. Whatever it is that we no longer appreciate, take it away. I like what Jesus has to say to us about this: “Wake up! Strengthen what you have left before it dies completely. I have found that what you are doing is less than what my God wants.“ (Rev. 3:2)
Application
Where are you in your process of recovering from pain?
Where are you on the comfort continuum? Do you need more comfort or more pain? Have you numbed yourself and kept yourself from facing into the pain? Is there anything you need to fast from? How dependent on God are you? We all need a wake up call from time to time – ask God what he’s saying to you about this.
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