Pain and guilt

Lately, I’m rediscovering just how insidious pain really is. If there ever was a double edged sword, it’s name was pain. Living with pain is one thing. I find it far easier to manage my day to day issues when I’m on my own. Loving with pain, however is a whole new form of anguish.

Part of the problem is that pain is completely subjective; you can never fully understand someone else’s pain and no one will ever understand yours. If I’m on my own, I don’t worry about that. My pain is my own and I don’t feel the need to share it with anyone else. The truth, however, is that I am rarely on my own. I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to have nearly always been surrounded by people who love me. They want to understand what I’m going through or how I feel and that’s where things get messy for me. There is no way to share your pain without inflicting it on others, which is why I generally keep it to myself. It makes me feel guilty to watch my loved ones suffer under the weight of my pain. They can’t physically feel it, but I’ve found that describing it in detail is often enough to cause emotional pain in someone else.

I don’t mind keeping my pain inside, I’m used to it; most of the time sharing it just makes it feel worse. Sometimes though, some very rare times, the only thing I want is for someone to understand; someone to share the burden when it just gets to be too heavy to carry on my own.

Every now and then I run into an instance that forces me to reevaluate the very scale by which I measure pain. Something happens that makes me realize what I thought was a 10 (aka the worst pain you could imagine), was a joke. Those events leave echoes that eat away at me for hours, days or even weeks after the pain itself is gone.

Then, I have a choice:

A) I can suffer in silence and make everyone around me miserable

B) I can choose to let someone in, sob my way through a generally graphic, horrifying description of my agony, thus sharing the burden.

At first glance, it’s a no-brainer. Obviously, I should choose B, if that really helps. And yet… If I choose B, yes, my mind is eased a bit, as far as the physical pain is concerned. Then comes the backlash. I’ve just unloaded my physical trauma onto someone I love and now I have to watch them struggle under the weight of this new knowledge. They now have new concerns about me or my wellbeing, they empathize with me and now they’re stuck with the image of my suffering in their heads. In the end, the guilt I feel over dumping that burden on someone else makes me feel even worse.

I know that I shouldn’t feel guilty about it, I know that that’s exactly what a support system is for, but I can’t help it. If I had my way, none of my loved ones would ever suffer. I can’t stand the thought of being the cause of their suffering and I hate feeling like I’ve just heaped a whole new load of worry on their plates.

Right now, you’re probably thinking that I should consider counseling. Believe me, I have. I’ve been to many different therapists who specialize in pain management, they’ve all been extremely wonderful. My problem is that I’m never able to really open up. Even after seeing the same person for months, by the time I get to their office, I’ve mentally tidied up all my issues into nice, neat little packages and when I talk about them, it’s as though I’m discussing the weather. More than one therapist has outright told me that they don’t know how to help me because they can’t get a read on how I feel about any of what I tell them. It’s not intentional on my part, it’s just that I have trouble connecting with people and if you’re outside my little circle, it’s incredibly difficult for me to let you in.

The upside, (which I’ve been realizing as I type this), is that writing it down and putting it out here helps. Sometimes, you just need to be heard, even if what you actually say doesn’t directly relate to the issue you’re dealing with.