We don’t talk much about physical pain, it just doesn’t exist for us unless we feel it. But in the inevitable fate of being human, pain befalls us all.
“To feel pain, which can be partially defined by human sciences, literary testimonies, and especially testimonies of the sick or the wounded, is first of all a personal and private phenomenon that avoids any measure, any attempt to define and describe it, and its degree and characteristics cannot be told to another person. Bitterness is the radical failure of language, immersed in the darkness of the body, it belongs to the individual’s internal debate. It absorbs the body in its own halo, or gnaws at it like a burrowing animal, but it is not possible to name this tormenting privacy. The inexpressible is not a continent on which the most daring explorers could draw a concrete geography. Under its blade, the unity of life is shattered, leading to the disintegration of language. Screams, whines, groans, cries or silence, that is, the inadequacies of speech and thought…; pain mutes the voice and makes it unrecognizable.” David Le Breton – Anthropology of Pain
Pain makes one realize the subjectivity of our experience in a striking way. In everyday life, where we constantly forget that we are finite, a spark flashes. It confronts the fact that it is only “me” who lives this life. It puts our loneliness in our face. It terrifies people. Maybe that’s why it’s something to avoid talking about. Of course, we wouldn’t be able to move forward if we thought about it all the time. It is necessary and healthy to live as if the pain does not exist in the chatter of daily life, when the pain does not come to us. But absolute denial of this can put us in a quandary with horror when it comes to us.
Such powerful experiences (experiences of spiritual and physical pain) can be a good opportunity to stop and reflect on one’s own life, and perhaps give them the strength to take steps to do justice to the life we live. Because the experience of pain brings a person closer to himself, to his own existence. It returns us to ourselves with its inexpressibility to the other.
Let’s continue with another quote from David Le Breton – The Anthropology of Pain:
“Pain is not proven, it is felt. In this sense, he discloses a human condition characteristic that he tries to deny his relation to the social world: loneliness, or rather introversion. The devastated, suffering person sometimes experiences drama because of the misunderstanding of his distress or the suspicion of its severity. And there is nothing that can prove the sincerity of a torture hidden in the body and avoiding the eyes. People say that they have very severe pains, but they know in advance that no one else can feel or share them as they do.
‘I can describe my aches and pains, someone else can do it, or we say we can, but how can it be verified that we can reflect them fully and accurately and with what degree of certainty?’ says Wittgenstein. And he continues: ‘I can certainly know that N. is suffering, but I do not know how much he is suffering. It’s pain he knows for sure, but his outward manifestations don’t mean anything to me about a totally special situation.’
Words scatter and name an escapist reality despite the torments of the body in its introversion. To understand the severity of another’s pain, it is necessary to be someone else. The difference of bodies, the necessary separation of identities make it impossible to penetrate the consciousness of the pain and pain of another, chained to one’s own pain, freedom or personality. ‘I’m depressed, I’m in pain.’
‘Depression can be expressed, it can produce symptoms, it can turn into signs and phantasms, or it can be relieved by action. It can even be transmitted; pain belongs only to man himself.’ In order to understand what a burn wound is, it is necessary to be burned. But there is no way to understand the extent of the pain of another person who is burned again. For example, although he can create a unity of destiny, he cannot save a person from the loneliness of his pain and the thought that he is the only one who suffers such pain.
Undoubtedly, a suffering person is never so alone in this sense.”
Experiencing pain is perhaps the most tactless harbinger of ultimate loneliness. We are alone with the inadequacy of words in every expression of the experience of pain; We are alone in the fact that our pain can never be experienced by the other as equivalent to our own.
We are all helpless about the incomprehensibility of our suffering from the other side like “me”. But one thing still brings us closer to the other; this desperation is inherent in all of us.
We are faced with a dilemma. Loneliness makes us feel helpless, and the commonality of this helplessness creates the feeling that we are not alone.
It is never possible for me to fully understand the “other”, yes. The other will never be able to understand the “me” as I understand myself, the way I want to express myself…
But this effort to understand and explain is admirable and is the most important element that binds us together and makes us strong. Ultimately, I relieve the helplessness brought about by my inability to express my pain, by understanding the inexpressibility of the pain of the other. Our effort to understand each other is one of the most important values that add meaning to our lives; and of course ourselves…
We need each other badly; we are doomed to togetherness and this is a curse that sometimes makes people say “hell is other people”, and sometimes it’s a blessing that makes people say “good thing they’re with me”. It is up to us to determine which one we will stand closer to in our lives. Therapy, on the other hand, is the surest way to establish an understanding relationship with both the “me” and the “other”.
