These reflections grew out of a seminar on pain with Homeopath Massimo Mangialavori. My thoughts are inevitably influenced by the discussions we had and the ideas explored during the seminar. I share them here as my own reflections, with deep appreciation for the inspiration and questions his teaching brought forth.
Of course, none of us are strangers to pain. It has always been part of the human experience. We may experience it differently, but every one of us knows what it is to hurt.
We often separate physical, mental and emotional pain, but they are deeply interconnected. If the mind is not well, the body is not well, and if the body is suffering, it affects our emotional and mental experience of being alive.
As a child, it is hard to communicate pain, let alone emotional pain. A child weeps, throws a tantrum or goes silent, depending on who is there to meet them in their experience of pain. As children we are trying to express something that we do not yet have the words for. As babies, we do not have words at all… and for some of us these words might never come.
I remember being in hospital for a broken arm at around ten years old. Of course, it was very painful. I broke all the bones in my wrist and my arm sat out of alignment. Looking at it freaked me out. They had to operate to reset the bones, but they couldn’t, because I had had a feast of avocado and chips with my friend just before I fell off the roof.
As it was in those days, they left me there to digest the food and told my mum they couldn’t give me pain medication because of “nil by mouth”: not even a drop of water.
My mum says I lay there, my eyes changed colour to icy blue, and I didn’t even cry or move. I remember myself floating above my body, looking at myself from my mum’s angle, just floating.
Nothing more or less.
I also can’t remember the pain itself.
The Pain Scale
Throughout my life, when I have had pain, I ended up in hospital in a similar wait-and-lie-there situation. The only thing offered to me was the pain scale.
I am sure you are all familiar with it. It ranges from one to ten and from green to red, in little blocks of ascending numbers and shifting colours. It is offered as a truth about pain. There are only ten levels, and they are either green, orange or red.
Now, if you have a brain like mine, which is always looking for the higher meaning, the pattern, the rule that ties all of humanity together, then this one-to-ten scale poses a significant challenge.
As a child, I watched The English Patient. I remember the image of the man lying there, his body burnt, moving in and out of reverie, carrying so much suffering. I remember witnessing that level of pain and wondering: if ten represents the greatest pain a human being could ever experience, how could I ever be a ten?
Ten belonged to something almost impossible to comprehend. It belonged to that place of unimaginable suffering.
The same went for level one. This must be an impact on the body that is the smallest possible: not even stubbing your toe, but something like a plastic spoon dropping onto your toe.
So somewhere in between these two extremes, I was left to endlessly analyse my pain, with too few numbers to even begin to describe the different kinds of pain a person can experience. And all of this had to be done under pressure, with a nurse waiting for the answer to determine what needed to happen next.
Needless to say, I never got the pain medication, even when I had a caesarean section, because I was never going near the torture of ten before it actually happened to me. I fainted from the caesarean, and then they gave me pain medication.
When Suffering Has No Words
This line of thought was there with me as a child, stayed with me, and became ever more complex when I understood that emotional pain can be every bit as intense as in The English Patient.
When we lose someone. When something ends. This enigma of loss that is too big to fathom, because it reaches beyond life itself. And yet we experience the suffering of it in our body.
Suffering is the intimate resonance of pain: it is what a person makes of their pain. It is never merely the extension of an organic disturbance; it extends to their entire existence.
Massimo Mangialavori
When this suffering and emotion is too big to bear, or even comprehend, the body becomes the theatre for expressing what we cannot. It expresses itself in symptoms and emotions that seemingly do not relate to the situation we actually find ourselves in.
Deep down, we are in pain.
The pain scale could never meet these experiences in their fullness. It is about the experience of pain: this vast, unfathomable experience that becomes so difficult to relate to others, and even to ourselves, and yet is a fundamental human experience.
Massimo shared a beautiful passage from Marcel Proust, who described illness as the experience of living alongside an alien within ourselves.
It is precisely when we are sick that we realise we do not live alone, but are chained to a being of a different species, from which an abyss separates us, a being that does not know us and to which it is impossible to make ourselves understood.
Marcel Proust
That image stayed with me, and it is so close to my own experience of relating pain to myself and others.
When pain becomes too great to bear, our own body can become unfamiliar to us. It becomes something we are trying to understand, something that feels separate from ourselves.
And yet it is still our body.
It is the place where our whole experience is held.
And when suffering becomes too great to express, the body becomes the theatre where that experience unfolds. Pain can show itself in so many ways: through physical symptoms, exhaustion, tension, inflammation, anxiety, grief or sensations that seem impossible to explain.
There is a whole language of suffering that exists beyond the words we have for it.
Another Way of Being Heard
This is where Homeopathy offered me another way of being heard and experienced as a whole person.
Not simply as a collection of symptoms, but as a unique human being with a unique experience of pain.
Homeopathy does not only ask: where is the pain? And from one to ten?
It asks: what is this experience of pain like for you?
How does it express itself? What changes it? What makes it better or worse? How does it affect your body, your emotions, your thoughts, your dreams, your fears and your experience of life?
No two people will ever experience pain in the same way.
When we are not immediately met with a pain scale, but instead given the time and space to describe the intensity and experience of our suffering, something already begins to happen.
We begin to turn towards the alien in the room: the alien within our own body.
The part of ourselves that has become unfamiliar through pain is no longer simply something to measure, manage or move away from. It becomes something we can begin to encounter, observe and understand.
Homeopathy offers this space with such dignity: to be deeply listened to, to be able to relate the fullness of our experience to another person. Not reduced to a number, but understood in its own unique expression.