Ouchies! When Little Things Hurt a Lot

TW: Mention of suicide and self-harm.

A thousand paper cuts given over a lifetime might be insignificant, but when none of them are allowed to heal, they fester into something awful.

― Darcy Coates, The Haunting of Leigh Harker

This blog post was inspired by a conversation with my friend and fellow mental health blogger Aimee Wilson. Aimee’s had a significant knee injury for a while and wanted to update me on some additional painful, but relatively superficial, damage.

Forgot to tell you, I hurt my knee again today. It happened outside so it got all scraped. The scrapes are very sore! You know that tingly pain you get with grazes? It’s a different kind of pain than a broken bone pain or a bruise pain. And there’s that thing people say about smaller injuries being more painful ... I’m feeling like that’s pretty true!

I agreed, giving the example of how paper cuts can be agony despite not being serious in a medical sense. “Yes!” she replied. “That’s exactly the example I was going to use!” It was a fun to find ourselves on the same page. More than that, it gave me the idea for a new blog post about how things that appear relatively minor can nevertheless hurt a great deal.

When Little Things Hurt More than We Expect

It’s a truism that “little things hurt a lot.” In general, this is because our expectations don’t match reality. That paper cut looks superficial. It might not even be deep enough to bleed. And yet, it really hurts! What’s surprising isn’t the fact that a relatively minor injury can hurt so much. The edge of a sheet of paper can be razor sharp, and our fingertips are served by a great many nerve endings. What’s surprising is that we’re surprised every time it happens. The injury is only “small” because we focus on the external injury rather than its impact on us. This mismatch between how things are and how we imagine they are doesn’t only apply to paper cuts, grazes, and other minor injuries. Naive, ill-informed, or inappropriate expectations underlie much of the pain we experience in life.

If It Hurts It Hurts

Sometimes we do or say something that hurts another person in ways we neither intended nor anticipated. I forgot a close friend’s birthday this year. I’m not sure how it happened. I have a calendar reminder, and in previous years I’ve remembered to send a card or gift. I was surprised that I forgot this time, but what really caught me off guard was the depth of the hurt my friend felt at my unintentional omission.

At times like this I remind myself of a line by American comedian and actor Louis C.K. “When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t.” I wouldn’t have been hurt if my friend forgot my birthday, but that’s irrelevant. I listened as my friend described how much she was hurting, and some of the reasons why it hurt as much as it did. I apologised, but deep hurt can’t be healed so easily. Only change — my change — can do that. I’ve set additional reminders for next year.

When Big Things Hurt More than We Expect

The mismatch between anticipation and reality applies to big things too, and there are few things bigger than our search for meaning. What is my life for? Why am I here? What’s this all about? We’ve all asked ourselves these questions at some time. As most do, I come up short. Desperate for answers as we are, it hurts to realise that the universe has nothing to offer. There’s no absolute purpose and meaning to existence beyond those we make for ourselves. It’s the ultimate discrepancy in expectations; an existential crisis philosopher Albert Camus termed the Absurd. He was well aware how devastatingly painful this can be. His book The Myth of Sisyphus opens with the assertion that “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” To be clear, Camus rejected both physical and intellectual suicide as responses to the Absurd. His challenge is to find healthy ways to accept the situation and live a meaningful life anyway.

Death is by no means a little thing and yet even when we can anticipate it — the passing of an elderly family member, for example — we’re shocked at how deeply the death of our loved one hits us. This is exacerbated by our reluctance to face death in advance. We don’t want to think about it until it happens. I’ve taken a few steps towards death education and end of life planning, a journey I’ve described in such posts as Letting Go of the Balloon: End of Life Planning for the Overwhelmed and How Much Do You Want to Know about Me? Thoughts on Writing My Obituary. No amount of education and planning can insulate us from the pain of losing someone we love and care about. That’s not the point, nor would it be a healthy aim. There’s no right or wrong way to grieve, but facing up to the reality of death and what it means gives us permission to feel its impact more fully and genuinely when the time comes.

We Feel Physical Pain in Our Own Way

Sensitivity to physical pain varies a great deal. The following is excerpted from Ouch! The different ways people experience pain by Christian Jarrett for the British Psychological Society.

The sensitivity and tolerance people show towards pain varies predictably according to several factors, including gender, ethnicity, personality and culture, all interacting, overlapping and playing out in the tissues and synapses of the body. Indeed, the topic of individual differences in pain is like a microcosm of science – it’s where biology, psychology and sociology all meet.

Two conditions involving an increased sensitivity to pain are hyperalgesia and allodynia. Hyperalgesia is where you feel an excessive amount of pain in situations that most people would find only moderately painful. Someone with allodynia feels pain in circumstances that wouldn’t normally hurt at all, such as the touch of clothes against your skin. With allodynia, the person’s nervous system misinterprets touch signals as pain. Medication can also affect a person’s sensitivity to pain. If you’re on analgesic medication for a long-term condition or illness, you’re likely to feel less pain from any new injury.

We Feel Emotional Pain in Our Own Way

As with physical pain, we all experience and respond to emotional challenges differently. What seems minor to one person might be extremely hurtful to someone else. Past injuries, trauma, or abuse are amongst the reasons someone might respond in ways that seem extreme or inappropriate if you’re unaware of what’s going on. Actions, words, topics, and situations might trigger flashbacks and emotional responses that seem out of character or disproportionate.

A clear example of the mismatch between physical and emotional pain is in the area of self-harm. I’ve witnessed situations in which someone has inflicted a physically significant, even dangerous, injury that was extremely painful, without any obvious emotional hurt involved. In contrast, I’ve known someone cause an injury that was almost trivial in physical terms, and yet feel intense emotional and mental pain at what they’d done.

I’ve written elsewhere about my response — or relative lack of response — to bereavement. “The death of a friend,” I wrote, “affected me far more than either my father’s death when I was eighteen or my mother’s, decades later.” Grief is grief, irrespective of who or what we’ve lost, or how profoundly it’s experienced.

There’s no hierarchy of grief and no loss is unworthy of being mourned. The death of a parent, child, partner, family member, friend, or animal companion, may all be deeply felt and deserve respect, caring support, and compassion. This is true whether we were bereaved by old age, accident, suicide, illness, conflict, crime, or any other circumstance.

I’ve witnessed how deeply the loss of a beloved pet can be, despite having no commensurate experience of my own. I’ve more experience of the pain that can accompany the ending of a close friendship. It’s another example of where reality can be out of step with what’s considered socially appropriate. We’re expected to feel pain after the breakup of a romantic relationship. There’s far less accommodation when a close friendship ends. It’s not supposed to tear us apart, yet so often it does.

And then, some people simply seem more sensitive than other to what’s going on around them. The following unattributed exchange captures this well.

Someone asked me, “What is your weakness?”
“I’m sensitive. Smallest things hurt me.
“What’s your strength?
“Little things make me happy, too.”

— Unknown

I began this post focused on the commonplace that “little things hurt a lot” but it’s brought me to the deeper awareness that we all feel things differently. That might seem no less trivial an observance. It’s nevertheless helpful and kind to remind ourselves of it from time to time, and not judge others for reacting to a given situation more — or less — than we imagine we would ourselves.

 

Photo by Diana Polekhina at Unsplash.