Overcoming Psychological Pain

Say what you will about human beings. We’re self-important. We’re destructive. But we are also special. We have a superpower unique to us: a capacity for language. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison describes it like this: Word-work is sublime … because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Our capacity for language is powerful. When I’m playing BeanBoozled with my nephew, I can use language to say,

“This jelly bean MIGHT taste like mangoes and it MIGHT taste like rotten dead fish. It’s a mystery.”

He doesn’t fully understand the word might. He’s four. In some ways, his behavior is not unlike that of non-human animals: controlled more by direct experience than by verbal reasoning. He sees a red and yellow jelly bean in my hand and his whole life history has taught him that eating it will be a rewarding experience. Despite my look of caution and verbal warning, he reaches for the candy.

His mom on the other hand has the language superpower. Her behavior is controlled by direct experience and by verbal reasoning. She knows from decades of experience that candy is good, but she also assumes rotten dead fish is terrible. When I offer her the candy, she immediately declines. She’s not the least bit enticed by a maybe-mango flavored jelly bean. She uses her superpower to override years of experiences enjoying candy, so that she can avoid something terrible. Her son will have a different experience. He will learn to avoid the terrible experience of rotten dead fish because on that day, he found out what rotten dead fish tasted like. But now, as a superhero in training, he can use the language he does have to help his twin brother avoid what was probably the most disgusting experience of his life. Of course, he won’t do that. He’ll do what I did and tell is bro, ‘hey, this jelly bean might be great’. But other animals can’t do any of this. They, like my nephew, can’t avoid rotten dead fish jelly beans without trying them first. Their behaviors are left to rely entirely on direct experiences and instinct (biological tendencies).

That example was inconsequential relative to what we can really do with language. We write books, we formulate science. We document history, we compose music, we perform math. It’s powerful to be able to communicate and express ideas. But that power also enables us to be uniquely destructive. Our capacity to perform silent, verbal acrobatics can expose us to pain in ways other animals don’t have to deal with. I can be enjoying a hot shower and think about something cringe-worthy. I can over-plan and worry and ruminate and miss out on the experiences happening outside of my head. Dogs and babies aren’t doing that. As verbal, thinking humans, we are uniquely enabled to spoil our sunny days. But we are just as enabled to brighten the cloudy ones. So how can we use our power for good?

Before getting into that, I want to add more support to this idea that language (specifically, thinking) should be held accountable for psychological suffering. That might not feel quite right. When I experience mental pain—be it depression or regret or meaninglessness—it often feels like the feeling is there first, followed by the negative thoughts about the feeling. Some days it seems like I wake up and feel low before any conscious thought can form. If negative thoughts are sometimes the consequences of negative feelings, why treat them as the cause?

If I accept feelings as the cause of my mental anguish, my situation becomes difficult to resolve. The causes of one’s feelings are complicated and ever-changing. Interconnected factors such as sleep, diet, exercise, social contact, fatigue, hormonal fluctuations, drug exposure (or drug absence), our interpretation of our purpose and worth, our genetic predispositions, et cetera, can all play into our feelings. Even within these factors, it is difficult to know how these things are affecting one’s mood. Am I lacking REM sleep or slow wave sleep? Am I missing an amino acid in my diet or do I need to eat more fruits and vegetables?

These factors are absolutely important to consider and addressing them can be physically healthy if not mentally. But they can’t always be perfect, and it’s hard to know which of them are contributing to any given bad mood. Feelings are a lot like the weather—difficult to predict and control. Trying to do so has often made matters worse for me. In trying to change my mood, I essentially say to myself that there is something wrong with who I am in that moment. It therefore becomes more productive to accept the mood as it is and address something I can more easily control—my reaction. My thoughts and my behaviors.

This brings us back to my point that language—thinking—should be held accountable for psychological suffering. We truly suffer when we let our transient moods control our internal narrative about our lives. When we resign ourselves to our diagnoses, our physiology, or our environment, we solidify that resignation with language. We generate a narrative that reinforces the problem and brings gloom to even the sunny days. “Mental illness runs in my family so shit, I suffer from this and so it goes, I guess I’ll stay home today”. The issue is not that statements like these are not true, nor that it is wrong to stay home and tend to yourself if you feel like it. It’s that these reactions can establish self-fulfilling prophecies. If one is not careful, language may fuse together these things that one cannot control with the things one can control, making us the victim of our environment AND our perspective. If one is seeking relief from psychological pain, these outside factors must sometimes be de-fused from one’s reaction.

Oddly, language can be great at solving the problems it creates. Rather than spiraling inward with regret, shame, depression, rage or contempt, I can apply metaphors and change my reactions. I can think, moods are like the weather. Sometimes pleasant, and sometimes gloomy. But always temporary. If I wake up feeling low, I can say to myself, “this is a rainy day. I suppose that’s what the weather will be. I’ll just have to carry on with my life as if it were sunny.” Rather than wallowing, I can remember that on sunny days, I really care about fitness or learning piano or connecting with people, and that I can commit to doing these things regardless of my mood. I can avoid falling into a nihilistic narrative that everything is gloomy and it always will be so why bother.

Again, it’s not that there is anything wrong with these emotions, or that they don’t have their usefulness. It’s that it can become unhealthy to let them rule us. Just as it can be unhealthy to let any other emotion rule our thoughts and actions (see hedonism, yolo dgaf, rose-colored glasses, etc.) There’s a metaphor used by cognitive behavior therapists that resonates with me (I found it in this textbook). It describes thoughts and feelings as passengers on your bus. Sometimes passengers can be annoying. Maybe they tell you where to go or harass you about who to let on. But as the bus driver, you’re the one in the driver’s seat. You’re in control, and you are going where you decide to go (unless the routes are predetermined by the manager of the bus station, which might extend this metaphor to God and predestination? Rabbit-hole, I’m not going down it). Some passengers will bother you, but you can’t let them tell you how to drive your bus. You have to accept that they are there and that they will eventually get off. As will the nice passengers. The thoughts and feelings you enjoy will also come and go.

It may seem contradictory to say you have to accept psychological pain in order to escape it. It might seem insincere to pretend it’s sunny when it’s obviously gloomy af. But it isn’t pretending. It’s recognizing that it’s gloomy and deciding that you have values and goals that you’ll commit to regardless of the weather. It’s gripping the steering wheel and staying on route, even when you have other passengers telling you how to drive.