On Suffering and Pain

Suffering is not healing; feeling pain is.  Why is that?  Because they are very different from one another.    There are  pains that are imprinted and thereby made unconscious, because the pain was far too much for a baby or fetus to experience.  This leads to generalized suffering which is the agony portion of the imprint without the connection to its acknowledgment.    Pain means connection, and that is why when our patients feel pain they stop suffering and remove themselves from the pain, as well.  Feeling pain turns into its opposite—feeling.  Once felt that portion of the feeling is gone.    So let us recap:  suffering happens when the imprinted pain is on the rise but still repressed so that it cannot be connected and integrated.  Pain is the specific connection to the original event.  It was so strong that it could not be felt at the time, and due to repression it became amorphous suffering.  Thus, it can go on for all of our lives until its generating source can be found and lived for the first time.   Suffering and pain are mutually exclusive, in the primal scheme of things.

Most psychotherapies extant try to suppress  the agony part of  the feeling, often with drugs, which ensures that connection  will never be made.   The belief is that once suffering is suppressed all is well.  Or another approach is the cognitive that implies that it is just an imagination; thus changing one’s attitude will help repress the suffering.  The problem is that there is the confusion between suffering and pain; the two are conflated, so that there is the belief that they are interchangeable and can be treated through new ideas which amounts to thinking your way to health.  Believing makes it so.

In one sense, suffering is in our head because it is not yet connected  to original imprints in our system.  So we are miserable and never know why.  And if we try to “understand” our suffering through an intellectual analysis we remain alienated from causes.  Origins, generating  sources lie far below our intellectual processes and will never lead to feelings and remote memories.  In other words, whereas in cognitive approaches  the neo-cortex means increased intellectual activity; in primal it  means just the opposite, letting go of the intellectual and dropping below to another level of  consciousness.

If we do not do that in therapy then all of the stress hormones continue putting out chemical  signals and deplete the system over time.  It is much worse to shut down  the suffering because then all hope of a cure is gone.  Feeling pain stops the system from reacting continuously to the alarm bells because  there are no more signals of alarm.  Thus the imprint is ever-present in the system and is a continual menace; the system treats  it as present because it is; it is a continuous danger, of what?  Of the feeling that is so overwhelming.  We need to put it back in the past where it belongs, and we can only do that by feeling the past so that it no longer intrudes into  the present.   We can now live in the present unfettered by our history.  The past is past.  Otherwise we can only pretend to live in the here-and-now.  We are still back in the  there and then.   Our past rules  our  lives.  We can  fight it, deny it or suppress it but it  is  still omnipresent and always will be.