Types Of Mental Pain

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In the process of developing and gaining psychological intelligence, I realized that there are different types of mental pain in origin.

Exist " historical "pain arising from personal injury;

"pain of separation "resulting from the feeling of detachment, separation;

"pain of ignorance or emptiness "associated with ignorance of our true nature or, to use Jung's terminology, the origin of our self;

and the heartache that not explained psychological processes.

I have found it helpful to be able to recognize the kind of pain that is being experienced and, at the same time, to have an understanding of all kinds of pain that exist. I often meet highly developed, conscious, psychologically literate people who continue to carry out an endless study of trauma, although the source of their pain lies outside of personal history.

Take, for example, the pain of separateness, which cannot be resolved from the standpoint of the individual. Any techniques used at this level, but bearing in their basis the belief in the existence of a separate person, limited by a separate body and mind, will resemble the rearrangement of cubes, although to solve the problem it is necessary to rebuild the entire structure.

The pain of ignorance and emptiness, in turn, cannot be resolved without acknowledging a deep existential ignorance of our true nature. Suspension in the air, familiar to every person, is unbearable and requires an immediate search for a solution. Usually, the solution is found among beliefs: we accept a certain kind of worldview, religious belief or philosophical paradigm, which is designed to explain what is the meaning of human life and what the world is built on. But until the realization of the true nature of being occurs on a sensory, practical, experimental level, the beliefs adopted will be nothing more than a safe haven from the leap into the unknown.

Our interaction with understanding pain is also progressing.

At first, we think that the pain is caused by other people and external circumstances.

Then we discover that the creators of our suffering are ourselves: here we take responsibility for our emotions, we view them as incentives to achieve some inner goal.

And in the end, when all the internal programs are worked out, we can find that in parallel with the remnants of the old programs that are slowly "fading away", we periodically experience pain that is not caused by our activity within our body-mind. I have a suggestion that it is at this level that we can become more sensitive to the pain of others (empathy) or experience pain that we cannot explain, for which a new level of awareness is required to understand.

As long as our level of awareness is low, it is highly likely that the main source of mental pain for us will be internal shocks in the form of emotions that prompt us to take some action. With the growth of awareness, we will become aware of our activities - conscious, subconscious and unconscious - to the extent that the mental pain caused by processes that were inexplicable at first will visit us less and less. As we are internally cleared of "unnecessary" pain, we can become more sensitive to the suffering of others. Provided that we are aware that our consciousness is a unified field, sensitivity to the experiences of others will eventually cease to amaze us.

The mental pain that we experience in the morning, for example, may be related to the trauma of physical birth. This kind of separation creates a gap in our integrity with the unity of being, and this causes a number of experiences that are familiar to us as the fear of rejection, the feeling of abandonment, resistance to change, fear of the unknown and discomfort, a feeling of deep inability to manage life and grief over the lost experience.

It is very important to understand what is the source of a particular person's mental pain at a particular moment. For example, feelings of dissatisfaction are rarely classified as pain or a form of suffering, although they are. Provided that a given feeling has been defined as a kind of pain, we gain access to understanding it and working with it. But it is also important to realize that at a certain moment an individual can achieve an understanding of all the processes that we classify as “psychological”, followed by the exploration of a new area of consciousness filled with collective and inexplicable processes. And this is expected and normal.

With love, integral psychologist Lilia Cardenas