A New Understanding of Physical, Emotional and Mental Pain

Pain seems to be at home anywhere in and on our bodies. We understand that it's there for our protection, a warning to us to take care of a damaged body part-from a stubbed toe to a severed ear. Our response to the same physical assault should be the same as everybody else's. It doesn't work that way. We bring along our own nature, background, and perception.

Physical and mental, and even emotional, pain are often so intertwined that the healing of the physical part doesn't always relieve the other two. A person in a car accident might be suffering as much from emotional pain (fear, anxiety, and stress) and mental pain (guilt or anger) as from any physical injuries that have occurred. The combination of the three can make things more complex in another way. A badly injured person might act and behave with minimal outward signs of the damage, driven by an inner need to help others, or with denial of his own trauma, or even with the need to present himself as strong and therefore invulnerable.

Dr. Sherwin Huland says, in an article in Newsweek, "When we invoke a word like 'psychological,' we include in its components an entire set of cognitive factors that are different for each person, including past experiences, cultural influences and the setting in which the stimulus occurs." A person slapped across the face wouldn't be handling just the physical pain, but would be including possible past slaps, how acceptable such behavior was in his life, and how his cultural background interpreted the gesture. In one person, shock at the idea of the action itself would be included in his reaction. Another person might have expected such an action and not suffered any emotional shock from it, feeling only the physical sting.