You're giving pain too much credit, and willpower not enough. Yes, there is an initial reflex action to pain, that's built into our hardwiring for self-preservation. But, given the right motivation, pain can be ignored.
Pain is like the blinking lights on a snowplow - just a warning sign.
"Whatever you are, be a good one." ~ Abraham Lincoln
Pain is indeed much more than a whip as you state. Pain can be a slave master, and break you, or it can be the power that makes you unbreakable. The philosopher Nietzsche put it simply "What does not kill me, makes me stronger". However, pain is a fight or flight phenomena. You can run from pain or you can use it to make yourself stronger. WIllpower to embrace pain, to face it is central to that theme.
edited to add: Emotional pain tends to evoke the flight syndrome in me until I decided to face it head on. Flight from pain is not a teacher, whereas confronting pain and embracing it teaches you to become stronger. I'm leaning as the expression goes "the painful way".
Like the immune system, the pain response has evolved to protect us from further harm, varies in its abilities by individual based on which variant and concentration of receptors are genetically encoded, which variant of neurotransmitters and level of transmitters are programmed genetically, and how the wiring in each person's brain and body develops/connects as they grow and experience painful stimuli, and have accidents that can drastically modify the architecture of any of the system's components. Also like the immune system, the pain response can go awry, causing too much of what should be a good protective thing and turning it into acute or chronic pain, or even phantom pain (where an individual continues to feel pain in a specific body part even after losing that body part and hence all pain signals from said body part).
Pain can be so severe that it has driven people mad, and brought them to a desire to end their own lives rather than continue to suffer the poor quality of life they endure.
Interestingly, pain due to social (emotional) events is experienced in the same pathways in the brain as is physical pain.
For the majority of people, pain will let them know that something is wrong so that they may take the appropriate response to rectify that which is causing the pain. Yes, it triggers the flight or fight, and yes it can also be debilitating and beyond one's own control to ignore or eliminate. Then there are the few outliers that thrive on, and search out, painful experiences, whether physical or emotional. The system isn't perfect, but all of us are a work in progress, small scale and grand scale.
One of my favorite poems from a difficult time in my life helped me discover more strength and courage to push on and heal my wounds:
Own Your Own Pain by Patricia Roth Schwartz Own your own pain.
Why not? It's yours.
You've hawked it, pushed it, pimped it -
now,
Your body, breathing life, guts, luster,
sweetness, softness,
Pays the price.
So own your own pain. Why not?
You've eaten it for breakfast,
Sung it to sleep at night,
Rinsed it out in the basin,
Watched it rise with the bread.
So - take it, turn it,
Let it slither,
Into blood-beat, breast-bone, cell-song,
skin.
Give it a name.
What you possess
Cannot possess you.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
Last edit: 03 Dec 2014 16:23 by ScienceChic. Reason: fixed broken font
Along those lines: The experience of pain has been used by various philosophers to analyze various types of philosophy of mind. David Lewis, in his article 'Mad pain and Martian pain', gives examples of various types of pain to support his own flavor of functionalism. He defines mad pain to be pain which occurs in a madman who has somehow gotten his "wires crossed" (possibly an early observation distinguishing normal pain from either clinical psychalgia or schizophreniaic pain) in such a way such that what we usually call "pain" does not cause him to cry or roll in agony, but instead to, for example, become very concentrated and good at mathematics. Martian pain is, to him, pain which occupies the same causal role as our pain, but has a very different physical realization (e.g. the Martian feels pain due to the activation of an elaborate internal hydraulic system rather than, for example, the firing of C-fibers). Both of these phenomena, Lewis claims, are pain, and must be accounted for in any coherent theory of mind.
Motivators come in a couple of genres; push and pull. Pain is definitely a push. But not all pushes are pain.
Pain is a large part of life and to avoid pain is to avoid much of your life. It should be felt, It is what tells you that you are alive. It brings depth of understanding to your heart and soul. A person should not wallow in pain, but feel it whenever it comes and not avoid it.
Pain can be a marker in our monotonous existence at times. Very few of the days of our lives can we vividly bring to our memory. But if tomorrow, while you are walking into the Loaf-N-Jug to pay for your gas, a man runs up, violently kicks you in the knee, and then runs away, he has just given you a memory that will last vividly until the day you die. He has given you a memory of your short life.
Personal experience tells me that pain does bookmark life. Time periods of painful existence remain vivid and clearly punctuate my lifeline with dates. At those times pain was a teacher (motivator) as I tired to glean the wisdom that would enable me to mitigate or avoid a repeat of the same painful episodes. I'm beginning to realize that pain can be a bridge that allows me to get to a point where I want to go. If I am to evolve as a husband, then I may just have to experience pain as part of that evolution. Personal experience has seen an evolution in my perspective on pain. Once it simply drove me before it's whip, subsequently it became my teacher, and now it seems to be a bridge to a better future (meaning it will help highlight my personal behavioral shortcomings, get me to examine them critically with the objective of self improvement for everyone involved).
MB - I agree. Your post reminded me of a memorable quote from the movie The Hunted with Christopher Lambert and Josie Chen. While preparing to assassinate Chen's character, the leader of the ninjas asks her to choose between a quick, painless death or a slow painful one. She replies "Kill me slowly so that I may know that I have lived". It hadn't occurred to me before then to embrace pain as a part of life, but too as you said, there are other motivators than pain and eventually it isn't healthy to continue to use only pain as a motivator.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
