Compassion, Shame, and Emotional Pain

Awareness, Inner Battle, Shame, Killing the Pain, Answers

I.

Awareness

What Self-Compassion Isn’t: 

Self-compassion is not treating yo self to manicures, mimosas, and fine leather goods. It is not DoorDashing BDubs while rewatching the entire Season 5 of The Office. It is not planning a family Disney trip, booking a honeymoon vacay at a Sandals resort, or even signing up for a local ceramics class.

Self-compassion does not happen outside of the self.

What Self-Compassion Is: 

Etymologically, “compassion” comes from the Latin com- and passionem, meaning “with suffering.” To show compassion towards yourself means to be with your suffering. Treating yo self is not being with your suffering; it’s evading suffering. To be with your suffering means to acknowledge and accept what’s going on in your body and mind. The first step towards greater self-compassion is awareness: Letting yourself know what you know and feel what you feel.

II.

Inner Battle

Hurt people hurt people.

Attributed to Charles Eads (source)

I’ve hurt the people I love most, and I’ve been hurt by the people I love most. While we know it’s wrong to hurt people and don’t always intend to, it still happens. It’s as if we can’t control ourselves. But we can.

We often hurt people when we fail to regulate our emotions. We’ll take things personally or negatively, experience strong emotional reactions, then shoot from the hip. Instead of steelmanning the argument, seeking to understand, or questioning the basis of our subjective experience, we act on impulse. And this impulsivity can lead us to say words or take actions that we’ll later regret.

People who frequently react with a fight-or-flight response lack emotional maturity. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, as most people (myself included) struggle to understand their emotions fully. After all, if we don’t learn about emotions at home or school, how can we expect to be emotionally adept? Developing emotional maturity requires intentionally examining our inner storms. Our feelings stem from our thoughts, and if we habitually think negatively, we’ll frequently experience negative emotions. It’s our responsibility to supervise and manage our emotions—we can double down on them or progress through them in a productive way. Sometimes, our negative thoughts are unjustified or unequivocally wrong, but we have made a habit of thinking them anyway. We don’t have to live with the same harmful thoughts day in and day out. We can break our bad habits; we can change our thoughts.

When we allow harmful thoughts to dictate our lives, we not only hurt other people, we hurt ourselves. We neglect our own willpower—the conscious choice to act in alignment with who we are at our core. Instead of facing our suffering with empathy and compassion, we escape into external distraction. To begin healing, we must stop ignoring ourselves and our bodies. We must seek to understand where our deep-seated thoughts and beliefs come from and replace the harmful ones with healthier ones.  

III.  

Shame

What is the seal of liberation? To no longer be ashamed in front of oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (translated by Walter Kaufmann)

Why are we living with such unbearable emotional pain? Because we tell ourselves stuff like:

• I’m not good enough

• I’m defective

• I’m disgusting

• I’m unlovable

• I’m worthless

• I’m destructive

• I’m a failure

• I’m a mistake

• I’m not deserving

• I’m bad

• I’m stupid

Whether consciously or unconsciously, most people repeat statements like these to themselves multiple times a day. The saying goes that we’re our own worst critics, but the reality is that we can be downright verbally abusive to ourselves.

These statements couldn’t be further from the truth. We are none of these deplorable things. We are perfectly imperfect humans trying to do the best we can with the one life we’ve got. Sure, we may do dumb, bad, or stupid things occasionally, but that doesn’t make us dumb, bad, or stupid—it makes us human! By shifting our blame from ourselves to our actions, we transform shame. We move from being “a bad person” to being “a good person who did a bad thing.” Let’s reframe a few more statements to drive home this point:

• I’m a lovable person who messed up

• I’m a creative person who made an error

• I’m a worthy person who acted poorly

• I’m a successful person who faced a setback

When we shift the blame in this way, we focus on improving specific actions instead of beating ourselves up. This is how we create positive change in our lives.

IV.  

Killing the Pain

I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary.

Taylor Swift, Fortnight

Disclaimer: This idea references commentary from this week’s CNN Presidential Debate and “The Real Debate.” If I ever reference political content in my ideas, it is only to substantiate a point, and I will never tell you who to vote for.

According to a study funded by the NIH, NIMH, and NIDA, researchers found that our brains experience emotional pain and physical pain in the same way. For example, if we feel rejected by an ex-lover, the same brain regions would light up in an fMRI scan as if we had just spilled hot coffee on ourselves. To our brains, emotional pain is physical pain.

In Idea #2, I mention that emotions originate from thoughts. In the aforementioned study, subjects who recently experienced an unwanted breakup were shown a photograph of their ex-partner as they thought about being rejected. The thought induced a feeling, which generated a somatosensory response as indicated by the fMRI scan. The cognitive underpinnings of emotions seem important to mention because we are in the midst of a bleak mental health situation. Could it be that the current mental health crisis is causing pervasive emotional pain, which our brains perceive as physical pain?

When we go through common but painful emotional experiences like rejection and isolation, our brains release natural opioids to the regions involved with a physical pain response.¹ In other words, the brain biologically treats emotional pain in a similar way to physical pain. However, for people experiencing mental illness, the brain’s opioid response is more likely to be abnormal due to their chronic mental state. What do these people do to alleviate their perceived pain if their brains are not producing a normal painkilling response?

During Thursday’s Presidential debate, CNN moderator Jake Tapper highlighted the opioid crisis in America, noting that overdose deaths have increased during both Trump and Biden’s terms, with over 100,000 Americans dying from overdoses annually. He asked the two candidates, “What will you do to help Americans right now in the throes of addiction, who are struggling to get the treatment they need?”

In response, both Trump and Biden discussed border security but not treatment. Trump asserted that the country was “doing very well on addiction until the COVID came along,” and emphasized the role of drug-sniffing dogs in preventing drugs from crossing the border. Biden pointed to a $1.2 billion bill that proposed funding for “fentanyl-detecting machines,” which he claimed Trump had urged Republicans to block.

I was rather unimpressed by both of these responses, as they failed to recognize the primary issue at hand: People who are turning to fentanyl and other opioids are not doing so because they feel self-assured and unperturbed. These people are suffering from mental illness. In their minds, they are experiencing physical pain, and they are doing what many other humans would do when they experience pain—they’re seeking ways to alleviate it.

The day after the debate, I learned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had hosted his own version of the debate, and I wondered what he had to say about the opioid crisis. I believe it’s worth sharing here:

Both of these presidents missed the point. They are talking about drug interdiction at the border. That’s not the problem. Even if you sealed the border, fentanyl occupies such a tiny volume that you can bring enough across the border in a briefcase to kill everybody in Los Angeles. Fentanyl is going to come into this country. The problem is something much larger than that. It’s a generation that is alienated, dispossessed, depressed, suicidal, disconnected from community—and that’s why they’re turning to drugs. We need to deal with that problem and reduce demand.²

V.  

Answers

This publication is called 5 Big Ideas because I believe some of my ideas are worth tidying up and sharing. I’ll never claim to have 5 Big Answers.

When it comes to emotional pain and shame and mental health and the opioid epidemic, I wish I could wrap up this essay with some solutions, but I have none. If I did, maybe I should run for President (or at least Surgeon General). However, I do have an inkling of what the remedy might entail, though it’s not very scientific or commercially viable. And it applies to all the issues discussed here today. It’s Love.

People who love their bodies do not abuse their bodies. People who love themselves do not abuse others. No matter how many intrusive thoughts besiege our minds (and God only knows they’re legion), if we practice unconditional self-love, we won’t succumb to thoughts that undermine us. We’ll choose to live from a place of love. Love can heal. Love can forgive. Love can transform.

Perhaps love is the answer.

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

1. Source

2. paraphrased