Pain As A Language

Pain is a symptom. Symptoms are the feedback that the body generates when it faces problems with its delicate internal balance (homeostasis). Without symptoms like pain, thirst, nausea and fevers, it would be very difficult for us to maintain a healthy body in the same way that it would be hard to drive a car safely with no dashboard display.  

But symptoms can be incredibly hard to live with. In fact, the symptoms of mental and physical health challenges are among the pillars of the worst human suffering. Life can throw a lot at us. But only the very worst of it is a match for the incredible suffering caused by our bodily symptoms. 

It’s easy to overlook the fact that it’s mostly symptoms that we suffer from, as opposed to the diseases themselves.

The suffering of extreme thirst is primarily due to the body pushing us to find water, as opposed to the dehydration itself. 

The pain we associate with broken bones comes from nerve impulses, signalling the fact that it’s no longer safe to bear weight. The break itself isn’t intrinsically painful.

When there’s malaria in the body, we don’t feel the parasite itself. We feel the discomfort of the body’s reactions to the invasion and its attempts to fight it off. 

The discomfort of vomiting is caused by the violent but essential act of toxins being expelled. It’s the body’s mechanism that causes the extreme discomfort.

When we have a weak core, pain is the spine’s attempts to tell us it isn’t being supported properly. Having a weak core isn’t a painful event in itself.

Experientially, it’s symptoms that cause much of the suffering we associate with our health issues. So it is understandable that we tend to get caught up in approaching them as if they are a  problem in and of themselves. 

Our symptoms are either specific messages from the body about problems it faces. Or the unavoidable consequences of trying to deal with those problems.

Yet, at a less emotional level, we all know that symptoms like pain are the body’s way of communicating with us about ‘stuff going wrong’. 

As inhabitants of bodies, we are at the steering wheels of the most complex vehicles in the known universe. Yet, there is only a certain amount of control we have over the vehicle. Most of us can scratch our noses at will. But it’s not so easy to suppress tumours, synthesise proteins and fight viruses at will. Those are all jobs only the body knows how to perform.

So, we live in this body where we have some level of control. But there are a great many other areas where only the body has control, and other areas still where there’s an overlap between what the body can do and what we need to do to support it. In this overlapping realm, our bodies communicate to us very intentionally with symptoms. Being hungry is a good example of this. The body knows how to nourish itself, but only we can do the eating part. So, it signals us with hunger. Burn healing and prevention are similar. The body can heal cells after a burn, but only we can remove our hands from the hot stove. So, it signals us with pain. These collaborations between us and our bodies are only made possible by the language of symptoms.

The pain of a hot stove is the body highlighting the part we must play in preventing and resolving burns. While chronic pain is the body trying to communicate many far more subtle needs like a need for more movement, muscle strengthening, scar tissue to be broken up, chronic inflammation to be cleared from tissues, meniscus repair, stress management, or even a need for old emotional traumas to be processed therapeutically.

So, while pain is an unbelievably difficult symptom to navigate, it remains part of the ‘symptom language’  the body speaks when it needs us to take action. Remembering this in the background of all the inevitable days of suffering is one of the keys to finding freedom from pain in the long term. Because if we are only focused on ridding ourselves of the symptom, we are unlikely to give enough energy to resolving its underlying causes.