Pain might be definable, but still hard to describe or even understand. Physical pain, is a sensation of some kind, your senses or nerve endings jar your body and tell you that something is not right, or something is different. When you hit your funny bone, a shiver of electric pain travels up your arm, maybe all the way to your brain. I’m no expert, but it feels like it rattles your brain a bit and you can even feel it in your eyeballs.
What kind of pain is that? I don’t know how to describe it. But I feel safe in calling it pain.
Now it’s a physical pain. And in the scale of physical pain, not that high on the scale I would say. There are deeper, more traumatic pains that would make us crumble to the ground and pass out that are higher on the pain scale. We’ve probably all experienced serious pain.
I like the word sensation in my attempts to define pain. Two reasons for this. One is that your body is talking to you and asking you to investigate the pain and the source of the pain. That’s a pretty useful mechanism for body repair and maintenance. Brand and Yancey wrote a book about the usefulness of pain, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, and it was kind of novel to our thinking back then, in the 80’s I believe. Lepers have lost the ability to feel pain in their extremities, consequently pain that is not sensed has a chance to do more damage and go undetected at early stages. So they lose digits and endure infections and worse in the absence of the sensation of pain.
So pain itself has a purpose. We might not feel good about it, but imagine how much worse it could be if we had no way to sense or detect pain. If your hand is in a very hot place, burning taking place and the damage is done by the time you smell your flesh burning.
So the word sensation seems like a good place to start talking about pain. Something is sensed that is not right, not in its right place, not performing rightly. It’s an unwelcome intrusion, but an important and necessary one.
Another reason that I like the word sensation is that we can use our senses to tell us that something is not right with other types of pain. How do you tell if someone is experiencing pain in regard to finances? Or family dysfunction? In future posts, we’ll explore these pains and their ability to be sensed.
You use your senses, and then some extra senses that we might not think of.
It might help to add another word to our lexicon of pain. Distress. Sometimes I find that these two words are interchangeable, distress and pain.
Next post will start describing these other pains, or what we might label psychosocial pains.