There’s been a longstanding joke between my sister and I about the word “pain”. We have been each other’s support system through some significant changes in our lives. We’ve also been able to commiserate and be each other’s therapist as we’ve had some tough shared experiences growing up. Our joke remains that there is “pain” and then there is “payne with a y”. To us, the “Y” denotes a much more intense and serious level of a situation. Although we often have used humor over the years to make sense of some of our challenges, this ongoing reference linked nicely to something I read a few weeks ago.

As a registered nurse, I have a keen interest in health and healing-how the body works and why certain things have the effect that they do. Combined with my life experiences (which have included some pretty shitty moments), I have honed in more on how being human and living through our experiences impacts our health and healing processes. It’s not anything scholarly or professional-just my own desire to read, discuss and apply to my own life in order to make sense of things. In doing so, I will often run across a piece of information that really stops me in my tracks. Recently, this was a statement about pain. It was a blurb about how the physical body can undergo “trauma”-surgeries, physical blows, cuts, scrapes and a whole host of other illnesses, diseases and so on. Yet very rarely do we attach meaning to these incidents and let them live in our minds the way we do with emotional pain.

You could go skiing and break a bone as the result of an accident. You go through the process of having intervention (surgery/cast etc.). Although you may have some lasting effects, generally you don’t allow that situation to run through your mind taking up valuable space. You normally wouldn’t replay the events leading up to it, after it or attach any further meaning emotionally to it other than to describe it for what it is.

So why do we do this for emotional situations that create pain? Why do we get so hooked into the “why” or the “Y”? Events that cause a “feelings” reaction not only will often create physical sensations, but will also link into our emotions and our thoughts and consume a great deal of energy. We will think about them, dissect them, try to interpret them, discuss them and ruminate on them for far longer than the situation actually existed for. In doing so, we will often re-create some sense of that same pain again-or even create a new angst as we try to figure out what happened.

I can attest to this wholeheartedly. I can barely remember what it felt like to be pregnant (3 times). To have 3 major operations to have these children removed from body. What the pain felt like afterwards. I would have to make a concerted effort to remember how I felt when I got hit in the head with a baseball, to have my gallbladder removed or when I fell downstairs holding my first child.

But ask me where I was sitting when my mother told me that my grandmother died. Or what the floor looked like when someone was breaking up with me. Or the name of the girl that teased me when I had to start wearing glasses. Those moments are locked in and ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice. These are the “payne” moments. The moments where there’s not only the initial blow, but then the “why/Y” follows. And it’s the “why” that catches us. And it’s the “why” that can be the rabbit hole-the quest for the answer that will never come.

It’s quite incredible to think that our bodies withstand being cut open and we generally just heal from it and move on. Yet our emotional body takes a hit and it can roll around inside of us for the rest of our lives. The process of how the mind and soul picks and chooses what sticks and what doesn’t is fascinating-and maybe even a little scary as patching up the soul looks so much different than fixing our physical beings.

The similarity is the scars that often remain. Physically and emotionally. I think it would force us all to look at each other so much differently if we could reveal our soul scars the way we can on our body. I think we would be in awe of each other and how we are all held together by something much greater than our physical case that we present to the world.

The drawings on my blog are by my 14 year old daughter. She sees the world in a way that puts creativity to the words I write.