PAIN AND DISTRESS: THE PURE SENSATION OF PAIN
In ordinary circumstances pain hurts. Because it hurts we react to it. We therefore rarely experience pain in pure form.
I have warned you that some of these ideas are at first a little hard to accept. This idea is basic to our management of pain, so please go along with me.
You can actually prove this easily enough. Take a pin and stick it lightly into your forearm. It hurts, you screw up your face and perhaps say “Ow” under your breath. You would tell me that the painful stimulus hurts, and you react to it. This is not quite true. I do not think that there is a time sequence to these two events—the hurting and the reaction to it. I think they occur together, or the reacting may in fact precede the hurting. This is also easy to prove. Now decide to yourself that you will stick the pin in yourself again, but this time you will not in any way react to it. Make sure your face muscles are calm and easy. Now stick in the pin. Yes, you feel it. But this time there is no hurt. If we do not react to it, there is little or no hurt in the painful stimulus. At the same time we feel it. The sensation that we feel in these circumstances is some approach to pain in pure form.
It is important that we fully understand this, and know it to be true; so repeat the little experiment on yourself, and also do it to a friend.
We must conclude that pain is not an unbearable sensation, provided that we do not react to it. This is true of much more severe pain than a pinprick.
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