Psychological Pain: What It Is And What Is Done In Therapy To Overcome It
psychological pain It is a concept that is sometimes used to refer to people who are going through bad times and who require professional help in therapy.
In this article we will see what this form of discomfort consists of and what measures mental health professionals take to treat patients who experience it.
As its name indicates, psychological pain is a type of discomfort, discomfort or suffering in general that does not have a physical cause, that is, it It is not born in the stimuli captured by the nerves that send signals from our body to our brain..
Thus, it is an unpleasant experience of a diffuse nature, which we cannot attribute to specific parts of the body, and which we usually attribute to what happens not in the nerve cells that detect organic failures in our tissues or organs, but to what It takes place in our mind.
This means, among other things, that it is very difficult to know what the origin of psychological pain is, because we are not able to know, even by approximation, the area in which what we must act on to “heal” is located.
In fact, even the idea of needing a cure for that type of discomfort seems questionable: Is medical intervention really what would solve the problem? In reality, there are no reasons to take this idea as true: even the therapeutic resources provided by psychiatry in these cases tend to be, with luck, a help to cope with the experience for a time, although exposing us to side effects and without fully putting definitively put an end to that discomfort.
Thus, although psychological pain usually has objective implications that go beyond what happens in our consciousness and in our subjectivity (for example, if it is very intense it is associated with a greater risk of falling into suicide attempts or developing of addictions to “relieve themselves” by generating an additional problem), those who suffer it themselves have no choice but to admit that they do not fully understand what is happening to them, and that they can only locate the origin of the discomfort not in something physical, but in your conscience.
Nonetheless, There are aspects in which psychological pain and physical pain overlap in the same experience.. For example, anxiety, when it occurs at very intense levels, usually comes hand in hand with digestion problems, general discomfort in the muscles and joints due to muscle tension, a greater propensity to suffer from headaches, head or even migraines (in the case of those who usually suffer from them).
This is not strange in itself nor does it constitute a scientific mystery; It is a reminder that the division between mind and body is basically a social construct that we use to be able to better understand the complexity of the human experience; In reality, both elements are part of the same reality, and are only clearly differentiated in a superficial sense, in the world of language and metaphors used to describe the mind.
Difference from chronic pain
Chronic pain has in common with psychological pain that in this case its presence does not indicate that there is an organic problem in a place where there are nociceptors (cells that trigger the sensation of pain when detecting injuries in certain tissues of the body).
However, In the case of psychological pain, there is no doubt that the problem has nothing to do with injuries, inflammations or burns.but with abstract psychological processes that have to do with the way in which we interpret what happens to us and what we can do.
Thus, people who suffer psychological pain do not experience discomfort in the section of nervous processing that goes from the senses to the brain, but in the entire perception-action-perception cycle itself, that is, in the entire circle of life experience: what we think is happening to us and what we think we can do about it.
This is a problem not so much physiological as philosophical (without the need for us to be important philosophers to suffer from it, of course).
What is done in therapy for psychological pain?
As we have seen, psychological pain is a very complex phenomenon. This makes it difficult to define it even from scientific sources, although in general it has been possible to establish a series of common elements that cases of psychological pain present and that allow it to be distinguished from the different types of nociception.
Given this, psychotherapy is presented as the set of procedures that, carried out by psychology experts, can help overcome or alleviate that discomfort. The key is to act on both sides of the perception-action cycle: both in the way of interpreting reality and analyzing what happens to us based on certain beliefs, and in the generation of habits of interaction with the environment and with others.
In this process, psychologists take into account that mental processes are also, deep down, actions, part of our behavior. After an experience of psychological pain, several behavioral patterns are grouped which sometimes take the form of anxiety, sometimes depression, sometimes frustration or impulses that are difficult to repress, etc.
Be that as it may, in therapy we see what patterns of behavior are feeding and reinforcing those mental operations and those behaviors observable from the outside and that keep the discomfort alive, to modify these elements and replace them with others.
Are you looking for psychological support?
If you feel psychologically bad and notice that you need professional help, I suggest that you contact me to attend therapy. I am a psychologist specialized in anxious and/or depressive problems, as well as addictions and poor impulse control, and I base my work on the cognitive-behavioral model and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I attend in-person sessions (in Almería) or online, and if you want to know more about how I work, you can visit this page.
