One of the things I got told a lot when I was growing up was that I wasn't "well-adjusted." What this usually meant, in retrospect, was that I didn't tolerate pain well. Not physical pain--that I was pretty good at. But emotional pain. When things caused me to feel pain, I tended to lash out, as kids do. One of the fascinating things about children is how they choose to push out pain. Obviously, whatever they are feeling is too much to hold in their tiny bodies. The same situation can cause six kids to emote six different ways. When a kid feels like she isn't being listened to or understood, she may cry. Some might scream. Some might get angry. Me? I was one of the ones who would get angry. My body would tense up and I'd tremble. Usually, I'd want to fight someone.
Thinking back on it, I wanted senseless pain to mean something. I think part of me knew I was "overreacting" and that my bodily reaction to not being heard or listened to was ridiculous. Anger, for me, was a way to make it meaningful. Take that energy and transfer it into something useful--at least in the mind of an 8-year-old--fighting seemed useful. At least it tended to be more useful than sitting on the floor screaming waiting for an adult to fix things. Or crying, trying to manipulate someone into doing something for you. Anger for me was a way of doing something for myself. I could fight you to get what I want. But really, getting angry isn't much different than crying or screaming. All of them are ways to externalize inner discomfort. To make other people realize that you're unhappy or unsettled and you want them to fix it.
Adults wanted you to be able to calm yourself down through emotional self-regulation. Your emotions--because you couldn't contain them--were inconvenient so they wanted you to learn to contain them more than they wanted you to have mastery over them. But there's a difference between self-regulation and self-awareness. Kids figure out how to calm themselves down, but they don't learn why they get upset in the first place. Or why being left out causes so much pain. Or why being misunderstood elicits the same response as scraping your knees. So kids become "well-adjusted" because they learn to distract themselves from pain. Or avoiding it. Or externalizing it in less inconvenient ways. I was one of those kids who learned to calm myself down by internalizing the pain. "I'm in this shitty situation because I must be a bad kid." Or, "I'm feeling left out because I'm not a good kid." (Spoiler alert: this becomes full-blown depression. And yes, even kids can get full-blown depression.)
The problem is very few of us ever learned how to actually sit with pain. To recognize it as something that we will experience over and over again in life and not run away from it when it happens. The idea of sitting with pain is terrifying. We never teach our kids how to live with pain. We try to guide them towards a life we think will minimize pain.
Which is impossible.
What a mistake to teach kids that pain prevention is the only way to deal with pain.
As a child, you fear pain more than anything. It's the literal boogie monster of life. You develop weird ideas about life and who you are that you believe will help you avoid ever experiencing pain again. You cut up the world into categories, people and situations you think causes you pain. You develop storylines like, "When I try____, I get hurt." "People like that do _____ to me." "I'm no good at ____." "I need ____ to be happy." This becomes really important as you move through your teens and twenties as your sense of self becomes wrapped around these ideas. Many, many people orchestrate their entire lives around ideas like these. They become fixed points in our personal narratives. They may not be true, but we give them a lot of power. We let them dictate who we like, who we don't like, what we do with our lives, what we say we're no good at. These thoughts get very solid, very quickly. They become our personal religion.
What's fascinating is that even having ideas like these is a source of pain. I know from watching kids, if they think for a moment that they'll be teased, they go on auto-pilot--maybe they cry, maybe they lash out, maybe they scream. Some of them even start developing panic attacks. The idea of being teased (whether or not it even happens) is enough to set off the pain response. It's the story they tell themselves that pulls the trigger, not the actual situation.
That's interesting, isn't it?
The thing is as you get older and gain control over more of your life, you start insulating yourself from the things you think will cause you suffering. You cut up the world into greater chunks and avoid bigger pieces of it. You become less practiced in dealing with day-to-day discomfort because you get better and better at avoiding pain, or at least you tell yourself that's what the good life is--the absence of discomfort. But then maybe you get lonely. Maybe your partner leaves you. Maybe your mother gets ill. Maybe you get into an accident. Suddenly, your storylines don't make any sense. You worked so hard to adjust to the world and avoid pain, and now nothing makes sense.
Did you ever really become "well-adjusted" to pain? Or did you just figure out new and interesting cognitive workarounds to avoid it?
Maybe it's shutting down and withdrawing when you're confronted with emotion. Maybe it's overeating. Maybe it's drug addiction or drinking. Maybe it's spending a few hours on ESPN.com. And some of them might not seem so bad: maybe it's going for a run, maybe it's hitting the punching bag, cleaning the house meticulously. But the point is, you're not really confronting the problem. You're evading it. You'll do anything to avoid sitting with the awkward feeling of emptiness or isolation or hurt or offense. You feel a twinge of loneliness and you pick up the phone and an hour goes by. You don't understand the loneliness, buy you're great at running from it.
We were told by a lot of people growing up that if you were a good boy or girl, you'd never feel bad feelings. You'd always have friends so you'd never be lonely. If you ate well and exercised, you'd never get sick. If you were well-adjusted, you'd never feel angry or resentful or discontent with your job. But none of these were true--our parents just wanted them to be true for us. They thought if they wished really hard, we'd be free of pain, so we never learned to deal with pain. We lived in delusion, no matter how optimistic and well-intentioned.
A lot of meditation is sitting with discomfort. It's getting to know feelings and emotions you've spent a lifetime running away from. Pema Chödrön describes sitting with pain as follows: "We could think of this whole process in terms of four R’s: recognizing the shenpa,refraining from scratching, relaxing into the underlying urge to scratch and then resolvingto continue to interrupt our habitual patterns like this for the rest of our lives. What do you do when you don’t do the habitual thing? You’re left with your urge. That’s how you become more in touch with the craving and the wanting to move away. You learn to relax with it. Then you resolve to keep practicing this way."
When you know pain, it doesn't control you. Emotions come in and out like waves when you recognize them, when you can recognize them. When you lose the storylines you attach to your emotions, they grow even weaker, not fueled by the undertow of a narrative. But until you get to to know pain, you will keep relying on the habits you've built up to avoid it or deal with it. Picking up the cellphone. Binge-eating through a box of cookies. Harboring resentment for a co-worker. Picking a fight with your partner. Ruminating on how bad of a person you are. These are cycles you can end.
This is why we need to think about what it means to be "well-adjusted." Well-adjusted to what, exactly? The world changes constantly and every day brings a fresh hell. You can't adjust to it. But you can learn to embrace change. You can learn how to accept and sit with pain when it happens. Doing so, you become a lot less afraid of it. You run from it less. You orchestrate less of your life around avoiding pain and more of it around embracing each moment that comes. It won't bring you bliss, but it does bring you freedom from habitual evasion.
