Neuro pain and anger - a view from the inside.

[johnpalmer]

 

What does anger feel like to you, a normal person? Well, first, let’s pause. Lots of us have played the mental game of “what if we all saw different colors, but we all agreed on their names?” So, we agree what “red” is, but we see different colors, when we look at the same picture… cool concept, right? Well, it’s true. Our color vision is biological, determined by the rod and cone cells in our eyes, and the odds are vanishingly small two people have precisely the same quantity, and same arrangement.

I want you to use that same kind of thinking, and realize we don’t actually know what anger feels like in anyone… except ourselves. I now know what anger feels like in me, but first, I had to learn a lot of what it wasn’t… because neuro pain can mimic anger. As nearly as I can tell, neurological pain can trigger emotions, including anger, spontaneously, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s still so nearly-direct that I can’t interrupt the emotions, and, after a lifetime, you’d be surprised how few I can’t interrupt. (Well, I’ve never tried to interrupt love, for example. Lust/new-partner-energy, yes, but that’s not love, it’s just a nice flavor that you often experience in love. So I can’t say I can interrupt any emotion.)

That means some children, who are told they can’t control their anger, who are being blamed for being in pain. If they control their angry actions, then, they’re not being the least bit naughty, unlike a child who is too quick to take offense, or too keen to nurse grudges.

There’s another obvious way neuro pain can lead to anger; it can cause certain emotional responses to become painful. Let’s say you’re being scolded or nagged; it might literally hurt. And you’re allowed to protect yourself from that kind of pain, but, obviously, the first protection is understanding that the pain is telling you a lie. What the other person is saying isn’t causing injury, even though it is very much causing harm. That means you’re never allowed to use force, to protect yourself from this pain. You are allowed to say “I need to have this discussion another time” (and must faithfully follow through), to protect yourself from the pain; you’re allowed to leave, to isolate yourself, however you make yourself feel safe, and, if someone refuses to let you leave, you do have the right to use minimal force to overcome improper restraint.

These two things mean that some children are treated very badly by the default assumption that, at age appropriate times, children will control their anger to age appropriate extents. Children are taught that “words can never hurt me,” but, emotional reactions can result in real, neurological pain symptoms, so, “words can never hurt me,” is a really despicable lie, to those particular children. And oftentimes, children who can’t stop scowling are shamed, as if anger was easy to switch off. Well, for most children… but for some of us, being treated poorly for being unable  to control our mood, means bullying us for things we really can’t help. Don’t get me wrong, everyone has to learn to control the actions they take as a result of emotions, most especially anger. But if you get me to stomp my foot and walk away from another young child to defuse a playground spat, you can’t dis me for the foot stomp, that was a healthy-to-me expression of frustration. Keep in mind, children, least of all, know what is a normal human emotional reaction, so sometimes you need to chase down clues about whether their experience is normal. Hopefully, with more people thinking of pain as a possibility, we’ll soon see a reduction in what we thought were childhood mood disorders (and, of course, childhood behavioral problems).

The next place where anger comes into play with pain, is, obviously, some people are said to have an anger management problem, when their problem is an inability to handle the additional challenge of managing neurological pain that can turbocharge anger. Pain relief might make their anger management trivially easy.

Due to my neuro pain, I’m constantly aware that things are taking more time, effort, and energy than they should, and sometimes, the frustration is so great, I just throw a tantrum, simply because it hurts too much to hold it in… but I only do this in isolation. Tantrums are ugly, especially in grown people, and some people just can’t handle seeing that much raw emotion. To me, that I’m expressing great frustration at, e.g., an oven means it’s harmless, but to other people, that much emotion can’t possibly be harmless, it can’t possibly be that you wouldn’t direct that at people. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a not-unreasonable precaution, but, again, I only tantrum when alone, which especially means, never at any living creature.  

The things I want to emphasize here, is, this is compassion 101, for people. If you know some people get hurt, and it triggers emotional states, you can find ways to work around those complications. If you know someone has a harder time with a task than others, you show a bit more patience, while still enforcing those boundaries that must be absolute.

But first, we have to wake up to how head dealing with lots of neuro pain are affected in ways both striking and profound, and they might need an entirely different treatment paradigm.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Discussions about colour can get interesting in this house, three people, with two different mutations that affect colour perception. Me with visual perception that goes down into the far red range, my wife a tetrachromat able to see UV and polarized light and our daughter who inherited both!

We also have a diverse spread of pain responses... me with a high threshold for pain, and my beloved who's a redhead and thus feels pain more.