The Wounded Animal in a Fallen World

Helpless, Overwhelmed, Burdened

Sometimes I forget completely 
what companionship is.
Unconscious and insane, I spill

Sad energy everywhere.  Rumi

 

Pain is vulnerability, and pained mammals are designed to go to one another to find comfort. When that’s prevented—or the other is the DANGER—the state of overwhelm triggers our nervous system into action. If the neuro-gravitational pull (Panksepp’s phrase) is toward RAGE, we prepare to fight.

If FEAR circuits get switched on, we prepare to flee.

In the energy of PANIC, we can be immobilized.

When we’re unable to escape, by mammalian design we may collapse into the electrical storm, submitting to those who are larger, fawning at the threatening one. But humans are somewhat unique. Whereas an antelope will be flooded with PANIC when chased by a tiger, it quickly settles when it escapes or when it’s no longer being hunted. Humans on the other hand can keep pumping adrenalin and cortisol just by thinking about danger. And the dangers that trigger us are often less about being literally dismembered and devoured (though that happens too), more about failing at something, being ridiculed. or being in some circumstance that confirms our worst fears about our inadequacies.

Why this painting?

Hyper-vigilance and the fear of Pain can stay with us—living like a monster in us, unpredictable, seeming to erupt out of our bodies. Reminded of some acute wounding event, Pain can suddenly activate, spiraling us into a black hole in our nervous system—bending, warping, altering our perception. Or Pain may more slowly arrive on our psychic stage reminding us of an emotionally grueling danger, priming us to see threats duplicating around us. And we can grow so tired of this emotional overdrive in our physiology, the same adaptation over and over—fight or flight or submit—the same pattern leading to the same results, we see ourselves as the definition of insanity.

When Pain is warmed up, it will eventually, it must, show up in our Heart-dramas, inhabit a character or several, provided our stage is safe and accepting enough and we give it the time it needs. Pain desperately wants to take a chance, craves to have a voice, and express what has been held for so long. It seeks to be heard, understood, and soothed.

Inside Out:

Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and mess is an expression of soul. James Hillman, The Soul’s Code.

When Pain does enter the spotlight of our awareness, it may be labeled as an Outcast or helpless or have a childhood nickname. It may be painted in our art as a basin where distress ferments, or more explicitly as a sewage system, or as vast as a lake of agony while we only have a drinking glass to empty it with. It may be role played as a terrorized child, a defiant teen with sadness hidden, a beaten dog. Pain could be stuck in a room or in a box or placed under a large scarf or drop cloth or may just be a disembodied voice backstage.

If it feels safe enough to speak, our Pain reveals something like the following:

• The past still appears to be present and darkens the future.

• The body is hypervigilant and easily triggered or shuts down.

• The emotional system is overwhelmed by memories that are vivid and hold specific sensations/images. Or the past is not accessible at all, and Pain lives in a strange nowhere.

• Pain presents a posture that conveys that it is beaten down or erased from life.

• Pain wants to be loved most of all.

Upside-down:

In our social world, Pain is often not invited. In the face of Pain, other energies (the Abnormal and what I will call the Self-Deceptive) become distracting, defensive, blacker, or whiter, lacking flexibility. In our traumatized society we have been taught to avoid the necessary difficult conversations, so part of us may show up nervously like chatty relatives at a hospice bedside. Since much of our deep Pain derives from traumatic history, from multigenerational terror, we have been warned to hold these wounds secretively, never to reveal them even in our most vulnerable moments. Politicians derisively call talk of Pain as “woke nonsense.” Forget about it!

Pain is what the Abnormal (Upside-down and mirrored as a character in our external world) describes as the “problem.” Or maybe as the “weakness.” Or it refers to Pain as an adornment that lesser people might wear on their sleeve, but Pain isn’t something that they would be comfortable displaying. It doesn’t “fit them.” All Abnormal characters are uneasy with personifications of Pain and commonly bring out all the weapons to enforce silence.

Be careful where you expose your Pain. Don’t kid yourself. There are those who wish to restrain you. Even when safe in the arms of another, give yourself the time you need to feel safe. Even when your Heart knows you are safe, it always takes a while to shake loose societies’ stranglehold and go deeper.