I’ve been thinking about why so many people hang on to their pain.
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I’ve been thinking about why so many people hang on to their pain.
At our first therapy session, she introduced herself, told me she’d been married for twenty-five years, had two grown kids and was now divorced. She and her husband had been high-school sweethearts and her love for him had never wavered. But he slipped into a secret affair with a woman they both knew, and after just a few months announced that he was leaving to marry this new partner. She was humiliated, she said, and totally surprised that someone she loved so deeply – still loved, she kept insisting – would disrespect her, abandon her, break up their family and leave her alone in midlife with what she saw as little prospect of remarrying.
Throughout her telling, I nodded with genuine empathy at the sad details, recognizing how each new piece of the story might heighten her pain. Her suffering was clearly genuine. Then perhaps two-thirds of the way through the hour, I asked how long ago he had left her.
Eleven years ago, she answered.
I don’t remember if I gasped, but I know I said back to her, in what I’m sure was a startled tone, Eleven years? Really?
I don’t remember how the session ended except that she made an appointment for the following week. Her eyes teared up as they had in our first conversation when she once more made her way through her litany of grievances about him. Then I made what was, in retrospect, a therapeutic mistake: I pressed against this ancient pain with more pressure than this fragile woman could handle.
I said, It feels like you’re emotionally still married to him. That you haven’t let go of the pain of his leaving, even this many years later. She stared at me as if I’d crossed a boundary, spoken some unspeakable truth. I watched her eyes signal that she had left the conversation long before the hour ended.
She never came back.
I want to be clear about an important piece of this story: this woman’s pain was real, as is the suffering that ensues from quotidian slights and neglect to the worst of childhood traumas; and there is real value in putting language to our pain. But when the complaint becomes chronic, when it lingers as a way we organize our sense of self, when the rehearsal of the complaint becomes more important than what we might learn from that pain, when we spend more time nursing our injuries than healing – then we’ve created, in my vocabulary, a grievance. Grievances are those complaints that lodge in our souls.
I’ve never forgotten this woman, not only because I continue to mull over my therapeutic mistake but because, time and again, I find myself in similar conversations with clients, and with certain of our friends. They cling to their aging stories, recite their unjust treatment, describe what it feels like to be victimized, and seem nestled into their familiar pain as if they’ve made it their permanent emotional home.
Some, like the abandoned woman, stay emotionally attached to the agony created by their long-gone partners; others are middle-aged men and women whose lives are stalled because they insist they are still victims of what one or both parents did or did not do to them when they were children; some argue chronically that their early financial or social disadvantages cripple them still; certain trauma survivors continue to organize their sense of who they are around their belief that they can be nothing other than victims of their earlier suffering.
Until recently, I had two convictions as to why these people cling to their pain. First, looking back, they only know themselves as unhappy victims. Some event or series of events earlier in life carved this conviction deep into their neural pathways, and undeserved misery became their normal brain-state. What would it be like to be free of ancient suffering? What would it be like to be happy? They might poke their cautious thoughts into such ideas, only to be terrified at the prospect of a future without their ancient grievances.
Second, looking forward, if I give up my grievance I’m forced to take responsibility for myself. If I abandon my role as a victim, I’m suddenly accountable for the person I choose to be, and therefore responsible for my own misery. Rather than take on this frightening burden of responsibility, I’ll stick with my complaints and continue to blame someone else for my despair: God, my parents, my asshole former partner. This commitment to powerlessness, this learned helplessness, says not only that we were injured, but that we are incapable of doing anything about it or moving beyond that pain.
But what if the source of our continuing grievance lies beyond our chosen misery or our fear of taking responsibility for our own inner world? What if our attachment to grievance is hidden beneath our awareness?
Research into the tie between brain chemistry and perceived wrongs suggests that this wiring lies deep in our brains. Here’s how one expert - a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and co-director of Yale Collaborative for Motive Control studies - explains it:
It turns out that your brain on grievances looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring grievances (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics. This isn’t a metaphor; it’s brain biology. . . Cues such as experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice – a grievance – activate these same reward and habit regions of the brain, triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation. To be clear, the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent – an unkind word or tweet can also be very gratifying.
[POLITICO, 12/12/2020: What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump, by James Kimmel, Jr.]
The brain biology, the reward circuitry in question is driven by the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is known as the feel-good neurotransmitter. So when, seeking relief, you recite your grievances to yourself or to another person, your brain releases a PING! of dopamine and you feel better!
Think of it: YOU FEEL BETTER WHEN RECITING THE INJUSTICE THAT MAKES YOU FEEL SO BAD!
This seems revolutionary to me, and it prompts me to ask a huge range of questions. Here are a few starting-points for my reflections:
What are my own pet grievances? Some I still carry around from childhood, though decades of therapy have diminished my addiction to these. Recent political and social events have loaded me up with grievances that trigger completely irrational, habitual, and largely ineffective responses. Aging has led me to the litany of too many old people: problems with health, finances, diminishing respect from others. I’m trying to be more aware, in the moment, when I slip into feeling like a victim.
I strive to have greater patience with clients whose stories seem littered with what still seem to me ridiculous recitations of unresolved, ancient complaints. Trying to talk them out of their grievances is like trying to reason with a substance abuser about the foolishness of taking their next hit: it’s always a useless conversation. So I now want to find the empathy to stick with even the most redundant complaints, with the hope that being close to their suffering will win me the trust to help them talk themselves into a different story. I’m only moderately hopeful this will work.
I want to learn more about dopamine addiction, how it plays out in our litanies of grievance, and what if anything we can do about it. With many addictive drugs, the longer we depend upon them the more we must increase our intake of them to sustain our high. Is this true of dopamine? Do we need to more frequently express our grievances – or find new ones – to get a fresh PING! of dopamine?
What if we have a shared story of neglect, injustice or trauma? What if our complaint is a generational family or group tale that binds us together? Does this make it even more difficult for one of us to break the bondage, to give up addiction to the shared story at the risk of jeopardizing our place in the collective? What is the line between acknowledging the pain that happened in order to actually heal, and remaining locked in the group narrative?
How do we deal with the person who insists that their story has never been heard, or never been taken seriously? We’ve listened to endless recitations of their story but they insist that we’ve never heard them, or never taken seriously the suffering they’re trying to convey? It makes sense to us that if they open themselves to our alternative narrative, they may find their way out of the grip of their grievance. But what makes sense to us in nonsense to them, precisely because they live inside the vary narrative of victimhood we’re trying to evict them from. Whatever our frustrations with their convictions, we have to come to terms with the fact that, what makes perfect sense to us offers no relief for these people from their stories of suffering.
I’ve spent thousands of hours counseling people addicted to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, sex, food, exercise, money or work. I know the powerful urge to use again, and how emotionally and sometimes physically painful withdrawal can be. But until diving into how our brain chemistry might be rewarding us for holding on to our pain, it never dawned on me that people can get positive doses of the feel-good brain chemical by habitually complaining, feeling victimized, or focusing on their heart-felt grievances. Not surprisingly, this PING!, this pleasurable brain-rush, may be as difficult to give up as any other addiction – especially because the brain is releasing these chemicals in anticipation of relief that never actually comes, driving the cycle to continue.
Admittedly, the science here is in very early stages; we need to learn much more if we are to understand why so many of us keep such a tight grip on our pain.
That's what I've been thinking - what pain are you holding onto?
Blessings,
– Rick