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Article 5
February 25, 1987

Pain and Repression

No discussion of human potential would be complete without addressing the question of pain. Unless we are able to understand and handle pain, all our efforts to gain positive abilities and states of being will fail. Besides, as we shall see, pain has a lot to do with unconsciousness, so if we are after more awareness, we will have to confront the issue of pain head-on.

"Pain", as we use the term, does not just mean a physical sensation. Under varying circumstances, certain sensations can be felt as painful or not -- sometimes as intensely pleasurable. For instance, in a state of sexual or religious ecstasy, physical sensations normally thought of as painful can even enhance the ecstasy. For most women, the sensations of childbirth are intensely painful, but some women assert that they can be intensely pleasurable. Exercise is painful for some and pleasurable for others. Heroin addicts undergoing withdrawal may gain exquisite pleasure from pricking themselves with needles.

What appears to convert a mere sensation or perception into pain is one's unwillingness to experience it. Pain is undesirable by definition. If an experience is tolerable or pleasant, it is not painful. For instance, most people are unwilling to experience injury to their bodies. Childbirth is felt as painful if one views it as the injury, through stretching and rending of tissues, of one's body. On the other hand, when it is truly viewed as a natural, non-injurious process, the sensations associated with it can be viewed merely as extreme sensations or (reportedly) can be felt as ecstatic.

Pain, in other words, is basically intolerance of experience; it exists in the flinch, not in what is being flinched from. If there were no flinch, there would be no pain, in the full sense of the word. But a flinch is simply an aversion, so we can venture the following definition of pain:

Pain is the presence of something to which a being has aversion.

However, in order to make sense of this statement and reconcile the different ways in which we use the word "pain", we must recognize that there appear to be two different types of pain. Some pains appear to be "built-in". These are uncomfortable bodily sensations, that under normal circumstances cannot be readily confronted without having a relatively strong intention to do so. Others appear to be "situational", though they may be no less intense in some circumstances. These are the discomforts associated with various situations a being encounters in life -- discomforts connected with misdeeds, dangerous secrets, boredom, and so forth. Situational pain is based on the intolerability of experiences other than the sensation of physical pain or discomfort.

For "built-in" pain, the aversion is often caused by an intolerance of too high an intensity of sensory input, an intensity that threatens to damage sensory organs or to overwhelm the being with its intensity, such as very bright light, loud sounds, strong smells. Often, too, it is caused by certain types of sensory input, such as nausea, certain odors, the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, the feeling of a full bladder or rectum, the feeling of hunger (apart from actual hunger pains), or the sensation of "physical pain" in its various forms (aches, burning sensations, sharp sensations, and the like). These "built-in" aversions appear to be inherited genetically as part of our bodily identity. They are clearly conducive to organismic survival. A person with leprosy, for instance, does not lose extremities because of the disease. He loses them because of the loss of sensation in these extremities, which therefore do not warn him when a physical injury has taken place. Infections may go unnoticed until it is too late to save the extremity. The physical pain associated with appendicitis can be life-saving, in that it gives warning before a fatal rupture and massive infection can occur. There are rare individuals who are not able to feel the sensation of physical pain; they must be very careful throughout their lives to avoid injuries, and they must be educated to survey their extremities regularly to make sure they have not acquired an injury or infection without noticing it. In young children and unreasoning animals, physical pain also aids survival by causing an aversion to things that are physically damaging to the organism. A dog scratched by a raccoon will (rightly) avoid raccoons in the future. So physical pain does have real usefulness.

But painful sensations are also often counter-productive for a reasoning being. Once the warning function has been served, it would be better for the being not to have to continue to flinch from the sensation of physical pain so that he can take effective action without being distracted or constrained by a need to flinch. As long as a being is more or less fixed in a bodily identity, however, he cannot nullify physical flinches entirely. The ability to experience physical pain without flinching is perhaps only possessed by rare individuals -- sages who have completely disentangled themselves from their self-identification with the body. The rest of us continue to have these built-in physical aversions, and the best way to handle them is to stay healthy and avoid injury.

Pain and unconsciousness are closely related, in that a flinch, or an aversion, is an "averting" of one's attention, a lowering of awareness, a turning away from something. So pain and unconsciousness are actually two sides of the same coin. In order to clarify this point, we should mention that there are, in fact, two kinds of unconsciousness or unawareness:

1. Simple unawareness
2. Directed unawareness

The other form of unawareness -- directed unawareness -- is unawareness based on aversion, or a flinch from pain. It is unconsciousness of a specific concept or phenomenon, and it is brought about by the presence of that phenomenon or by the presence of a related (similar) concept or phenomenon. While simple unawareness is caused by turning towards something else, directed unawareness is caused by pointedly turning away from the thing of which one is unconscious. There is a more or less automatic paradox associated with directed unawareness, because the being has to be aware of something first in order to have unawareness directed towards it! In a certain sense, you have to know or suspect, at some level, that something is present in order to know that you must turn off your awareness of it. You have to know that something is there in order to know where not to look. It is rather like trying not to think of a pink elephant. It is this kind of unawareness that can be detrimental to a being's achievement of the kind of world he wants to have. We will refer to directed unawareness, following Freud, as "repression".

In order to help a person become more aware of a fact or situation that the being has repressed, the being's aversion to the various underlying truths in the area must be handled. Aversion or pain can be regarded as a transition stage from consciousness of something to a directed unconsciousness or repression of that thing. It is a transition, because one is still (while the pain exists) in contact with the thing, and one still has a choice of whether to move towards it or to back off. Pain or flinching is an attempt or intention to reject, or separate from, a fact, activity, or identity. It should be noted that repressing something is not the only way of getting away from that to which a being has an aversion. He can also run away, hide, throw away (or throw out) the hated object or person, or get it or him out of his space in a variety of ways. These are the physical equivalents of the process of repression, which is just a mental attempt to throw away something that is unwanted.

The process of running away from an object, activity, or identity (mentally or physically) should not be confused with the process of deciding or choosing one activity or identity over another, or of choosing one concept over another as factual in a given situation. A being can make a choice of activity or identity for reasons other than an overwhelming aversion. In the case of deciding what is true or what exists, before that choice or decision is made, no truth yet exists, to which the being could have an aversion, and there is no contradiction involved in deciding that a certain one of a group of possible truths is true, or in deciding to have a certain kind of experience instead of other kinds of experience. A person is always making choices about what to do, what to have, and what to be, and there is nothing wrong or disabling about that. For instance, if a person chooses to read a book, that does not mean that he is aberrated because he isn't going to a movie, dancing, flying a plane, etc., or that he has an aversion to these activities.

In contradistinction to this scene is the scene where the being has accepted the factuality of something and is now trying to get rid of it mentally without "unmaking" the decision that it exists or doing something to handle it. If you reject something hard enough, mentally, you are no longer aware of it, but it's still there, and you may well find yourself running into it later. In other words, the problem with a being's attempt to throw away facts by repression is that no one ever empties the garbage! It just piles up, and in being there, it uses the being's personal resources or vitality. If you shove garbage under the beds, it may disappear, but you might start smelling it after awhile, and you might wonder what it was that you were smelling. Or you might move the bed, and suddenly -- there's the garbage! The force of one's unchanged agreement on the existence of something that's rejected or repressed (rather than just actually removed or destroyed or no longer agreed upon) causes it to continue to exist and continue to affect you, apparently without your consent.

In the mental realm, aversion or rejection is a refusal to be aware of something. One manifestation of mental aversion is forgetting. Repression is the mental equivalent of losing something or throwing something under the carpet. Like physical garbage, mental garbage may eventually have an untoward effect on a being. You can never get rid of something you can't or won't admit is there. The only way to get rid of it is to overcome your aversion for it, become fully aware of it, and accept it, at which point you can understand it. At the point of understanding it, you also stand at the point of knowing that you have accepted it as true. At this point, you can choose consciously to change your opinion to conform better with your observations. Or, recognizing that it exists, you can do something constructive about it, Then, like a problem that has been solved, it will be gone. If a person has a particularly difficult math assignment to do and is repressing the fact that he has that assignment, so long as he continues to repress that fact, the assignment remains undone and continues to bother the person, at least on a subliminal level. When the person confronts the fact that the assignment exists, accepts the existence of the assignment, then he can either decide that the assignment is not important, or he can work on the assignment (getting help, if needed) until it is completed, at which point, the problem of having an undone assignment no longer exists. We are probably all familiar with the relief of having done our homework or completed some other onerous task. This is the type of feeling one gets from getting rid of mental garbage. Since there is no other garbage collector for repressed items, a being has to burn all his own garbage in the fire of his perception, acceptance, understanding, and constructive action. If he does that, he will find that the vitality that was tied up in the garbage will be reclaimed for more useful purposes.

What happens when a being represses a fact is that he starts to become aware of it, but this process of receiving knowledge is interrupted part way through. This is called an incomplete receptive process. Any part of the process of becoming aware may be affected: perception, interpretation of what one perceives, verification of one's interpretation, or acceptance of what one has verified. The net result is that the being doesn't learn (remains unaware of) the thing that he would learn if the process were completed. For instance, the being starts to perceive something and then flinches from the perception, leaving the process of perception incomplete. A person who can't stand the sight of blood but is required to watch a surgical operation will try not to see what he is looking at, or may even go completely unconscious to avoid the perception. In other words, he may faint. The classic Victorian "vapors" is another instance of using physical unconsciousness as a way of avoiding perception of something unwanted. But a person doesn't have to become completely unconscious. More often, he just "dims down" his ability to perceive to a degree. People have "the vapors" all the time without actually being so dramatic about it as to keel over. They may just "space out".

Or, the being may perceive something but refuse to try to interpret it or to think about it. He refuses to make the "obvious" interpretation, the interpretation he would make in the absence of aversion and repression. For instance, a parent who dotes on his son, who feels that his son can "do no wrong", may see the boy staggering in the door late at night with smelly breath and fail to make the interpretation that the boy is drunk. A woman may notice that her husband's shirt has lipstick marks on it and smells of perfume and fail to wonder whether her husband has been with another woman, because the thought is too unconfrontable for her.

Next, the person may have in mind various possible interpretations but may refuse to verify (or falsify) any of them. The wife knows her husband might have a lover, but doesn't want to find out whether it's true or not, so she doesn't take any steps to check up on him.

Finally, a being may have a correct interpretation and may start to accept it as factual, and then interrupt this process partway through, thus resulting in a failure to accept something he "knows" is true. This receptive disability can take the form of saying that the "correct" interpretation is false. This eventuality is known, in psychiatric parlance, as "denial". A wife may look at the lipstick stains and say, "From looking at Joe's shirt, you might think that he's been stepping out on me, but that can't be true," or the doting Dad might say, "My son looks like he's drunk, but he's not the type." Alternatively, the being may resort to indecision. The being says, "I just don't know whether it's true or not," and leaves it at that. This simply procrastinates the decision that could end the receptive process.

In the case of an interrupted perception, interpretation, verification, or acceptance, the being may (as in the above examples) simply have no perception, interpretation, verification or acceptance at all, or there may be an altered (or substituted) interpretation or acceptance, backed up, perhaps, by a fallacious "verification", as a way of derailing the receptive process. For instance, the wife may interpret the lipstick stains and sweet smell on her husband's shirt as indicative of the fact that a small child must have been playing with lipstick and perfume, or the doting father may have interpreted his son's staggering and bad breath as indicative of tiredness or illness.

Often, a combination of denial or uncertainty and misinterpretation or misverification occurs. "It looks as though he's been stepping out on me, but it must be just a child playing with lipstick," or "He looks drunk, but he must be tired or sick." This is called "rationalization". Likewise, when a being is uncertain, he may feel himself unable to choose amongst two or more interpretations, one of which is the "correct" one: "It might just be a child playing with lipstick, or he might be stepping out on me. I just don't know". "He might be drunk, or he might be tired, or he might be sick. I can't decide." It is, of course, OK not to decide something if you don't have enough data. But the sign that a failure to decide is a form of repression is that the indecisive person doesn't take any effective steps to resolve the indecision, yet continues to worry about it.

So material can simply be repressed ("forgotten"), or an alteration or contrary assertion can be introduced to aid the process of repression. In this way, a being can acquire delusions:

A delusion is a falsehood introduced in the act of repression in order to hide the repressed material.

If we are able to raise the level of awareness, we can peel off these layers of falsehood and arrive at the relative truth that underlies each layer of falsehood. Each layer is "truer" or more "fundamental", as we move towards the first decision. The third is truer than the fourth, the second is truer than the third, and the first is truest of all. A person increasing in awareness in a certain area will have a series of new realizations or "cognitions":

A cognition (verb: cognize) is a realization, an acquisition of knowledge.
An insight is a cognition of an underlying truth.

For instance, let us say person A starts out thinking that person B is a good person. If A commits a misdeed against B, however, such as doing something to injure B's reputation, A may find it hard or impossible to confront the fact that he has harmed an innocent person, one that he likes. So he represses the fact that B is a good person and decides that B is obnoxious. Then he feels his action was justified. Suppose, though, that B goes around with a crowd that disapproves of having negative thoughts about others. Then A might not be able to confront the "fact" that B is obnoxious, because he faces possible social disapproval for having that opinion. So he represses that concept and decides that B is "really OK". Here, we see the following lineup of ideas or decisions that A has about B:

1. B is a good person.
2. B is obnoxious.
3. B is really OK.

1. B is a good person
2. B is obnoxious.
3. B is really OK
4. B is looking out for Number One.

In order to help a person become more aware of a fact or situation that the being has repressed, the being's aversion to the various underlying truths in the area, i.e. the pain in the area, must be handled. It does little good to adopt a strategy of trying to find underlying truths if the reason for the introduction of falsehood remains unhandled, because that reason will then be a reason for resisting the method you are using for increasing awareness. The being must be brought to the point of being able to confront the painful area sufficiently to perceive the truth in the area. Then insight will come spontaneously. Otherwise, it is likely that more layers of delusion will be introduced. The way in which we can use metapsychological principles to help the being to confront his pain and to acquire insight and ability is called "viewing".
 

Frank A. Gerbode, M.D.
Director, IRM