Psychological pain: what is it and what is done in therapy to overcome it

Psychological pain It is a concept that is sometimes used to refer to people who are going through bad times and who require professional help in therapy.

In this article we will see what this form of discomfort consists of and what measures we mental health professionals take to treat patients who experience it.

• Related article: "The 16 most common mental disorders"

What is psychological pain?

As its name suggests, psychological pain is a type of discomfort, discomfort or suffering in general that does not have a physical cause, that is, it it is not born in the stimuli captured by the nerves that send signals from our body to our brain.

Thus, it is an unpleasant experience of a diffuse nature, which we cannot attribute to specific parts of the body, and which we usually attribute to what happens not in the nerve cells that pick up organic failures in our tissues or organs, but to what takes place in our mind.

This means, among other things, that it is very difficult to know what is the origin of psychological pain, because we are capable of knowing even by approximation the area in which is what we must act to "heal".

In fact, even the idea of ​​needing a cure for this type of discomfort seems questionable: Would a medical intervention really solve the problem? In reality, there is no reason to take this idea for granted: even the therapeutic resources provided by psychiatry in these cases are usually, hopefully, an aid to cope with the experience for a time, although exposing ourselves to side effects and without finishing definitively putting an end to that discomfort.

Thus, although psychological pain usually has objective implications that go beyond what happens in our consciousness and in our subjectivity (for example, if it is very intense is associated with a greater risk of falling into suicide attempts or the development of addictions to “relieve oneself” generating an additional problem), who suffers it in the own flesh has no choice but to admit that he does not fully understand what is happening to him, and that he can only locate the origin of the discomfort not in something physical, but in his consciousness.

Nonetheless, there are aspects in which psychological pain and physical pain overlap in the same experience. For example, anxiety, when it occurs in very intense levels, usually comes hand in hand with digestion problems, general discomfort in the muscles and the joints due to the tension of the muscles, the greater propensity to suffer headaches or even migraines (in the case of those who use them suffer).

This is not in itself strange, nor is it a scientific mystery; it is a reminder that the division between mind and body is basically a social construct that we use to be able to better understand the complexity of the human experience; in reality, both elements are part of the same reality, and they are only clearly found differentiated in a superficial sense, in the world of language and metaphors used to describe the mind.

Difference from chronic pain

Chronic pain has in common with psychological pain that in this case its presence does not indicate that there is an organic problem in a place where there are nociceptors (cells that trigger the sensation of pain by detecting lesions in certain tissues of the Body).

However, in the case of psychological pain there is no doubt that the problem has nothing to do with injuries, inflammations or burns, but with abstract psychological processes that have to do with the way in which we interpret what happens to us and what we can do.

Thus, people who suffer psychological pain do not experience discomfort in the nervous processing section that goes from the senses to the brain, but in the entire perception-action-perception cycle itself, that is, in the entire circle of experience vital: what we think happens to us and what we think we can do about it.

It is a not so physiological problem as it is a philosophical one (without having to be important philosophers to get to suffer from it, of course).

• You may be interested in: "Chronic pain: what it is and how it is treated from Psychology"

What is done in therapy for psychological pain?

As we have seen, psychological pain is a very complex phenomenon. This makes it difficult to define it even from scientific instances, although in general it has been possible to establish a series of common elements that present cases of psychological pain and that allow distinguishing it from the different types of nociception.

Given this, psychotherapy is considered as the set of procedures that, carried out by psychology experts, it can help overcome or alleviate that discomfort. The key is to act on both sides of the perception-action cycle: both in the way of interpreting reality and analyzing what happens to us based on certain beliefs, as well as in the generation of habits of interaction with the environment and with others.

In this process, psychologists take into account that mental processes are also, deep down, actions, part of our behavior. After an experience of psychological pain, several patterns of behavior are grouped which sometimes take the form of anxiety, sometimes depression, sometimes frustration or impulses that are difficult to suppress, etc.

Be that as it may, in therapy we see what patterns of behavior are feeding and reinforcing these mental operations and those behaviors observable from the outside and that keep the discomfort alive, to gradually modify these elements and replace them with others.

Are you looking for psychological support?

If you feel bad psychologically and notice that you need professional help, I propose that you contact me to attend therapy. I am a psychologist specialized in anxiety and / or depressive problems, as well as addictions and poor control impulses, and I base my work on the cognitive-behavioral model and from Acceptance Therapy and Commitment. I attend face-to-face sessions (in Almería) or online, and if you want to know more about how I work, you can visit this page.

Bibliographic references:

• Meerwijk, E.L.; Weiss, S.J.; Toward a unifying definition of psychological pain. Journal of Loss & Trauma, 16 (5): pp. 402 - 412.
• Shneidman IS. The Suicidal Mind. Oxford University Press; 1996. Appendix A Psychological Pain Survey.
• Thornhill, R.; Wilmsen, T.N. (1989). The Evolution of Psychological Pain. In Bell, R.W.; Bell, N.J. (eds.). Sociobiology and the Social Sciences. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press.
• Wille, R.S.G. (2011). On the capacity to endure psychic pain. The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 34: pp. 23 - 30.