It's messy and weird in here.
I've been thinking a lot about pain over the last year. I haven't experienced very much pain, personally. I occasionally get headaches, of course, and I've had a few minor injuries that were painful (fireworks are BAD!!!!), including sports injuries that still occasionally hurt, decades later. I'm not like that lady in Scotland. But pain hasn't really been a feature in my life. When I was a kid, my family didn't really do over-the-counter medicine. We definitely had aspirin or ibuprofen or acetaminophen or something that was occasionally used for things like headaches. And band-aids, I guess? But I don't remember pain or discomfort being really a thing in our life. The sense was that discomfort is a symptom of something that might need to be treated, but the discomfort itself doesn't necessarily or even usually merit treatment. Pain felt (and still mostly feels) like a clear, direct and actionable communication from my physical body to my thinking. Your head hurts? Drink some water. Take a nap. Your stomach hurts? Drink some water. Rest. Wait and see what happens. For now, for me, this mostly works. (Except chest pain associated with anxiety. That's weird and confusing and unproductive.)
For the last few years, Duchess has had lots of experience with discomfort. She was a pretty robust kid who didn't get sick often and rarely complained of pain. Since adolescence rolled around, though, she complains of menstrual pain, knee pain (from ultimate frisbee) and now back pain (from rowing). She has had recurring episodes of dizziness and fatigue (we thought she was anemic, but she wasn't even close - turned out that MY iron levels were low, though). We've vacillated between telling her to just suck it up, and taking her to the doctor, where the diagnosis is always that they're not sure what's going on, but there's nothing seriously wrong. My paradigm isn't working here.
And then there the emotional pain. Duchess frequently talks about how her friends have "hurt" her or other friends. Usually by saying something casually or even accidentally mean. She is very, very upset and righteous when people hurt her. I find most of the the "hurt" she's describing to be far below my threshold for "hurt," even in 14-year-old-adjusted terms, and the grandiosity of it feels off to me. This makes me feel like she (and all her friends) put far too much weight on Being Hurt. My theory is that girls are socialized to feel that being hurt and feeling pain are legitimate emotional experiences for them. Being angry or annoyed or humiliated or indignant aren't okay, because they're more outward-facing, but being hurt and being a victim is.
Some of Duchess's friends are also engaging in self-harming activities like cutting or disordered eating, and I think this aligns with my theory - they're embracing Being Hurt as a way to focus and feel in control of the emotional chaos in which they live. I looked up self-harming on the crisis text line website recently, and was surprised to see on the list of self-harming activities something that Duchess actually does right in front of me, which is hitting herself in the head (with her hands). I've only seen her do this a few times, and never actually hard enough to do damage, but it is shocking every time. She does it when she's upset, and it does seem to be a way to channel her emotions, so I guess it makes sense that it falls into the same category as cutting.
Both my kids do a thing when they're upset that also seems similar, though less controlled - they move around the house in a way (fast, careless, flailing) that makes it inevitable that they'll bang into a doorframe or a table or fall down or hurt themselves physically in some other way. I think they're experiencing an imbalance - an inner storm and an outer calm. I believe that girls, especially girls like mine who are deeply invested in being Good, don't feel entitled to just let out that inner storm into the calm world. So they have to create an outer context that is acting on them that feels like it rationalizes the inner storm. They have to Be Hurt.
I recently listened to an interesting Invisibilia episode about girls and pain, exploring the phenomenon of people (mostly teenage girls, I think) with "amplified pain" who feel unexplained pain, and following a girl who was pursuing a treatment involving doing a lot of painful things to sort of retrain her nervous system not to respond so sensitively. (There was also a kerfuffle of angry responses to the episode, apparently, pointing out that dismissal of women's pain, and particularly girls' pain, is a long and bad tradition and should be vigorously challenged.) I guess what I'm coming to is mostly just an awareness of how little I understand. I can't tell Duchess how she should experience pain, or what she should do when she's experiencing it. It's real pain; she's feeling it. But what it is, how it should be labeled, where it comes from, and what it means, I have no idea. For now, we talk about it with her, and try to help her unpack what she's feeling. She's emotionally wise for an eighth-grader, so she can understand what we're getting at (when she's not in the throes of The Feelings). But none of us have any solutions.
What I think Duchess might have, though, thanks to her ridiculous, masochistic sport, is evidence that if she keeps going, if she moves through pain, she gets through it, and sometimes she also gets something more - in this case, mighty thigh muscles, strong calloused hands, and an improved ability to make boats go fast. Rowing is pretty much entirely the practice of enduring physical discomfort. The coaches set out barf buckets next to the rowing machines. So Duchess experiences something nearly every day that I almost never experience - pushing her body to the point of pain/intense discomfort and having to keep going through that. (Note that I don't necessarily recommend this approach. I have a lot of qualms.)
Discomfort is usually associated with change. If we don't see it for what it is, if we avoid it (hi, Skipper!) or explain it by tying it to external circumstances that are unrelated (hi, Duchess!), we can miss the opportunity that change offers, whether it's physical, intellectual, or emotional. But not all change is good, either, and it's often hard to tell if it's the kind of discomfort that will tear you down or build you up. Basically, I have no idea what we're doing here.
For the last few years, Duchess has had lots of experience with discomfort. She was a pretty robust kid who didn't get sick often and rarely complained of pain. Since adolescence rolled around, though, she complains of menstrual pain, knee pain (from ultimate frisbee) and now back pain (from rowing). She has had recurring episodes of dizziness and fatigue (we thought she was anemic, but she wasn't even close - turned out that MY iron levels were low, though). We've vacillated between telling her to just suck it up, and taking her to the doctor, where the diagnosis is always that they're not sure what's going on, but there's nothing seriously wrong. My paradigm isn't working here.
And then there the emotional pain. Duchess frequently talks about how her friends have "hurt" her or other friends. Usually by saying something casually or even accidentally mean. She is very, very upset and righteous when people hurt her. I find most of the the "hurt" she's describing to be far below my threshold for "hurt," even in 14-year-old-adjusted terms, and the grandiosity of it feels off to me. This makes me feel like she (and all her friends) put far too much weight on Being Hurt. My theory is that girls are socialized to feel that being hurt and feeling pain are legitimate emotional experiences for them. Being angry or annoyed or humiliated or indignant aren't okay, because they're more outward-facing, but being hurt and being a victim is.
Some of Duchess's friends are also engaging in self-harming activities like cutting or disordered eating, and I think this aligns with my theory - they're embracing Being Hurt as a way to focus and feel in control of the emotional chaos in which they live. I looked up self-harming on the crisis text line website recently, and was surprised to see on the list of self-harming activities something that Duchess actually does right in front of me, which is hitting herself in the head (with her hands). I've only seen her do this a few times, and never actually hard enough to do damage, but it is shocking every time. She does it when she's upset, and it does seem to be a way to channel her emotions, so I guess it makes sense that it falls into the same category as cutting.
Both my kids do a thing when they're upset that also seems similar, though less controlled - they move around the house in a way (fast, careless, flailing) that makes it inevitable that they'll bang into a doorframe or a table or fall down or hurt themselves physically in some other way. I think they're experiencing an imbalance - an inner storm and an outer calm. I believe that girls, especially girls like mine who are deeply invested in being Good, don't feel entitled to just let out that inner storm into the calm world. So they have to create an outer context that is acting on them that feels like it rationalizes the inner storm. They have to Be Hurt.
I recently listened to an interesting Invisibilia episode about girls and pain, exploring the phenomenon of people (mostly teenage girls, I think) with "amplified pain" who feel unexplained pain, and following a girl who was pursuing a treatment involving doing a lot of painful things to sort of retrain her nervous system not to respond so sensitively. (There was also a kerfuffle of angry responses to the episode, apparently, pointing out that dismissal of women's pain, and particularly girls' pain, is a long and bad tradition and should be vigorously challenged.) I guess what I'm coming to is mostly just an awareness of how little I understand. I can't tell Duchess how she should experience pain, or what she should do when she's experiencing it. It's real pain; she's feeling it. But what it is, how it should be labeled, where it comes from, and what it means, I have no idea. For now, we talk about it with her, and try to help her unpack what she's feeling. She's emotionally wise for an eighth-grader, so she can understand what we're getting at (when she's not in the throes of The Feelings). But none of us have any solutions.
What I think Duchess might have, though, thanks to her ridiculous, masochistic sport, is evidence that if she keeps going, if she moves through pain, she gets through it, and sometimes she also gets something more - in this case, mighty thigh muscles, strong calloused hands, and an improved ability to make boats go fast. Rowing is pretty much entirely the practice of enduring physical discomfort. The coaches set out barf buckets next to the rowing machines. So Duchess experiences something nearly every day that I almost never experience - pushing her body to the point of pain/intense discomfort and having to keep going through that. (Note that I don't necessarily recommend this approach. I have a lot of qualms.)
Discomfort is usually associated with change. If we don't see it for what it is, if we avoid it (hi, Skipper!) or explain it by tying it to external circumstances that are unrelated (hi, Duchess!), we can miss the opportunity that change offers, whether it's physical, intellectual, or emotional. But not all change is good, either, and it's often hard to tell if it's the kind of discomfort that will tear you down or build you up. Basically, I have no idea what we're doing here.
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