by David Fireman, LCSW
There are times when pain becomes more than pain. For purposes of this essay my synonyms for pain are: aching, yearning, emptiness, bewilderment, despair, suffering.
Pain can become a kind of identity or a way of knowing who we are when everything else has become uncertain. When someone dies, a marriage ends, a serious diagnosis arrives, a country seems to lose its moorings, or the world itself feels unstable, pain can provide a strange form of security.
It seems to say:
This happened and it matters. No, I didn’t imagine it.
In grief, pain can take on an even more complicated function. When someone we love is gone, pain may become one of the few remaining ways we experience connection or continuity with that vital person. The pain can feel like proof of a meaningful relationship and that the loss is truly significant.
To “let go” of the pain can sometimes feel, consciously or not, like giving up something crucial to one’s sense of self, the person, or the relationship, the injustice; the important intensity of what happened.
But persevering through grief and coming to grips with grief does not ask us to stop loving or stop living. It does not require amnesia. It is not a return to some imagined self, who existed before the loss, before the trauma or the world became more complicated.
And perhaps recovery and healing are not just about restoring the former self but also about mobility or moving into a self that can integrate the experience of loss but ventures beyond it.
Can I move while carrying this pain? Can I experience something alongside the pain without immediately wondering whether I am betraying it?
These responses matter because the ways we protect ourselves often make perfect sense in the circumstances that shaped them.
We withdraw and anticipate, try to control people and situations. Sometimes we get uncompromising and rigid. We become all too self-sufficient. Or we stop asking or trusting that someone could be helpful. We confine ourselves within the pre-loss boundaries that have been battered.
These patterns may have been adaptive responses to circumstances in which what we needed from others was erratic, unreliable, or simply not there.
Perhaps healing does not require us to condemn those adaptations. Perhaps in some sense we can honor them. Eventually, we might be able to ask whether these mechanisms still need to hold sway in our current circumstances.
The same might be said of grief.
Grief can become a companion without becoming a dictator. A companion walks beside us. A dictator determines where we go. There is a difference.
Healing may involve cultivating something new among the ruins of loss and destruction. This isn’t replacing what was lost. Nor is it the same thing as finding a silver lining or trying to convert pain into a lesson so quickly that it is fogged over or pushed down.
Perhaps we try something novel: making a friend or trying to see something differently. Taking an early morning walk or listening to an unfamiliar piece of music. Finding important work that matters or experiencing some pleasure that does not need to be justified.
But there can be a particular kind of complicated guilt in experiencing novelty or pleasure after loss. As if satisfaction is evidence of disloyalty and a good day means we have somehow drifted into a devaluing forgetfulness.
But maybe in grief we can learn to carry someone’s memory with us without requiring every experience to point back toward them.
This is where I find the metaphor of the scar useful.
You look at a scar and remember.
A scar is not simply evidence that something happened. It is evidence that something happened in that precise location. It is a marker. A kind of monument. It contains a history that may be invisible to everyone except the person carrying it.
There are thoughts, images, sensations, and emotions inside a scar and the mind has scars in much the same way the body does.
Something in the present touches that old, once wounded place, and suddenly we are somewhere we have not been for years. The complexity opens. Inside the psychic data become charged. We may feel something very much like the original pain. But it is not exactly the original pain. We have been transported, but we have not necessarily gone back entirely.
Trauma has little respect for chronological time. A smell, a sound, a relationship, a look, a particular kind of silence can disintegrate decades. For a moment, we can be back inside something we thought we had left far behind.
Perhaps healing means recognizing (and moving toward accepting) that type of experience, even if it is just a “psychic millimeter” away. Not ten feet away, or from some serene mountaintop of perspective. Just a millimeter. That small distinction can be enormous.
Over time, with care and if we’re lucky, with the presence of another person, who can remain emotionally present without trying to rescue us, we may gain some perspective. The scar remains part of the story, but it no longer dictates the entire story. A scar does not pretend the wounding didn’t occur. Instead, it records the permanence of the injury. But it also records healing and survival.
Scar tissue is the body’s way of saying: something cut me deeply here, and life, nevertheless, knitted itself back together. The new structure is not the old structure.
We do not become unwounded. We do not become unscarred.
And perhaps a perfect, scarless restoration was never the point.
There is a temptation in our culture to imagine healing as a return to wholeness, as though the goal were to become the person we were before the cut or devastation happened. But some experiences make that impossible. And perhaps some forms of healing make something else possible. Like a larger life and a more “spacious” self. One that sees the scar, remembers and respects the wound, yet recognizes that healing has made a new path possible.
Is it possible to build a capacity to remember without being consumed? Or to love without requiring a permanent sameness of pain as proof of love?
Can we experience pleasure without interpreting it as betrayal?
Or carry the dead, and the injured parts of ourselves we cannot fully restore, and still make room for what has not yet happened? The yet untold story?
The scar comes with us. We look at it and remember where we have been. But it can also remind us that we are no longer exactly where we were.
The wisdom of suffering, if there is wisdom to be found, may not be that suffering makes us stronger or better. Sometimes suffering simply hurts and must be borne.
The wisdom may come later, in the dawning discovery that, having carried that weight, we can become more “spacious” than we were before what happened to us. Not unwounded. Not unscarred. But more spacious, with room for pain, memory, AND the life that still lies ahead.