Table of Contents
J. We try to avoid pain, deflect it, and deny it, due to fear of the consequences
When one fasts on a religious festival such as Ramadan, or Navratri even in those days you suffer from the hunger and pain of it. But you deny that you are hungry and avoid the sense of hunger because you are afraid of adverse consequences due to the wrath of God.
This is exactly what happens to us in every painful situation. We don’t accept a situation and pain out of it because in our brains we imagine a bad future consequence.
When a business is not running with profitability, you try to find a painkiller in Loans hoping that this painkiller will take you out of your pain. If you accept that indeed business is not running well, then you can look deeper into the business fundamentals and keep fixing them till you come out of the pain. A loan will give you temporary relief, but this also comes with the future pain of paying back your earning. As business fundamentals are wrong(which has led to the current want for a loan), the pain of poor business fundamentals, plus the pressure of repayment will accumulate in the future.
If you acknowledged the pain and remained in the pain, you would have given away several unwanted operations to reduce the burden and stay in the business. This would have continued till a point where you would become profitable. The reason you did not accept the pain due to business losses is due to the rigidity that you are not wrong, your decisions are not wrong.
We try to avoid pain when the pain challenges our belief system;
it needs us to question our belief system, not the pain.
More often or not we get surprised by a painful situation, not because the situation will not pass, but because that situation makes us feel that we made a mistake. When we feel we made a mistake, then our brain always wants to correct it. However, we can not go back to the past to correct our mistakes. So brain tricks us with several imaginary situations so that we can avoid the pain, and the lazy brain can avoid working hard towards correcting itself.
Some of the classic modern-day examples of unacceptance of pain and trying to deflect them
| Situation | Easy Escape Tendency | Actual Unacceptance |
|---|---|---|
| Not getting a promotion | Change the job | How can I not be good and eligible for promotion? |
| Not getting a job/pink slip | I will do a business and work for myself, who wants to be a slave for the rest of the life? | I will do a business and work for myself, who wants to be a slave for the rest of my life? |
| Not getting a life partner | Who wants to invest in a relationship these days? Everyone runs for pursuing a career. It is better to be single and enjoy life. | How can I not be good enough to have someone by me in my life? Let no one has me, they have not understood my value. |
| Marriage not working | Divorce | I am heard less than I should be, I have less comfort than I thought I would have, I have less fun then expected, I have less time, I have less friends, I have less life, I have less happiness. |
| Not getting a job after college | Higher education | My education and degrees are lesser than others, so I am not getting a job. Once I have more degrees, I will get a job. |
| People advising what one should do in life | do what people say | When so many are saying the same thing how come so many be wrong? I must be wrong. If I don’t listen to them, I will lose them. |
| Inability to propose | Keep stalking and hoping some day she will realize your love and come jumping to you | What if she rejects me? It is better to not say and not get rejected rather than say and live with rejection pain. |
You see every escape from pain you seek, every denial, every avoidance of pain has an imaginary component to it. One tries to escape pain due to some hypothetical bad future and keep hope alive. This is fantasy, and this fantasy helps one to stay away from reality to experience less pain. But just because one is experiencing less pain at this moment due to their fantasy doesn’t mean that they have a good life, on the contrary, they have no life, as life itself is pain.
So when one goes for continuous education when one doesn’t get a job, the brain suffers from survival pain. When one leaves his/her love to satisfy people with a fear of not losing people, he/she loses the love, and thus brain suffers from reproduction pain.
When one seeks divorce, the brain suffers from invalidation of shared memories and emotions. A marriage not working is a pain, and divorce is another pain. One pain can not solve another pain. Rather one keeps hopping between the same pain, getting stuck in life.
We suffer more in imagination than in reality
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius