Pain: A Round-about Book Review for Man’s Search for Meaning

I have always been fascinated by pain.  I know, weird. Go ahead with the Count Rugen jokes. But I have.  My copy of C.S. Lewis’ Problem of Pain is well-loved.  I wrote an entire paper on pain in my New Testament class, and one that focused on the pain/empathy aspect of the Atonement in Book of Mormon class.  It’s a continuing fascination.  Basically, I have eventually come to realize that the ability to feel pain is actually one of God’s greatest gifts to us. In 2 Nephi, we learn that we can only experience the good of the world by also feeling its negatives.  And I’m not even convinced that pain is always a negative thing.  To feel no emotional pain is psychopathy.  To feel no physical pain is a medical disease too.  And there are too many times throughout the scriptures that good men and women cry in pain and sorrow to a good end.  I believe that Rispah wailing over her dead son was a good thing, not a bad thing, even if the death of her son was a bad thing.  I think it was healthy for her.  (I was going to give you a reference on that story, but I’m so bad with exact scripture references…it’s in Kings somewhere…perhaps Chronicles). And many of you know my obsession with Jeremiah, and my fan-girlish obsession with him and his Lamentations.

I remember in my junior year of high school, I read a short story by James Joyce called “Counterparts.” It’s part of Dubliners. In this story, the main character, Farrington gets chewed out by his boss, and then he goes and pawns his belongings and drinks himself into oblivion.  Then, he goes home.  And he immediately begins to beat his son, Tom.  Mercilessly.  I really liked all of Dubliners, but this story always stayed with me for some reason. Because I had always been told that pain was to teach us something.  That’s the Latter-day Saint go-to answer.  That pain has purpose.  That pain teaches us something.  Or that our pain is to create an example for someone else.  But this boy getting beaten by his father didn’t seem to be serving any purpose whatsoever. And yes, it’s a story; but it’s not an unrealistic story at all.  And I think this story might be the measurable beginning of Hannah’s obsession with understanding pain.

With all of this in mind, a coworker of mine once told me that I should read “Man’s Search for Meaning.”  Actually, more than one coworker.  I was reluctant.  For one reason and one reason only:  I actually don’t really like Holocaust books.  A quick introduction for those who don’t know the story: Man’s Search for Meaning is the memoirs of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who was a Holocaust survivor, as well as an explanation of logotherapy, a form of psychiatric treatment that he developed because of his experiences in concentration camps.  But what I was initially told is that it’s about a man in the Holocaust.

So back to what I was saying: I don’t like Holocaust memoirs. Shocking for someone who is obsessed with the analysis of pain, but it’s true.  Maybe this is wrong of me, but I don’t like books that seem to exist solely to tell people that children are starving in Africa, so stop crying.  I don’t think you should ever tell someone their pain is wrong.  Pain is never wrong.  Pain is always real and usually deep. 

Going back to Empathy Exams (why am I constantly quoting this book?), even a hypochondriac is in pain.  People say, “It’s all in your head;” well, yeah, that’s true.  It is all in their head, but it’s still pain.  And pain isn’t “rankable.” Pain perception is completely subjective.  I was a medical lab scientist for three years. I want things to be measurable!  But the medical professions have fallen back on a system of happy faces for pain! So, you can’t really tell someone that their pain is less than that of another human being’s. To quote another book, “I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn’t change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have.” (Perks of Being a Wallflower). Pain isn’t something that diminishes by finding someone higher up on the “Pain Totem Pole” so to speak.

So with all that said, I don’t like Holocaust memoirs.  Because I feel like they too often try to resolve pain by convincing people that they shouldn’t be in pain at all.  And I know some people like Holocaust books because they find them cathartic or therapeutic in a bizarre way, and if that’s part of your process, go for it.  But I just don’t roll that way.  I don’t want to ignore the Holocaust, or not mourn it.  And I’ll read books about it.  I ADORE Number the Stars, and The Hiding Place was a life changing book for me.  But I don’t subscribe to the Deal With Your Pain by Belittling Your Pain school of thought.

And I don’t really subscribe to the Ignore Your Pain to Deal With Your Pain school of thought either.  In church today, the gospel doctrine teacher told the story of a woman who constantly served others, only slept four hours a day, and was constantly doing something.  The teacher said that this was this woman’s way of not thinking about her daughter who had died in either suicide or homicide (the police never did decide which).  She commended this woman—she didn’t have pain, because she turned outward.  While I agree that serving others is a way to become happier, I don’t agree that this is a healthy way to deal with grief.  And the fact is this woman didn’t have peace. She just distracted herself from pain to the extent of only sleeping four hours.  You can’t cover up pain.  To quote yet another teen novel, “Pain demands to be felt.” (The Fault in Our Stars).  I promise, I’m not a teenage girl, but these books are just working with the thought process today. I learned this the hard way—you can’t deal with your own negative emotions by ignoring them. 

I remember I was talking with a friend who is a social worker at a children’s hospital ER.  A teenage girl was brought in by her mother and grandmother because she was despondent.  The doctor asked this social worker to go in and evaluate her.  After speaking with the girl for a few moments and talking with her, the social worker left the room and told the mother and grandmother, essentially, “She’s fine.”  They were horrified—she wasn’t fine.  She was usually so happy, and here she was, not happy. The social worker said, “Her best friend committed suicide two nights ago. I’d be worried if she were happy.”  You don’t get rid of pain by pretending it’s not there.  Let’s quote us some Harry Potter, “Numbing the pain for a while will only make it worse when you finally feel it.” (That is Goblet of Fire, I believe, but I’m going off memory here, so this quote is approximate). 

 Let’s not get crazy personal with this, but I definitely learned that the hard way.  I’ve been trying to be more open about my personal struggles with anxiety and OCD, because I believe that I’m at a place with their management where I can benefit from being open about it, and others can benefit from me being open about it.  To follow the Siddhartha model, I have returned from the mountains and am sharing my enlightenment (Herman Hesse…I guess literature is where it’s at today).  But when I was in college, actively fighting my OCD (not that I don’t still struggle with it, but it’s not a battle I fight consciously each day anymore), my therapist (yes, I had a therapist, and if you have OCD, you should have/have had one too) once told me that the biggest problem was that I didn’t dwell on the feelings.  Apparently, most people with anxiety disorders dwell in their anxiety and just sink deeper and deeper into a hole.  Evidently, I, as a scientist, decided to take a hyper-logical approach.  I didn’t like the anxiety, so I turned off my emotions.  This all led to me eventually sitting there with Reese’s peanut butter cups melting on my tongue, describing every part of it while not labeling anything as positive or negative, just what the experience was like.  I know it sounds weird, but this dude was actually an amazingly good therapist, and this was actually one of the best breakthrough moments of Hannah’s anxiety disorder treatments.  The point is, you cannot ignore feelings.  You have to deal with them. 

And that’s where we get back to Viktor Frankl.  I was expecting that Viktor Frankl would be talking about how life in a concentration camp sucked, and everyone else needed to get over it. But it wasn’t.  This book was about pain.  All pain—from papercuts to genocide—is pain.  I once was talking with a mother when her eleven-month-old started crying from something really insignificant.  She pulled him close and started to comfort him, and said, “I know. This is the worst thing that you can remember ever happening, isn’t it?”  How beautiful to comfort someone’s pain when you know that there are much worse things out there!

And that’s the approach Frankl takes about pain.  He seems to believe that he was given pain, not so that his story could help people be grateful, but so that he could have empathy.  Last other book reference, I promise, but in The Chosen, the character of Danny is ignored by his father. Always.  They rarely speak to one another.  At the end of the book, you learn that this is because his father was afraid that Danny didn’t know how to feel.  His father is the rabbi or tsaddik of their Hassid Jewish community, which is an inherited role, meaning that Danny would one day be the tsaddik.  A tsaddik is more than a rabbi—he is someone who takes on the suffering of their community (insert Christ metaphor here).  He feels the pain of the Hassid community (see also The Giver, but I promised no more literature references).  Danny’s father, Rabbi Saunders, is afraid that Danny does not know how to feel because he is so brilliant—not just smart, but brilliant.  And how could you have a tsaddik who cannot feel?  So, Rabbi Saunders draws away from his son.  Not because he doesn’t love him, but to teach him how it feels to be alone.  How it feels to not know that there are those that love you.  It’s not a fantastic method, perhaps, but it works for Danny. Danny eventually becomes the epitome of empathy (in The Chosen, but even more clearly in the sequel, The Promise).

And that was what Frankl focuses on: that to feel pain connects us.  To feel pain improves us.  To feel pain makes us real. 

To make one last quote (yeah, yeah, I broke my promise), this one may or may not be C.S. Lewis, but at least it’s C.S. Lewis in a play about C.S. Lewis (and as someone who has ripped apart The Problem of Pain, its consistent with his thoughts on it) “We are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men.  The blows of his chisel which hurt us so much are what makes us perfect.”(Shadowlands—I must say, I saw a stage production of Shadowlands before I read Dubliners, so, perhaps that was the seed that Dubliners nurtured to foster my obsession with pain)  And that is what pain is for.  For perfecting us.  Whether that means so that other people see our pain and are inspired by it (doubtful, because how often does that REALLY change people), that it teaches us resilience, or perhaps all it’s there for is to teach us empathy.  That is after all, half the point of the Garden of Gethsemane, is it not? “That his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.” (Alma 7:12—hey, I do know SOME references, at least, right?)

And that is why, in the words of another Holocaust survivor (okay, one more quote, it was a “pie crust promise” as Mary Poppins would say), “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” (Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place).

(And yes, Man’s Search for Meaning is recommended with a solid five stars).