What a pain - in the wrong place!

I have been living with a frozen shoulder for the last few months. At its worst, the pain shoots up and down from my left arm and shoulder and back of my neck.

I am currently getting some Chinese massage and acupressure treatment and its painful like hell.

Sometime back I wrote about a friend’s friend who is also in some kind of pain, but of a different kind though! She has been suffering from separation anxiety, away from her much married man friend with whom she had been for the last 15 years and now has been left in the lurch!
Jen is devastated and the pain she feels is acute.

This has got me wondering, which is worse - physical pain or mental pain?

The two can, of course, overlap.

My frozen shoulder is causing me enough worry at the thought of living with it for the rest of my life - is weighing heavily on me.

Jen's hurt has also manifested itself in physical ways, too. Her grief has weakened her immune system and she cant seem to eat and has headaches and fever often now-a-days.

But most of the world would agree that these are two different types of pain.

I guess the sharp pain of a toothache is certainly different from the distress that fills your being when your boyfriend leaves you. The extreme pain of a cancer cannot be the same as the death of a loved one.

Horrible as pain is, it exists for a purpose, according to scientists. Physical pain is part of the body’s defense system, so that when one knows of it, you know you have to disengage at once from the source of the pain. Physical pain, I think, also serves as signal that something is wrong with your body (I sound like a rocket scientist J).

But what purpose serves this mental pain is something I have not been able to fathom!
It is mostly the result of a emotional event, leading you perhaps to seek better options in life OR atleast make you more self aware.

The good thing about physical pain is that, at most times, it goes away. And if you have crossed the hump of severe pain, I can tell you that the feeling is wonderful.
I am not sure about this horrible thing called ‘mental pain’. This one is a harder nut to crack because the hurt ebbs and flows and there is no painkiller that one can swallow to make it go away forever!

Its said that time is a great healer. But I have seen people being haunted by this metal pain beast. Just when you think you have gotten over it, something triggers a memory and the pain comes flooding back. And other than death, the only and most common cause of this pain is that old chestnut called “LOVE”.

Life makes people carry around so much of this pain due to relationship woes – misplaced love, betrayed love, unrequited love, of never being able to attain that happy-ever-after scenario you want, (atleast not in this lifetime!), the pain of waiting, of missing someone so much that your heart would break the pain of trying to forget.
Even the pain of wanting more sex – as in the case of former NYC Governor Eliot Spitzer! J

I have now come to realize that romantic pain is silly and self-inflicted and selfish caused by our own ego. It’s very difficult for us to accept, let go and move on.
(They say if it’s really true then love comes back in any case! So why hold onto something!?!)

I guess, pain is an inevitable part of life and a fact of life and the alternative to it is not good either. If one is really looking at a painless life then it’s looking at non-existence – death!
Between the two, I know which side of the road I want to be, even if I’m experiencing an 8 or 9 or 10 on the Richter scale of pain.