Turning Away From Hurt: Wise Or Foolish?
by Jeffrey Rubin, PhD
Welcome to From Insults To Respect. Today, we discuss that challenging experience known as hurting.
Sometimes, we are hurting because of a physical injury, like when I banged my shin as I walked by the corner of my bed. At other times, it is due to an emotional event, like when I’m insulted for being a New York Yankees fan.
Growing up in Brooklyn, my no-nonsense grandfather disdained my complaining whenever I was hurting, insisting that the best approach to such experiences is to toughen up and just put it out of my mind. Other people encouraged me to turn my mind away from the hurt and focus instead on a pleasant experience.
Throughout my early years, I tried my best to live according to these types of advice, and for minor hurts, it seemed to work well enough. However, for more serious, longer lasting ones, there seemed to be a brief period during which there might have been some relief, but very soon afterwards, the hurt came raging back. And then, when I was in my mid-thirties, I came upon some research articles that had me trying out a very different approach.
A Different Approach
An article published in 1985, by J. Suls and B. Fletcher, titled “The relative efficacy of avoidant and nonavoidant coping strategies: A meta-analysis” (Health Psychology, vol 4 (3) 249-288.) summarized its findings as follows:
“Overall, avoidance was associated with more positive adaptation in the short-run. However, attention was superior to avoidance if the former involved a focus on sensory schemata rather than emotional processing.”
Emotional processing (also referred to in the research literature as “emotion focus”) has individuals attending to a thought such as, “This experience is a big time hurt.” Notice that the emotion focus approach has one observing a set of words describing the feeling, whereas a focus on sensory schemata has one observing its bodily sensations. If the sensations bring forth words such as, “this is so painful,” or “wow, this is awful agony,” you accept this without judgment. You very gently, when you feel ready, return your focus to the physical sensations as if you are tasting, for the first time, some fresh mountain water from a tropical island. Just let the sensations wash over and through you for a couple of minutes. Do this each time you begin to experience the sensations.
In 1989, a study came out by M. R. Frone and D. B. McFarlin, titled “Chronic occupational stressors, self-focused attention, and well-being: Testing a cybernetic model of stress” (Journal of Applied Psychology, 74(6), 876–883). The study looked at stress reactions of some blue collar workers, some of whom were experiencing a great deal of stress from work overload. The results indicated that a tendency of subjects to focus on their bodily sensations from high stress decreased the chances that these subjects developed subsequent illnesses.
The article makes mention of a cybernetic model of stress.
This model posits that individuals who attend to their psychological and body reactions to stressful life events are more aware of deviations from their desired state. Given such mismatched information, these folks are thus more likely to take corrective action, thereby reducing the likelihood of illness.
This article introduced me to the idea that focusing on the bodily sensations when you are hurting might prevent illness. Then other articles came out further supporting this notion.
Meditation
It can be helpful for particularly difficult hurtful experiences to practice a type of meditation. For a review of the research on the effectiveness of this type of approach for reducing illness see here.
Although there are a variety of meditation techniques that slightly differ from one another, basically you sit for about twenty minutes twice a day in the morning and before supper. During this meditation, you observe each breath, though it is natural that your mind will wander from this task. When your mind does wander, you are not doing anything wrong; it is just part of an effortless process. When you recognize that your mind has wandered from observing your breath, if you can effortlessly return to observing it, do so; if not, that’s fine as well. From time to time during this meditation, hurtful experiences will emerge into consciousness. When this happens, you take a few seconds to nonjudgmentally observe their associated bodily sensations.
Expressive Writing
Expressive writing has demonstrated in several research studies to improve health outcomes (see here and here). Rather than avoiding thinking about the harmful feelings, those practicing this technique do the following:
Over the course of four days, they write for a minimum of 15-minutes at each sitting about something that has led to having a challenging emotional experience. As they do so, they make sure they include not only what happened, but also what they felt when it happened, and how they now feel about what happened. They include their deepest emotions and thoughts about what occurred. They are encouraged to really let go and explore their feelings and thoughts about it. As they do so, there will be moments when waves of bodily sensory experiences associated with the described emotional experience will arise. At such times, for a few moments they observe these bodily feelings. While writing, they might tie this experience to their childhood, relationships with parents, people they have loved or love now, or their career.
Those who go through this experience, sometimes report that after writing, they sometimes feel somewhat sad or depressed. Like seeing a sad movie, this typically goes away in a couple of hours, and in the long run, the research suggests this is beneficial.
If you try this and find that you are getting extremely upset about a writing topic and come to feel it is unwise to continue, trust your judgment and stop writing or change topics. You might try to return to the extremely unsettling topic again in a week or two. If you again begin to have feelings that are so extremely upsetting that you feel it is unwise to continue, trust your judgment and stop. Try one more time to write about this topic in a month or so. If you end up striking out, you might want to seek out a professional humanistic counselor to help you to process this sensitive material (see HERE for some suggestions for obtaining this type of counseling services).
Additional evidence that suggests there is positive value to take time to focus on one’s hurts comes from research on the effects of “exposure therapy.”
Exposure Therapy
Exposure therapy was developed to help people dealing with trauma. When people are fearful of something, they tend to avoid the feared objects, activities, situations, and associated emotional bodily feelings. Although this avoidance might help reduce feelings of harm in the short term, over the long term it can prolong and worsen the experience. In this form of therapy, psychologists create a safe environment in which to “expose” individuals to the things they experience as hurtful and thus try to avoid. This exposure, in time, helps reduce the harmful consequences of traumatic experiences.
Exposure therapy has been scientifically demonstrated to be a helpful treatment (see here and here).
Conclusion
So, “Is it wise or foolish to turn away from hurt?” In answering this question, it seems to me that if your style of dealing with the hurts you experience is best described as maneuvers to avoid thinking about them, this does not indicate you are foolish. People pick up certain habits when they are young and making changes to them can be hard. Although I found I was abl
e to change my old avoidance habit, if you are satisfied with your avoidance approach or just don’t want to bother to go through a process of change, you are entitled to continue as you have always done.
Rather than joining a chorus of name callers to encourage learning a different approach, I have laid out some of the research backed arguments for spending some time to marshal the courage to make friends with the bodily sensations that come when you are hurting. In line with that old saying, “The best things in life are free,” two of the three approaches I’ve described are completely free. Going forward, it is up to you to freely choose how to deal with hurtful challenging experiences.
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
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