Synthetic Pain

This will be the hardest post I write, the one I don't want to write, the post most people don't want to read.  I want to do it right, I want to get it out with as little interference as as possible, I want to get it over with.  I heard this title in a movie last night when a hapless character was trying to say "sympathetic pain."  I related better to the malpropism. 

I spent the first fifty years of my life denying pain, avoiding processing it, refusing to feel it at all.  If I had dealt with it, particularly the early issues, it would have been genuine, it would have been appropriate pain. I not only suffered pain I did not deal with, I also did not develop the proper strategies to do so.   Now, years later, I have processed that old pain cognitively, as the statute of limitations has run out on my emotional recourse, and I am without any effective mechanisms, and no authentic pain.  My pain is now synthetic.

I have discussed the sources of my old pain in many posts here, and judging by some of the feedback I have received, too self-righteously so.  I have done so not to alleviate any remnants, but to understand the aftermath of those repressed injuries, to understand the darker sides of my character.  Now I find myself willing to open up and process things honestly and directly, but have discovered that I have no right to do so, given that my current pain is not legitimate, it is of my own contrivance.  Any pain I have now, I have brought on myself, and not knowing how to deal with the real thing naturally, I am at a terrible loss as how to cope with this countefeit version, not knowing the conventions of such work. 

I do know that whatever is here inside of me, honestly won or not, hurts so deeply, reaches more vunerable places than did the bona fide version all those years ago.  So these things I have no right or  mechanism to grieve, also carry the double indemnity of the shame and guilt  of even embracing them.  My logical apparatus works no more either, unable to quell the flood of emotions that crest its banks. There is no "kick in the pants - get over it", no giant "chill pill" to take, just the loneliness of a pain I cannot name,  a pain I am not to feel. 

I once listened to two men talking, both having lost their wives.  The first to speak told the other about the mistakes he made, how he drove his wife away.  The second detailed how he lost his wife after a two year battle with cancer.  I watched the face of the first, and I could tell what he was thinking - in the course of a few seconds, he had no more right to suffer, no more right to his pain.  I don't think his thoughts did anything though to lead him out of his darkness. Last night, in another movie, I watched the parents of a young man who went on a killing spree at his college, try to deal with their loss, especially as they saw the parents of his victims.  It is as if the pain is a prison sentence, complete with the indictment and the stigma of the crime.

The short point from this long passage is that I am feeling a type of pain that I cannot condone, cannot easily overcome, and cannot seek sympathetic forgiveness for.  I cannot help what I am feeling, and the only solace I find is in writing these posts.  I wanted to set the record straight - wanted to define what is real but what is not meant to be, not allowed to be.  I understand if this theme is tiring, and if so, please stop reading.