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The more you avoid your pain, the more pain you attract. Pain only exists to warn you of threats, real or imagined. The longer it takes to address these apparent threats, the more your pain takes on a mind of its own. Simple pain can quickly turn into complicated layers of annoying misery. Anankelogy identifies four progressing types of pain. Need-response aims to address them all in a thorough wellness campaign.
Which do you prefer?
Relieve your pain instantly, or avoid it altogether, even if that lets it return again and again.
OR
Face your pain, to identify the needs your pain reports so you can remove cause for the pain.
Have you ever noticed how the more you try to get away from your pain, the more your pain somehow finds you.
The more you try to flee from your anxieties, the more your fears chase you.
The more you run from your anger, the more outrage jumps in your way.
The more you stuff down your disappointments, the more they pop up to surprise you.
Anankelogy identifies pain as a warning of a perceived threat to your ability to function. The greater the threat and the more limiting to your function, the more intense the pain. Apart from such threats to your ability to function, there is no such thing as pain.
Anankelogy recognizes four graduated types of pain. The longer a reported threat persists, the next type of pain often kicks in.
natural pain | residual pain | biostructural pain | metapain |
originally reported threat to remove | reminder a threat is not fully removed | unheeded warnings seek another route | warning to remove threat of pain itself |
Let's take a closer look at each, along with some illuminating examples. And then consider how a wellness campaign can potentially remove each kind.
1. Natural pain
This is when your body originally reports a new threat to remove. This is often a quick and sharp pain. It is rarely agonizing when processed in a flash.
Natural pain occurs each time your body immediately warns you of an emerging threat to your ability to keep functioning. Your natural pain serves you, warns you, keeps you alert to threats. Natural pain is inherently good.
This basic type of pain tends to instantly compel you to seek removal of the threat. But it typically allows time to reflect on how real is that threat. And grants you space to determine if you are to remove the threat itself or if you are to remove yourself from the threat.
Consider these three examples of natural emotional pain.
Natural pain at work. Your boss angrily shouts at you for something beyond your control and you instantly feel the sting of rejection.
Natural pain amidst political tension. Your roommate mischaracterizes your stance on a key issue, provoking you to feel the sting of being misunderstood.
Natural pain from a wrongful conviction. You initially feel shocked by the guilty verdict while wondering, in horror, how the jury could find you guilty without any clear evidence.
Natural pain should be easily reversable in a wellness campaign. During the initial BASE phase, you learn to shift from habitually avoiding the emotions you find uncomfortable to discovering how each specific unpleasant emotion conveys a specific need for you to address. You learn to embrace its sharp jab to face its urgent warning and then boldly address it.
The more you address its warning, the more the accompanying pain
of rejection,
of being misunderstood,
of shock,
naturally goes away. Once there are no more threats to report, there is no more cause for pain. If your body perceives the threat is not sufficiently removed, you naturally segue into residual pain.
2. Your Residual pain
Whenever a perceived threat persists, your body insists on warning you. If you can only partially remove the threat, or somewhat remove yourself from that threat, your body is only doing its job to keep painfully warn you.
In contrast to the sharpness of natural pain, residual pain typically remains at a lower pain threshold. In fact, you often ease your need just enough to relieve its annoying discomfort. Especially if the resources to fully resolve your need seems out of reach.
We often prefer the familiar pain of residual pain over the unknown sharpness of natural pain. We often gain more experience figuring out how to handle the dull yet manageable strain of our impartially resolved needs. We often find it easier tolerate lingering residual pain than to tolerate the intense yet brief moments of natural pain.
However, if too much unprocessed pain builds up, residual pain can pile up layer upon layer. Eventually, these layers can grow to be as painful as sharp natural pain.
Once such pain reaches intolerable levels, you understandably seek some way to avoid the agony. You likely seek out pleasures to offset the pain. If such pain relief lets you avoid the intensity of such pain, you likely ignore the threats provoking such pain.
Perhaps you feel or know there is little you can do about the originating threats. Perhaps you find yourself trapped in avoiding these unpleasant warnings, which leaves the threats persisting with more alarm bells going off.
The more you slip into these avoidance habits, the more you risk sliding down the rabbit hold of addictions. Getting stuck on avoiding pain can eventually result in more pain to avoid.
Consider these three examples of residual emotional pain.
Residual pain at work. You cannot find a suitable way to appease your boss’s anger, so you acquiesce in a way that leaves your need for approval painfully yet tolerantly unresolved.
Residual pain amidst political tension. You try to overlook the slight, but your body reminds you that your need to be understood remains painfully unresolved.
Residual pain from a wrongful conviction. You struggle to wait for your appellate counsel to file your appeal, as you remain constantly and painfully aware of your unmet need for justice.
Residual pain could be a little challenging to reverse in a wellness campaign. During the TEAM phase, you receive growing support to identify and address your lingering unmet needs. You learn to remove cause for pain with each painful need you address with your support team.
The more you sort through your lingering emotional pains
of haunting disapproval,
of still being misunderstood,
of unfair treatment,
the less pain disturbs you or distracts you. The meaningful process of sorting these out with others supporting you to succeed can be richly satisfying. If left unprocessed, such residual pain can slip into biostructural pain.
3. Your Biostructural pain
“When you repress your anger,” John Powell asserts, “your stomach keeps score.” Ignore your emotional warnings too long, and your body signals the problem down another path.
Repressed fear can reemerge as a headache. Suppressed depression can resurface as lethargy. Rejected anxiety may rebound in explosive anger.
While you understandably don’t desire any of these, each tries to serve your need to be aware of threats to be removed. The more you can appreciate such pain and start removing the report threat, the more each pain can go away. Pain seems to be nature’s least appreciated gift.
Ignored threats to your functioning can easily distort your biological and psychological processing of pain. You feel hurt somehow and not recognize the immediate source for that pain.
This pain could account for the identified chemical imbalances associated with depression that psychiatric meds seek to relieve. This could also account, in more severe cases, for the severe cognitive distortions among the most violent.
Consider these three examples of emotionally based biostructural pain.
Biostructural pain at work. Your persisting yet unmet need for your boss’s affirmation looks for another way to be addressed, creating an obsessive craving that feeds your addictions.
Biostructural pain amidst political tension. The more you suppress your anger toward others of an opposing view without trying to understand them, the more your headache returns.
Biostructural pain from a wrongful conviction. Your fear of being denied on denial gradually turns to anger as you find yourself increasingly disillusioned with the criminal justice system.
Biostructural pain will likely be difficult to reverse in a wellness campaign. During the GROW phase, you start to address the power dynamics trapping you in pain. You cannot remove a cause for pain when it stems from those in power over you needlessly provoking your emotional pain. Together, we incentivize such powerholders to improve their responsiveness to your overlooked needs.
The further you can unpack and process the deeper pain
of addictions masking over other underserved needs,
of headaches and other body aches pointing to your unaddressed needs,
of generalizing outrage that can blind you from specifics you cannot accept,
the closer we get to reaching your ultimate wellness goal. The more underlying needs to process, the longer this process make take. The less of your biostructural pain ever gets processed, the more your body will likely shift into metapain—if not there already.
4. Your Metapain
This is when your body reports a threat of too much pain. The pain load itself becomes the threat you are compelled to remove. At this stage, your wellbeing is threatened by too much pain lingering on for so long.
Your health likely declines, or rapidly collapses. This is late-stage pain suffering. About the only thing worse is death, although some have “opted out” to try to escape such unbearable agony.
While the pain feels like the threat to oppose, it’s only doing its job. The real threat is all those underlying unresolved needs. Pain is not the problem as much as the threats your pain tries to report. When poorly addressed for too long, the pain emerges as another threat to face.
Consider these three examples of emotional metapain.
Metapain at work. All the painful warnings of your unmet need to be valued grows intense enough to be a threat itself, creating more unbearable pain for you to cope with addiction.
Metapain amidst political tension. You feel overwhelmed by so much political angst that your body warns you how it cannot adequately function from too much overwhelming angst.
Metapain from a wrongful conviction. Your unanswered need for exoneration shouts so loudly in your internal system that it creates its own alarming threat to your capacity to fully function.
Metapain can only be reversed in a wellness campaign after addressing enough of the underlying unmet needs prompting the overload of warnings. During the GOAL phase, you receive team support to speak truth to power in a mutualizing way. This incentivizes those in power over you to listen to those impacted. We motivate them to improve each other’s responsiveness to each other’s affected needs, to remove more cause for pain.
Together, we can reduce and eventually remove
much of the pain fueling addictions, or
your overwhelming angst during these conflicted times, or
your agony over overlooked innocence.
At a minimum, we challenge the legitimacy of any powerholder to continue any further negative impact on your inflexible needs. For each unresponsive powerholder, we initiate what we call a scorn campaign. Because we’re serious about removing—and not merely easing—your pain.
Removing all types of pain by resolving all needs
The wellness campaign supports you to go from coping with your pain to stopping it. Because a life full of pain is a life filled with too many unmet needs.
Anankelogy gives you understanding to better relate to your pain. Need-response with its wellness campaign gives you tools to better address and ultimately remove your pain.
To remove your pain, you must first face and embrace your pain. You will be more successful overcoming your pain if nurturing your “easement orientation” toward resolving needs over relieving pain. The Anankelogy Foundation provides you with a program to do just that.
Join us in growing a movement toward greater wellness among us all. Start your journey by joining this free online program that gives you the tools to start removing your pain, by getting to the source of it all.
Your responsiveness to these types of pain
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