D06 Pain Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Pain is pain and desire is desire and there is little these have in common.

OR

Unsatisfied desire can present as a threat that you experience it as a form of pain.

Anankelogy

If you haven’t eaten anything in over a day, your craving for food naturally grows intense. Eventually, your hunger feels painful. Your body warns of a threat to your access to food. And you feel that warningas a form of pain.

Just as “biostructural pain” sends missed warnings to your body to experience, you can also experience in your body the missed signal to replenish something emotional. The more you ignore your feelings of isolation and loneliness, for example, the more your body may warn you of this threat to your full functioning by prompting you to feel intensely hungry for interpersonal connection. You know when you misinterpret this feeling as literal hunger when the feeling persists no matter how much you eat or drink.

When feeling a burning hunger even after enjoying a full meal, ask yourself, What must I replenish in my life? When feeling thirsty for something sweet or for something intoxicating, ask yourself why? What emotional need have I been neglecting?

Dig deeper still and you may realize you are not so much missing the message but feel powerless to do much about it. Need-response addresses these deeper causes to your unquenchable desires.

Need-response

Need-response challenges our popular consumerism reactions. Instead of placating any hunger or thirst with something pleasurable to eat or drink, we drill down to identify and address your neglected emotional needs.

Reactive Problem

The more powerless you feel you can fully satisfy your emotional needs, the more vulnerable to reacting to your unquenchable desires. Conventional wisdom touts willpower and your responsibility to make proper choices. But you can only choose options available to you at the moment of these emotional and physical needs.

If you require a moment of solitude to reconnect with your authentic self, but must acquiesce to powerful pressures to forgo solitude—less you lose your freedom or means of income—no amount of willpower or right choices will matter much. Such popular philosophies, although grounded in reliable wisdom, tends to pull us into reacting to our pain. To distract us from ultimately resolving our painful needs.

Responsive Solution

Need-response address the power relation dynamics that easily interfere with your ability to fully resolve all of your needs. The NR301 program equips you with a viable way to incentivize the powerful to respond better to these overlooked needs.

You learn to approach them as an equal. You’re both human, with real human needs. You both prefer less pain. You both can cause less pain in the other. You both can do more to mutually respect each other’s vulnerable needs.

The more you can help each other to resolve each other’s affected needs, the better you can address your own unsatiable desires. There is no such thing as desire apart from some need to replenish what your body reports as lacking.

If the primary resource you need to fully function proves inaccessible, your body suggests an alternative. If that’s unavailable, you can always pursue some substitute that only eases the pain. But if those in powerful positions seek legitimacy, let them enable you to access more of the primary resources your life naturally desires to fully function in life.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs? Post in our Engagement forum your thoughtful response to one of these:

• How can I tell the difference between emotional and physical hunger during a fast?

• How does this relate to overeating and any associated health problems?

• The more I can fully function after addressing each need, the less hungry I notice myself feeling.

• Will eating properly help me recognize when my hunger reports something I must replenish?

Instead of selecting one of these, post your own engagement feedback about your experience with the subject of this principle. 

Remember the aim is to improve our responsiveness to each other’s needs, toward their full resolution. If you’re new at posting here, first check the guide below.