Is Pain Good for Us?
I had a massage recently, and let’s just say it wasn’t exactly relaxing.
There were moments when the massage therapist found a knot and pressed into it, and my immediate reaction was, Wow, that hurts.
But I didn’t ask her to stop.
In fact, part of me knew that the discomfort was exactly why I was there. Something was tight. Something needed attention. The pain wasn’t the goal, but it was part of getting to the place I wanted to be.
And that got me thinking about pain in general.
Is pain actually good for us?
Obviously, not all pain is good. There is pain that is inflicted on us by other people. Cruelty, abuse, violence, betrayal. I don’t believe there is some hidden lesson we are obligated to find in someone deliberately hurting us. Sometimes pain is simply wrong, and getting away from it is the lesson.
But there is another kind of pain.
The pain life gives us.
Heartbreak.
Failure.
Disappointment.
Loss.
Regret.
Rejection.
Mistakes.
The moments when something we desperately wanted doesn’t happen, or something we never expected suddenly changes our lives.
We don’t ask for those kinds of pain.
But perhaps we can learn from them.
Think about that knot in my back. The therapist didn’t create the problem. She found something that was already there and worked on it. The discomfort was unpleasant, but it was also revealing something that needed attention.
Life can do something similar.
Sometimes pain exposes a knot we didn’t know was there.
A relationship ends, and we discover something about what we need from another person.
We make a mistake, and we learn something about ourselves.
We lose something, and suddenly realize how much it mattered.
We get rejected, and discover that rejection doesn’t actually define our worth.
We fail at something, and learn that failure isn’t the same thing as being a failure.
None of this makes the pain pleasant.
And I don’t think we should romanticize suffering. Pain doesn’t automatically make us wiser. Some pain simply hurts. Some experiences leave scars. Sometimes people go through terrible things and the only honest response is that it was terrible.
But when pain does come into our lives, we have a choice about what we do with it afterward.
We can keep pressing on the bruise forever.
Or we can ask, What is this trying to show me?
Maybe that’s where growth happens.
Not in the pain itself, but in what we do after it.
I’ve made enough mistakes in my life to know that I don’t want to make all of them twice.
Some lessons were expensive.
Some were heartbreaking.
Some took years to understand.
But I wouldn’t want to erase all of them if erasing them also meant erasing what they taught me.
Because some of the person I am today was built from experiences I would never voluntarily repeat.
That’s a strange thing about life. We don’t necessarily become stronger because something hurt us. Sometimes we become stronger because we learned from what hurt us.
The massage eventually ends. The muscles relax. The knot loosens. And maybe life is a little like that. A painful experience arrives. We don’t understand it. We resist it. We wonder why it is happening.
Then, slowly, we work through it.
We learn.
We adjust.
We become a little more aware of ourselves. And eventually, we move differently.
Maybe that’s what pain can give us not a reason to be grateful for suffering, but an opportunity to become more conscious of how we want to live.
So perhaps the question isn’t really:
“Is pain good?”
Maybe the better question is:
“What can I learn from the pain I didn’t choose?”
Because I don’t want to go looking for pain. I’ve had enough of it. But when life inevitably brings it, I hope I can recognize that even though I didn’t choose the experience, I can still choose what I do with it.
Maybe I can loosen the knot.
Maybe I can learn why it formed.
And maybe, most importantly, I can try not to tie the same knot again.
“There are two kinds of pain in this world. The pain that hurts, the pain that alters.” – The Equalizer 2 (2018)