Why do bad things happen to good people?
This is the central question of religion. It further is a central question for understanding ‘pain’ in psychiatry.
All pain is a ‘psychosomatic’ phenomena. Psychosomatic means that body and mind are involved in the experience. Psychosomatic does not mean speak to cause and effect but does speak to associated phenomena and potential contributing factors and possibly a different approach to solution.
For example a child is caned and strapped.. I pick this example because being caned and strapped was a recurrent experience of my own attending Viscount Alexander and Vincent Massey High School in Fort Gary Manitoba. Fortunately this was not a routine occurrence though physical punishment by school administration was normal for a previous generation. Death by school caning was a social problem that preceded Japan’s embarking on WWII. It should be noted that while Nazi brutality has been extensively documented so that the word Nazi conjures up brutality, Japanese brutality is similarly understood in the east in all the countries which Japan invaded.
What is good. What is bad are questions of ‘interpretation’ and ‘morality’ not at all so obvious as some would argue.
The Japanese perceived their corporal ‘punishment’ of students as did the administration at my school in Winnipeg. The Nazi’s felt the same. The history of the world tells us that corporal punishment was indeed the norm for all nations with rare exception. Consider simply the history of punishment in the Royal Navy, the leader of civilization and guiding light of the world, until the redistribution of power in the early 20th century. Records of hundreds of lashes slowly are reduced to tens of lashes and it was not uncommon for sailors to experience permanent mainming or death from their ‘correction’. Further minor faults were very aggressively punished and only slowly was the ‘rod spared’ for worse crimes. In Islam today according to Islamic laws , which some describe as barbaric, since the punishments went out of vogue sometimes hundreds of years past, the cruelty and offence of punishment remains as a historic note for all nations.
Hollywood would have us believe in the chivalric notion of the loving kind mother showing great sentimentality by heroines when faced with unpleasant punishments on the live screen. Unfortunately this marketting to the ‘fairer sex’ for the pure purpose of selling dish soap is a travesty of abuse of public education as propaganda. Attending my first boxing match I was shocked to see how lustful and violent the women audience were. Historically matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy has been associated with torture and punishment.
What did occur historically was that race horse trainers did note that a different approach to training from whipping gave better results. Doystoyevski’s portrayal of the man beating his horse to death is an obvious example of the limits of corporal punishment. The Japanese government actually had to have committees to look into the death rate of children in institutions from corporal punishment.
Further modern psychology especially forensic psychology became interested in Sadomasochism, an ongoing issue of Hollywood and the upper classes in general. Just as today we know that pedophiles flocked to the church for access to the children so sadists flocked to positions such as prison guards and police for their access. Not much different than alcoholics seeking work as bar tenders or sex addicts seeking work as prostitutes. Obviously the majority are motivated by money and more lofty aspirations or driven by need rather than greed. Still this significant minority are attracted to these positions of power simply for the means to act out their aberrant tendencies or desires.
Now move forward a half century and note the advances in what people historically called civilization. I remember being strapped by teachers in elementary school and while others in my class probably don’t remember the day I certainly remember when the strap was removed from the classroom, teachers denied the right to corporally punish students and this moved to the sole domain of the Principals Office. I graduated before Principals were denied their bit of physical activity and would only be billy clubbed by guards and surreptitiously physically punished in custody. It was frowned upon by even my early 20’s when I was involved in demonstrations to leave evidence of injury. It has been decades now since anyone in authority has physically abused me though I continue to be exposed to repeated verbal abuse and public humiliation and exhaustive shaming.
Raising white chickens I learned that the chicken with a black feather was visciously attacked by the other chickens. This is natures way of removing aberrant genes from the gene pool and one of the reasons that Utopian Darwinism is questioned as genetic difference is removed rather than celebrated in nature normally.
In my study of the Canadian school when I was interested in birth defect, IQ and school drop out I found that public schools punished the slow learner and the fast learner. Not surprisingly the slow students dropped out. What was offensive to those who’d asked me to study the matter, where I first learned that politics funded research was my finding that the students smarter than teachers and administration, the high IQ kids were also dropping out of school.. The public school faced with ‘one shoe’ for all served the masses but not the “deviants.”, euphemistically termed “outliers” by those secure in their mediocrity.
Apparently I had a high IQ. Whatever that represents, blessing or curse.
But I was beaten repeatedly for correcting teachers and to this day am punished for pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes.
I’m kind of autistic in this regard and have taken delight in a new Canadian television show called the Good Doctor. I self identify and story tellers have long known that even children love a story in which they can see themselves. I’m delighted with the excellent ratings of the show because I expect that it speaks to Canada as a ‘colonial’ nation more than it speaks to medicine.
In a Colonial nation there is a fixed upper class. Here in British Columbia, the game was rigged in the last generation for the English immigrant to win. In Quebec the French born person is a Royalty and Canadian life has it’s apartheid but it’s not so much by colour but by class, origin and family. When I lived in England I saw very quickly that upward mobility and wealth in society was relatively easy if your family was wealthy for generations and you’d been to the proper school to get the right education.
Dr. Jordan Peterson has pointed out some 10% of students due to lower IQ or even lower emotional IQ are ill fitted for modern society and unlikely to find even work easy. The rise of the peasant class. Brutal maniacal killers like Lenin were able in an earlier generation to claim to represent these ‘masses’ and there by gain fortune and power for his own deeply evil designs as a mass murderer. Hitler similarly used this means to elevate himself. Today the closest we compare is late night shows with people begging for money for a variety of species of cuddly animals without any concern for reptiles and insects and certainly not the very underprivileged bacteria necessary for life.
How I perceive pain is best seen on a scale 1-10 with the contribution of mind and body being apportioned. Chronic pain is separated from acute pain as acute pain, pain that lasts minutes or days isn’t the burden on society that chronic pain has. Chronic pain is more ‘mental’ as well.
Men who have been caned in studies have been known to experience pain, the same objective physical injury 10 times another person who has not been caned in youth. There is no ‘greater sensitivity ‘ for the upper classes as the white feminists argued when the black feminists challenged them about their relatively safety and security. The universities at the time were doing ‘take back the night’ dances in which more lighting was put on the campuses to protect the privileged upper class feminists when the threat of rape on university campuses was the least in America. By contrast nearby black ghettos were the hotbed of rape and were not funded for ‘lighting’ or even much of a concern to the ‘take back the night’ crowd. This idea of ‘sensitivity’ is itself a luxury of psychological value but not at the physical level. The innocent is immediately more impugned by violence but their background of relative safety and comfort also gives them the means to be resilient and flexible. There is a reason in history for the officer class and the tendency for race horses to be trained with the best of food, shelter, exercises, discipline and training.
Women who have not been informed about menstrual cycles or have been sexually raped by painful intercourse early in life or had negative genital experiences are at great risk of having many times more genital complaints, cramping, abdominal pains etc.
So the question is best considered if the sum total of the pain is 10 and 5 is assumed physical and.5 is assumed psychological is the physical component ‘5’ or 2 and the mental component 1 or 5.
The example of a gunshot wound would appear straightforward ‘physical’ but if the gunshot was occasioned robbing a bank it’s a different ‘experience’ to a gunshot experienced saving the life of a child. The body of a poor or rich man, the actual physiology will have similiar impact. However if a person has been beaten as a child they will fear the pain as greater than a person who has not.
Add to this consideration my patients who are masochists. A group of people for whatever reason have found that inflicting pain while masturbation or during sexual orgasm heightens the perceived enjoyment. There are some neurological components as well as psychological components to be considered but it remains that this person may indeed feel ‘pain’ differently than a person who only experiences pain as a message of harm.
If a professional fighter experiences a blow as compared to an innocent the professional may well ‘know’ the blow was not ‘disabling’ and ‘will heal’ based on previous experience of fights as compared to the ‘shock’ of the innocent who experiences the blow and believes wrongly they are disabled , near death and rather than continue the attack reverts to a fetal position and prays. I rather like the latter though have found when that didn’t work I’ve been forced to salvage what remains of my pride and body by actually fighting back which as original as it seemed the first time has significant historical precedent for stopping the pain.
In my work doing hypnosis and hypnotizing people for surgery I further found that distraction could well ameliorate the experience of pain. I was cutting a person with a knife but I had used hypnosis like I’ve used xylocaine injection to stop the pain. Acupuncture distracts the body. Mentalist apparoaches may work as well as physical approaches. Paradoxically with chronic pain exercise reduces the pain in the long run.
Now this addresses the existence of psychosomatic pain. So pain mostly is bad and good people and people designated as bad can have pain. It’s been said that pain is mandatory but suffering is optional.
If a person considers themselves as bad they will indeed experience or perceive greater pain. Depression prolongs and worsens pain. indeed at one time chronic pain was called ‘somatic depression’. All pain is psychosomatic.
Good people have pain.
Bad things happened to good people. However religious people who perceive negatives in life as ‘lessons’ from God rather than as ‘punishement’ or even as ‘random bad shit’ do better with recovery in general. Chronic pain is addressed in the context of how does it affect what I do compared to what I did. IF I perceived myself as a good person because I was a surgeon and I loose my hand in a criminal minds episode to a cannibal I am more likely to have ‘phantom limb’ pain than perhaps a man who has his hand chopped off in Saudi Arabia for stealing a piece of bread to save the life of his dying child. Understanding the ‘meaning’ of a person and their purpose and the meaning of the ‘pain’ and a person’s ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do alter the perception of pain.
Disability is a further issue because it appears quite surprisingly people who are high paid as beauty contestant judges appear to not experience the disabling pain that people who have similiar injuries do when the latter works 12 hours in a cold stinky outdoor fish plant.
Just some thoughts about pain and perceptions with some ideas about past and present and the understanding that these factors can have and influence and change outcomes and indeed help us to understand better why bad things happen to good people.
This doesn’t even get into the issue of ‘secondary gain’ where a person injured or claiming to be injured when they weren’t even injured can be rewarded for the ‘drama’ of pain presentation. Today some 40% of claims are ‘false claims’ and knowing that should explain to some extent why insurance companies are so slow to ‘assume’ a person is good , despite every special interest group insisting their group doesn’t lie.
In Canada a convicted terrorist who maimed an American soldier was rewarded 10 million dollars.
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