Often in our lives we find ourselves dealing with pain, our own or that of others.

As a consultant to parents of exceptionally and profoundly gifted children, I often find myself speaking on the phone with desperate parents who are dealing with considerable pain, their children’s and their own. They expect to learn from me the way to solve their problem, to take away the pain. But the difficult truth is that for one reason or another many of the situations they and their children are contending with cannot, at least in the short run, be fixed. I can’t take away the pain. Not every difficult situation is a problem that can be solved. Some are true dilemmas in which every available choice has negative -- painful -- consequences. Instead of finding the answer, or the best answer, we are left with trying to decide which is the least harmful one. Time and time again I have hung up the phone after a conversation with a parent and cried, feeling the intensity of the family’s pain and knowing I couldn’t take it away.

Over the years I have come to realize that what many of us need even more than solutions to an immediately painful problem, is a way of seeing the inevitable pain of life that is healthier than our standard cultural view, and a set of strategies (what one mother called a “nifty tool kit”) to help us deal with pain,


Confronting the Issue

Pain isn’t a subject that we often address directly, and that may be one reason why we don’t cope with it very well. Our culture’s attitude is anything but helpful. Watch a little commercial television and you’ll see the two most common responses to pain. The first is “Have a pain? Take a pill.”

That used to be the response to physical pain, but lately it has grown to include emotional or psychic pain. In a culture that claims to want to keep its children off drugs, drugs are pushed to adults at every turn. Pharmaceutical remedies are now promoted not just for headaches, stomach aches, sore muscles and heartburn, but for depression (often loosely defined), extreme sensitivity, and shyness (newly dubbed social anxiety disorder). Worse, these pharmaceutical remedies, without studies to prove either their safety or effectiveness for adolescents and children, are more and more being suggested for (and given to) adolescents, children and even toddlers.

The second response is “do something to fix the situation that causes pain and if it can’t be fixed, hire a lawyer and sue someone.” If it can’t be fixed, the reasoning seems to be, the perpetrators should be identified and punished and we should be monetarily compensated.

While either of these responses might be appropriate in certain situations, the idea that all pain can or should be addressed by one or the other suggests that pain is an aberration, that we somehow have an inalienable right to a pain-free existence. If we encounter pain there is something wrong, someone to blame, and a critical need to stop the pain immediately. But the truth is that life includes pain. For everyone.


Pain Thresholds

It’s important, of course, to recognize that pain, whether physical or psychological, is an individual matter. What causes one person enormous pain may give someone else little more than minor discomfort. We need to be aware of individual differences in the perception of pain, the reaction to pain and the expression of pain. In a situation that most people would deem painful, some people show little or no reaction. There are several possible explanations for this. They may genuinely not feel pain, or they may feel it but deny it or refuse to focus their attention on it, or they may feel it strongly but hide the feeling from others. When two people are dealing with a painful situation, differing pain thresholds or differing modes of expression can cause confusion, misunderstanding and sometimes serious relational difficulties.

When my own son was in a class of older children in which classmates often bullied him and the teacher frequently reminded everyone of how much younger he was, I took him to see a psychologist because I was afraid that his generally cheerful appearance was hiding a level of pain and stress that should be addressed. The psychologist assured me that he was just fine; my son thought the bullying said more about the bullies than about himself, he rather liked the teacher and so allowed the belittling comments to roll off his back, and his cheerful appearance reflected the fact that he was a very cheerful kid! What I would have found painful, he was able to take in stride.

On the other hand, an extremely sensitive child who hasn’t been taught to distinguish between levels of pain may go into paroxysms of agony over every tiny bump in the emotional road so that parents become desensitized to the constant expression of pain. They may then ignore serious alarm bells. Or they may become so impatient with the whole issue that they give the child the message that unusual sensitivity is a shameful thing. My father, of stoical German heritage, must have been totally stumped by the problem of raising a “skinless” and highly emotional child. Having done his best to outlaw feelings, he made it clear to me that strong people not only didn’t show pain, they didn’t have it in the first place. Pain in our family was proof of poor character, weakness, failure. I’ve often thought how much easier it would have been on my father to raise my cheerful son instead of me!

It is important to mention that there are a few children, whom some would call “old souls,” who seem naturally able to handle pain in a unique way. They can apparently do with it what a Buddhist compassion meditation is designed to allow the meditator to do -- absorb the pain of the world, process it through the heart with compassion, and send it out into the world again as love. Parents lucky enough to have one of these rare children, may be able to learn far more about handling pain than they teach.


Perceptions, Definitions and Meaning

How do you perceive and define pain? What does it mean to you? The answers to these questions determine your ability to cope with it.

As parents, it is our responsibility to keep our children from harm. If we equate pain with harm, then we will think it’s our job to keep our children from experiencing pain -- an impossibility that will create even more pain for us and for them when it comes in spite of our best efforts to keep it at bay. If we think pain is some kind of punishment or an unfair visitation of unnecessary distress, then our ability to contend with it will be marginal. It can grow beyond the immediate experience and take on implications of guilt, injustice, or the hostility of a vengeful god or a malign universe, which can be overwhelming. If this is how we view pain, we are likely to teach our children to ignore, deny, run from or blame themselves or others for pain that can’t be immediately stopped, fixed or avoided. In the worst case scenario this perception of pain can lead to addictions, bitterness, withdrawal or suicide.

All religious traditions address the issue of pain in one way or another and a family’s religion or spiritual heritage is likely to have important effects on their understanding of pain’s meaning. These effects can be positive or negative, depending on the tradition and on the interpretation of its teachings the family subscribes to. But whether you have a religious or spiritual tradition or not, you have a cosmology, a belief system about what the universe is like and what your place in it is, you will teach this cosmology to your children, if not by word, then by modeling. Einstein is quoted as saying that the most important question each person must answer is whether the universe is a hostile or a friendly place. It will be far easier to handle your own pain and model good strategies for your children, if you believe in a friendly universe!

Practice

The following tools are readily available to anyone of any age, but all of them require practice. That’s why some of the people most able to handle pain are those who have had the most pain in their lives. The more we use the tools, the better we get at using them and the better they work. Pain is an excellent motivator, and for some it’s quite enough. Others would rather moan and groan and whine about pain, or grit their teeth and stoically endure it, or shriek and rage about having to encounter it, than put out personal effort to cope with it.

Using the following tools may require going against a good deal of conditioning, or against our own natural tendencies. If we tend to run from pain, for instance, it isn’t going to be easy to get ourselves to turn around and face it. But the tools work. They don’t take pain out of the world, but they can literally turn lives around and bring light into darkness.


Ten Tools for the “Nifty Tool Kit”

1. Acceptance.
Accept that pain is part of life, neither unfair nor intended to ruin your day or your children’s childhood. Accepting pain allows you to move through it and out the other side, while denying it shoves it inside, where it does not vanish, but remains and often festers. Accepting pain instead of denying or covering it up, allows us to feel it, experience it for as long as it lasts, and then let it go. Accepting it lets us discover that it can and most often naturally will go. Once out on the other side of a painful experience, we are likely to discover that something very important has been learned that could have been learned no other way.

Rarely a kind or level of pain (either physical or psychological) may be encountered that does not go. (Losing a child is an example. Few parents feel they can “come out the other side” of such pain.) But even in such a case, it is possible to discover, if one is able to enter rather than resisting it, that the pain is not static. It flows and changes, sometimes affecting us more strongly, sometimes less. At times its intensity will blot out all other sensation. At other times it recedes into the background and the variety of life experiences can continue. Accepting its permanence allows one to give up a level of focus and resistance that keeps pain in the center of one’s awareness.

2. “One Day at a Time” or “Day-tight Compartments”
The Bible says “Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof.” If we can keep our attention confined to a small space, the pain that fills that space will be easier to handle. In times of moderate pain that space may be a day; in times of intense pain that space may be a minute or even a second. It’s possible to endure something briefly that we can’t imagine enduring for a long time. If we focus on the moment, we can get through just this one, then just this one, then just this one. If we look back at all the other bad moments there have been and extrapolate from that an infinite number of future bad moments, they all run together into a single eternal pain and we’re likely not to be able to handle it.

3. The Blanket.
Many children, like Linus, have “security blankets” that provide more than security. They provide comfort. It is important to find out what soothes and comforts us, what soothes and comforts each of our children, and then provide it whenever possible during painful times. It may be a warm bubble bath or a long walk or a cuddle and a story. Whether for us or for our children, it’s important not to think of this as indulgence, but as healing medicine.

My parents’ generation disallowed thumb-sucking and bemoaned the introduction of pacifiers. The excuse was teeth -- thumb-sucking led to braces. But the underlying reason was that the cultural traditions of their time suggested that comforting a child would make him weak. There is nothing inherently weakening in comfort during a rough time, for a child or for an adult. As long as the mode of comfort doesn’t cause immediate or future pain of its own (like alcohol or drugs or too much sugar or chocolate) the dosage may be increased as the need increases.

My parents’ generation was not entirely wrong, however. As important as it is to provide comfort, we also need to expect and encourage healing and moving on. Carried too far, offered too often or for too long, comfort can become an end in itself. Providing plenty of love and attention when pain isn’t in the picture can help avoid this problem.

4. Other People.
We need each other. One of the most important uses of community is support during bad times. In a busy and mobile culture it can be difficult to establish and maintain as many human-to-human ties as we need. The first step is to actively seek them out, either in person or through electronic connection, and the second step is to take very good care of the friends we do find. It’s easy for people with lots of interests to get so busy that we forget to nurture our relationships. We need to be sure to call or visit friends (and family, where family members provide caring and support) and arrange for our children to do the same. Write letters. Exchange e-mail. We need to spend time with the people we care about. Time is vital to building relationships.

And don’t forget the value of pets for both children and adults. Animals provide enormous support, sympathy and love, and we can gain balance and perspective from the care and love we offer them.

5. Helping Somebody Else.
Every year during the holidays newspapers are full of advice to those who find the holidays depressing -- get out and volunteer to make a pleasant holiday for someone else. Helping somebody else is an excellent way to keep us from being overwhelmed by our own troubles. Sometimes, in the process, we find people whose pain is far greater than our own and we realize that things aren’t quite so bad as we thought. Other times, we simply substitute helping (and the good feeling that brings) for hurting. Children who grow up with a family tradition of helping others are likely to carry it on through their lives.

6. “This Too Shall Pass”
Nothing remains. Nothing stays the same. One of my own favorite sayings is “there are no caves, only tunnels.” It reminds me that no matter how dark and small a space I may be in, there’s a way not just out, but through. And outside there’s light.

Telling ourselves that nothing lasts reminds us that no pain is forever. But there’s another benefit to it as well. Knowing that good things also pass encourages us to appreciate them while they last.

7. Breathing.
Focusing on the breath is a technique the Lamaze method teaches for dealing with pain during childbirth and it is the foundation of many meditation practices that work to reduce levels of stress and pain. We all breathe, but seldom do we notice. Conscious breathing is a tool that’s easy to learn, works quickly, and can be used virtually any time, anywhere, under any circumstances. The more you practice it the more quickly it will work to calm and center you. Begin by simply noticing your breath, not trying to control it, just noticing each intake and each out breath. Gradually let your breathing deepen and slow, concentrating on the sensations as the breath moves into and through you.

Most of us breathe from our chests rather than our diaphragms, and changing that can increase the effectiveness of the breathing technique. Take a deep breath and watch to see whether it is your chest or your stomach that moves. If it’s your chest, see if you can change the way you are breathing so that the movement happens below your rib cage. A quick way to switch from chest-breathing to diaphragmatic breathing is to take a very deep breath and then let it out in a hard, fast sigh. Doing it once or twice usually accomplishes the switch.

As simple as the breathing technique sounds, it is amazingly effective. Practicing it regularly can make it an important part of daily life. Paradoxically, while it softens the affects of pain or stress, conscious breathing also increases our awareness of positive feelings by bringing us into the moment to experience them more fully.

8. A “Terrific Things” list
Bernie Siegel, an M.D. who has worked with cancer patients throughout his career, often advises people who are dealing with life and death issues to make a list of the terrific things that have happened to them in the last week and then share it with someone. It is very easy to notice what hurts, so that in really rough times we may quickly come to believe that pain is all there is. Making a conscious effort to find something “terrific” in every day changes our focus.

When we are consciously looking for terrific things there turn out to be many more of them than we thought. Most of us have had the experience of learning a new word and then hearing or seeing it used all around us, or buying a car and noticing how many others of the same model are on the road. When we are on the alert for something, we see it; when we aren’t, we are likely to miss it even when it’s right in front of us.

Since everything is relative, what we label “terrific” during a smooth part of our life’s journey might be something spectacular, like winning the lottery, while in a very rough time it might be the song of a bird or a glimpse of a brilliant sunset. The important issue here is not what the terrific thing is, but that we identify it as terrific!

9. A gratitude list
This is a common tool in twelve step programs. It can be difficult to be grateful for anything during a time of great pain. But if we take the task seriously and start with the goal of finding five or ten things we are grateful for, and do this every day for a week or a month, our feelings can begin to change. Sometimes we find that there are actually more things to be grateful for than to be hurting about, whether the painful situation that drove us to using this tool has changed or not.

Sometimes a kind of spiritual miracle can occur doing this exercise. We can come close to feeling, if not fully understanding, the mystery of pain. If we concentrate hard enough on gratitude, we may eventually find ourselves able to be grateful not just for the things outside of or around the pain (like being able to see, or to walk, or to think or not having been hit by a bus today) but for the event or the person causing us pain, and eventually for the pain itself. We may discover that pain sharpens our whole experience of life.

10. Joy
How can this be a tool for dealing with pain, when pain and joy seem to be polar opposites? Because joy can be a fundamental aspect of life that exists for us at all times, in all places, whether pain exists simultaneously or not. It can be the underlying energy of life itself.

Many of us are looking for happiness -- its pursuit is a right guaranteed to Americans. We expect happiness to be a big thing, long lasting, we hope even permanent. The idea is that when we find happiness, all the negatives will be superseded and disappear in its constant glow.

Joy is different. It is incredibly bright, but may seem brief, fleeting, because we are so much more likely to focus in another direction. We need to teach ourselves to notice it. Being able to notice it, being determined to notice it, turns it from a fleeting moment to the foundation of all our experience, available to us even when pain brings darkness.

There is a picture book by Leo Lionni titled Frederick. If you don’t know it, it’s worth finding, for yourself as well as for children of any age. It is the story of a mouse who, while the other mice are industriously storing up seeds for the winter, is merely standing and looking -- at the sun, at the trees, at the sky. The other mice think he is wasting his time, but he tells them he is working just as they are. Later, during the long hard winter, the mice gradually eat up their whole store of seeds and find themselves cold and hungry. It is then that Frederick shares what he has stored up. He turns his memories of summer beauty into words and fills the cold dark place with light and warmth and beauty.

Frederick is one of those simple, classic stories that work on many levels. It can be seen as a celebration of art and artists. But it is also a story about the truth and strength of joy. Storing images of beauty, moments of noticed joy, from our daily lives is something each of us can do if we choose to do it. The greater our store of bright moments, the more aware we will be of their constant presence, their instant availability no matter how dark the world seems at the moment.


Perspective and Choice

You may have noticed that the last three tools seem to be just different ways of saying the same thing. At the bottom of the nifty tool kit there is what might be called the Swiss Army knife of tools. It does everything. It’s perspective.

Everything in our life view depends on perspective, viewpoint, the place we’re standing at the moment. Photographers know that standing in one spot and shooting a picture five times can give five entirely different photos, depending on the angle of the camera or the focus. An inch this way, an inch that way, and the whole picture changes. Focus close or focus far, and the picture changes. Face into the light or away from it, and it changes. We are always in control of our perspective. We can change focus, back off, take a larger view.

In his powerful book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says, “We must never forget that we may...find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation -- just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer -- we are challenged to change ourselves.” [1]

Changing our perspective, changing ourselves, is a choice. It may not be easy, but it is always possible. Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that, whatever the life situation, whatever the pain, each of us always has that choice.

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[1]. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984, p. 116.


For more than 20 years, Stephanie S. Tolan, poet, playwright and award-winning author of novels for children and young adults, and co-author of Guiding the Gifted Child, has also been a consultant to parents and educators about the needs, both educational and social/emotional, of children who are considered highly to profoundly gifted. These are children whose “asynchronous development” puts them out of sync with the expectations of society and sometimes even their own families, and also out of sync within themselves. By the very nature of their differences, these children (and their families) often deal with considerable psychological pain. This article is a more general version of one written to help these families deal with the pain they face. It offers a “handy tool kit” that anyone can use to deal with the inevitable pain of life.