What If Your Emotional Pain Is Trying to Protect You?

I run from pain all the time. It’s what happens when you live with pain all the time. And you’ll never hear me say that the pain of bipolar is a “gift.” But emotional pain, and even physical pain, can sometimes have a purpose. Emotional pain, especially, can be your brain’s way of trying to protect you or, at the very least, communicate with you.

In this piece, we’ll look at what emotional pain and physical pain may be trying to tell you, how to listen without gaslighting yourself, and how that kind of listening can sometimes soften the pain, even when it doesn’t disappear.

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Emotional Pain Isn’t Just Misery; It’s a Message

We are all familiar with emotional pain. Whether it’s the emotional pain of depression, a breakup, or being passed over for a promotion, we all experience emotional pain on a regular basis. And while it’s natural to recoil from pain, that’s automatic and evolutionary; it’s also important to recognize that pain serves as a useful messenger.

Your brain uses emotional pain to get your attention. It’s your brain’s way of saying that something is wrong. For example, why do breakups matter? They matter because they cause pain. If they didn’t cause pain, we would be considerably more likely to break up with anything and anyone that was inconvenient. But that wouldn’t be healthy for us. Bonds are what make us human, and, indeed, happy and content, so when we experience emotional pain, it’s our brain saying that something has gone wrong and is impacting our ability to achieve happiness and contentment.

Physical pain is the same. We experience physical pain because something is physically wrong in our lives. Emotional and physical pain are the wake-up calls that tell us to pay attention.

How Emotional and Physical Pain Work Like Alarm Systems

Emotional and physical pain are used as alarms specifically because we pay attention to them. If pain didn’t hurt, if it weren’t negative, if it weren’t something we didn’t enjoy, we wouldn’t be motivated to avoid it.

Take the simple example of putting your hand on a hot stove. You immediately feel high degrees of physical pain. This unpleasant feeling warns us that we are in danger and we have to get out of that danger immediately. This makes us take our hand off the stove. Physical pain is a survival mechanism.

But the surprising thing to some people is that emotional pain is a survival skill too. While, in theory, I would love to never spend another moment in emotional pain, that would actually be harmful to me. My emotional pain tells me that something is wrong and that I need to take action. I need to rectify the pain, and in doing so, my life will get better.

Take the example of emotional abuse. If someone emotionally abuses you, it hurts. That’s really important because without that pain, we wouldn’t be motivated to end the abuse. If we never ended the abuse, we would lose the ability to have a happy and healthy life. Pain actually helps us by telling us that something is wrong and needs to be corrected.

How Alike Are Physical Pain and Emotional Pain?

I keep lumping emotional pain and physical pain together, and there’s a reason for that.

If it feels like a breakup “physically hurts,” that’s not just poetry. Brain-imaging studies show that social rejection and exclusion light up some of the same regions involved in the unpleasant side of physical pain. These areas help register how bad something feels, whether it’s a broken bone or a broken heart.

Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues have argued that this “shared circuitry” reflects how evolution wired us to treat social threats almost as seriously as physical ones: being rejected or abandoned used to be a genuine survival risk. So, both emotional and physical pain act like ancient alarm systems, driving us to pull our hand off the stove and to move toward safer people, safer situations, and better care.

Common Messages Hidden Inside Emotional Pain

Physical pain often communicates pretty directly. Physical pain tends to be acute. You stub your toe, you feel pain, and you’re motivated to be more mindful of the cat’s scratching post next time. Or, you’re in a car accident and you experience pain from your injuries, telling you to get help so you can heal.

But emotional pain communicates with us too, although we sometimes don’t pay attention as closely. In fact, many of us find it easy to just plain ignore emotional pain.

For example, emotional pain might happen because:

• You’re overworked and need a break
• You’re experiencing loss and need support.
• You’re in an unethical situation and need to act in alignment with your values.
• You’re being ignored and need to assert a boundary.

And so on. But while physical pain can leave obvious marks like a bruise or cut, emotional pain does not. This makes some people ignore their emotional pain — at their own peril, however.

Types of Emotional Pain

So, if we understand that emotional and physical pain are alarm bells that are trying to get our attention, it truly behooves us to listen. If you don’t listen to your physical pain, you’ll end up with a badly burned hand. If you don’t listen to your emotional pain, you’ll end up with an unhappy and discontented life.

The trouble with emotional pain is that many of us find it harder to understand its message. One reason is that emotional pain comes in so many flavors. It can be:

And, oh, so many more.

You can think of emotional pain as any negative emotion (although negativity is in the eye of the beholder).

How to Listen to Your Emotional Pain

But just like you need to listen to your physical pain to avoid bodily hurt and injury and facilitate physical health, you need to listen to your emotional pain to avoid long-term unhappiness and facilitate mental health.

It’s easy to listen to emotional pain when the reason is obvious and a well-recognized source of pain, like a breakup. We all know that breakups hurt. It’s not hard to ask ourselves why we are grieving post-breakup. Most people know it’s important to deal with that grief and other types of pain during that time so we can heal and be ready for the next relationship.

But it’s harder to listen to and deal with emotional pain when the antecedent is more obtuse. For example, what about a person who offers backhanded compliments?

• “Oh, you look great compared to the last time I saw you.”
• “You know a lot for a person that doesn’t read.”
• “You have a nice face for your age.”

Comments like these will make you feel bad, even if you don’t consciously know why.

But if you find yourself feeling negative emotions (pain) after interacting with someone, it’s important to figure out why. So, you can ask yourself:

1. How am I feeling?
2. When did I feel this way?
3. Did something happen to provoke these feelings?
4. What are these feelings trying to tell me?
5. What do I need to do to heal from this pain?
6. How can I avoid this in the future?

And remember, these questions are rooted in self-kindness and self-compassion, so when you answer them, do so gently and with the same love you would offer a friend.

Once you have thought about the above, it’s time to thank your pain for getting you to pay attention and for helping to protect you.

After backhanded compliments, you might say:

1. I am feeling bad about myself. My self-esteem “hurts.”
2. I started feeling this way after a conversation with my coworker.
3. What my coworker said to me made me feel bad.
4. My pain is trying to tell me that it isn’t okay to be insulted, even if it’s wrapped in a compliment, and even if the other person didn’t mean it.
5. I need to remind myself that I don’t deserve to be insulted and that my self-esteem is not contingent on the views of others.
6. To avoid this in the future, I need to be assertive with my coworker and tell her when a comment she makes is unkind or makes me feel uncomfortable.

I then might say, “I thank my pain for protecting my self-esteem.”

These six steps can be used when dealing with huge or tiny emotional pain. However, the steps can be more complicated when the pain is severe or complex. Each step can take a lot of self-interrigation and may require the assistance of a professional.

When You Can’t Just ‘Fix’ What Hurts

Of course, sometimes pain points to something you can’t easily change. You may know a relationship is unhealthy, but you’re financially tied to the person. You may recognize that your job is slowly grinding you down, but you need the health insurance. You may know your housing situation is unsafe, but you have nowhere else to go. Pain can still be telling the truth even when you’re stuck.

In those situations, the message of pain isn’t, “Why haven’t you fixed this yet?” It’s more like, “This is serious. You deserve care and protection here.” Sometimes, the most you can do in the moment is very small: tell one safe person what’s going on, set one tiny boundary, make one appointment, or start planning for a future change instead of demanding an immediate escape.

Listening to your pain doesn’t mean you have to blow up your life overnight. It means you take your own suffering seriously, even if the next step is only half an inch forward. And if all you can do right now is say, “This hurts, and it’s not okay that I’m going through this,” that is still honoring the message. Your conversation with pain is valid even when your options are limited.

How to Talk to Chronic Emotional Pain

I suffer from chronic pain. I suffer from chronic emotional pain and chronic physical pain. And while these pains are disease-driven, it doesn’t mean that they are without meaning, and it doesn’t mean that talking to them is without benefit.

Take suffering from depression, for example. Yes, depression is an illness stemming from bad signals in my brain. True. But it’s rarely that simple. For example, looking at the six steps:

1. I am feeling sad.
2. I started feeling sad when I was 19 and at university.
3. The stress of trying to get a computer science degree may have contributed to my pain.
4. My sadness is trying to tell me that something is wrong in my life (and, in the case of depression, my brain).
5. I need to reduce my stress to increase the likelihood that I will feel better. I need help to heal from the sadness that is part of depression.
6. I need to find and stick to helpful treatments to get well now and stay well in the future.

I thank my pain for getting my attention and telling me to get help before things got worse.

When Chronic Pain Is All Talked Out

If you have chroinic pain, you may heard the chronic pain message a thousand times. You already know you’re sick. You already know your life is limited. You already know you need help. The pain keeps screaming anyway. It’s not that you’re refusing to listen; it’s that the message has stopped being new.

In those cases, the meaning of chronic pain may be much simpler than we want it to be. Sometimes the only honest message is: “This is big. This is ongoing. You deserve support, accommodations, and real treatment for this.”

Chronic pain often outlasts whatever originally set it off, especially in conditions like depression, bipolar disorder, trauma-related disorders, fibromyalgia, or nerve damage. The brain and nervous system can get stuck in pain mode long after the original fire has burned out.

That doesn’t mean you’ve failed to decode your pain properly. It doesn’t mean there’s some magical lesson you haven’t learned yet. It just means your system is injured or wired differently and needs ongoing care. Listening to chronic pain might look less like, “What do you need me to change?” and more like, “How can I wrap more support, treatment, and gentleness around this reality?”

It’s okay if chronic pain feels meaningless or unfair. You don’t have to force a silver lining to justify your suffering. But you are allowed to hate the pain and still be curious about it. You’re allowed to say, “This shouldn’t be this hard,” and also ask, “Given that it is this hard, what can I do to make today even 1% more bearable?” Sometimes that’s the message chronic pain can offer.

Why Thank Your Emotional Pain?

You might think that saying thank you to your emotional pain is unnecessary and even goofy. Okay, I get it. But if you have pain inside you, making it a friend, rather than an enemy, can be helpful. After all, I’d much rather take a walk with a friend than an enemy.

How Thanking Pain Can Help Eliviate It — Story Time

Believe it or not, sometimes thanking emotional pain or physical pain can actually help alleviate it.

It’s story time.

I have a friend who was very sick when he was 15. He was so sick, in fact, that he flatlined. He was actually dead for four minutes. When his heart started again, he remained in a coma for around two weeks. His body struggled mightily to survive. Luckily, his body won the struggle.

Fast forward to today. My friend was experiencing very bad leg cramping and pain without a reason. So someone asked him an important question: When do you remember your leg pain being the worst? He replied that the worst leg pain of his life was when he awoke from his coma and found that his legs had badly atrophied and he had to learn to walk again. The process was agony. He resented his legs for the pain they caused him for the entirety of his life. He felt that his body had betrayed him.

But the fact of the matter is that the pain in his legs when he was 15 was actually a protection mechanism. His legs had atrophied because his body needed to direct all its resources to saving his vital organs. His legs atrophying actually was part of saving his life.

Once he had this realization, he actually thanked his legs and their pain. His whole life, he had hated the pain his legs had experienced, but once he understood the benefit of the pain, he thanked his legs for protecting him and keeping him alive. That pain was the best thing to happen to him, not the worst.

And yes, making friends with his pain helped him to alleviate some of the pain and live with the remaining pain more contentedly.

Sometimes, your pain just wants a thank-you. It wants appreciation for what it gave you because sometimes it gives you your very life.

When Emotional Pain or Physical Pain Remains No Matter What

I would never sit here behind my laptop and say that listening to and thanking your emotional pain and physical pain will make it go away, far from it. I live with chronic pain every day, and thanking it pretty much just makes it giggle.

That said, there are still benefits:

1. Talking to and interrogating your emotional pain or physical pain helps put you in touch with its roots. This insight is almost always valuable, whether the pain is chronic or not.
2. Thanking the pain for what it has given you may not make the pain go away, but it shifts a mindset. That shift in mindset may make dealing with the remaining pain easier.
3. Once you have a greater understanding of your pain, you can more effectively communicate that to others, such as professionals, who may be able to help you all the more.

But if you’ve listened to your pain, if you’ve talked to your pain, and if you’ve gotten all the help you can for your pain, and it lingers no matter what, just know that you’re not alone. Not every pain has a deep meaning that will free you from it. That doesn’t mean these techniques can help to some degree, but it also doesn’t mean they are a magic cure-all. You didn’t fail if your pain remains. It just means that you’ll have to keep treating your pain in the best way you can. And remember, there are breakthroughs in pain science every day, so don’t give up. The tool you don’t know about today might be just the thing that helps tomorrow.

Also, talking and listening to your pain doesn’t mean not using medication. Pain medications, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, nerve blocks, etc., can be your best friend. Communicating with your pain is about adding a tool, not about subtracting from what works.

Getting Help When the Emotional Pain or Physical Pain’s Message Is Just Too Loud

If you’ve read all this and think to yourself that you can’t possibly talk to your pain because it’s screaming in your direction while throwing fireballs at your head, I hear you. But there are still things to do.

1. Get therapy. This is especially true for chronic pain, as it tends to be so entrenched that we can no longer really hear what it’s saying. A trained pain therapist, however, can help you talk to your pain in a safe way that can help. They can also teach you skills to help you deal with the remaining pain.
   • Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) can be useful, especially in teaching pain-coping skills.
   • Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) therapy (like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing [EMDR] and others) may help.
   • Grief counseling can help you deal with what the pain has taken from you.
   • Support groups can connect you with others going through the same thing.
2. Get bodywork done. Just like a therapist can help you with physical and emotional pain, someone who does pain-specialized bodywork (like certain types of massage or physiotherapy) can help you learn about the place emotional or physical pain has in your life. They can also teach you exercises that can help with the remaining pain.
3. Go to clinics that specialize in your kind of pain. Pain (especially chronic pain) is a specialized condition that the average healthcare practitioner may not have enough tools to help treat. Go to the specialists. They know things that would never have occurred to you.

And if your pain has crossed into “I don’t know how much longer I can do this” or you’re thinking about hurting yourself, that’s not a moment to decode the message; that’s a moment to reach for crisis support or emergency care. Intense pain is already more than enough to carry — you don’t have to carry it, interpret it, and heal it all by yourself. Getting help is one way of answering pain’s message with, “Okay, I hear you — and I’m not going to face this alone.”

Final Thoughts: How Listening to Emotional and Physical Pain Can Help You Heal

In the end, I definitely still won’t call pain a gift. I don’t think you have to love it, be grateful for it, or pretend it’s beautiful. But I do think it helps to know that emotional and physical pain aren’t just random torment; they’re part alarm system, part messenger, sometimes even part rescuer. When we pause long enough to ask, “What are you trying to tell me?” we sometimes find better boundaries, better support, better treatment, or simply a kinder way to live inside a hurting body and brain. Listening to pain, thanking pain, and getting help for pain won’t magically erase it, but it can keep you from facing it alone and in the dark. And if all you can do today is acknowledge, “This hurts, and I deserve care,” that is already you and your pain working together on your side.

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