understanding pain, mental illness, and grief

they're all consequences of our attempt to reconcile our mental model of how the world works with our experiences

I’ll start by briefly sharing my model of how our mind works. Then I’ll explain how this can augment our understanding of and response to pain, mental illness, and grief.

---

To my understanding, the brain is just a massive prediction engine. It combines our sensory inputs with our mental model of how the world works to decide how to act and respond to our environment and the situations we’re presented with.

I think two layers form the basis of our mental model of the world:

1. Our experiences: The “facts” of what has happened in the past.

2. Our conditioning: The way we process our experiences, i.e. the “meaning” that this experience takes on in our mind. An example of a conditioned belief is “Taking care of myself is selfish”, or “Anything is possible”. These beliefs are typically subconscious.

Our experiences and conditioning are dynamically interrelated; our experiences shape our conditioned beliefs, and our conditioned beliefs shape the way we relate to our experiences.

I’m not going to spend too much time unpacking this; the core premise to take away, for now, is that a core aspect of our brain mechanism is building a model of the world, and this model is built upon our conditioned beliefs.

pain

With the above premise in mind, I’ll offer the following explanation of pain: pain is the initial reaction that occurs when faced with a difference between our mental model of the world and our lived experience.

An easy example to unpack this is through sports. As a Minnesota sports fan, I’m extremely familiar with sports heartbreak and all the shapes and contours it can take. As everyone knows, “It’s the hope that kills you.” This is because hope can be described as an investment in a worldview in which your team wins; the higher the investment, the greater the degree of difference between your mental model of the world and the lived experience of the loss, and the greater the degree of pain that is experienced.

This is why, for example, people have such different reactions to the death of a loved one. A large factor is the attitude that people have towards death; older people who have a deeper understanding of the fragility and impermanence of life won’t have their worldview as shattered by death, while those clinging to a more naive worldview will have their life upended and will experience more pain.

The key insight is pain is simulated. There is nothing that directly ties an experience to a pain response. This is true even for physical pain; pain is a nervous system response triggered by our brain’s assessment of a situation. We know this because some do not experience pain, showing that there’s nothing intrinsic about physical harm let alone mental harm that causes our body to experience pain. It must be an evolutionary adaptation, a mechanism built by the brain to serve a purpose. 

I think pain is the brain's way of prompting us to reassess our conditioned beliefs and align them with our lived experiences. It’s a giant warning sign in our head that says “Our model of the world is wrong, and we’re in danger until we fix it.” In this way, pain isn’t something to be feared; it’s a motivator for action. 

However, it isn’t easy; the process of bringing your conditioned beliefs to light is difficult, especially when you’re experiencing visceral pain — most of the time it just brings confusion and dissonance. 

mental illness

I think mental illnesses are various conditions describing our inability to respond to the pain we experience in a healthy and deliberate manner; in other words, they’re conditions describing our inability to reconcile the difference between our conditioned beliefs of how the world works and our experiences. Anxiety may be understood as a fear of experiencing pain, of having our beliefs challenged, and an attachment to our beliefs. Depression may be understood as the persistent horror at what we experience and lack of desire to live in the world as it is as opposed to the world as we wish it to be or as we thought it was.

These descriptions map pretty closely with my experiences with both. 

My experience with anxiety has been interesting. It was hard for me to even initially accept that I was experiencing anxiety; I’ve generally not been afraid of experiencing pain, and I thought I had a fearless attitude towards everything I attempted. From what I’ve unpacked so far, I’ve always subconsciously just wanted things to be given to me as validation for how special and smart I see myself. Every time I’ve experienced difficulty that would require me to dig deep, work hard, and have difficult conversations to transform friendships and relationships that are experiencing conflict, I run away. I run away both because staying would cause me to experience pain and confront the worldview I’ve built in which I’m free of the responsibility of working at things I think should be given freely to me (i.e. wealth, success, admiration, etc.). My worldview, until very recently, has not included taking responsibility and working hard at things that I want, and predictably that’s caused me to underperform across pretty much every domain of my life. Every time I come close, every time I’m given an opportunity to show I’m deserving of the success and validation that I crave, I get an intense feeling of uneasiness and anxiety, and I’ve typically taken that as a sign that something’s wrong with the situation or opportunity and I need to get away. 

Depression is also a fascinating experience to reflect on. In my experience, it’s felt as if the world is muted; it’s a persistent feeling of horror and despair, and when I’ve experienced depressive episodes, it’s been extremely difficult to come up with a reason to try. In the back of my mind, I’ve just repeated the phrases “It shouldn’t be like this?”, or “How could it be like this?” It’s also typically been paired with a compulsive obsession with some object that takes the meaning of some type of panacea in my mind; i.e. I’ve thought “My experience would be different if I had this”, or “Everything would change if this one thing was different with the world.” 

While it’s easy to get caught up in the sensory phenomenon that each state of mental illness produces, I think a more fruitful approach is to accept the states you’re experiencing as information to use in your inner work. For example, if you’re experiencing anxiety, a fruitful question to ask is “What am I running away from? What am I unwilling to confront?” And if you’re experiencing depression, you might ask “What am I unwilling or unable to accept?” 

grief

I think the true grieving process only begins once you’ve done the work of reconciling your conditioned beliefs with your lived experiences. 

I’m not sure how to exactly describe grief. Grief wraps up so many feelings and ideas into one complex emotion. It represents the understanding that the world is complex and far more out of our control than we’d like to believe. It describes the vulnerability and rawness that come with the understanding that we will only ever achieve a minuscule understanding of how the world works, and no amount of work or preparation will leave us fully prepared for the inevitable surprises that life will throw our way It describes the recognition of our previous hubris and lack of appreciation for the ability for things to change faster than we could imagine

Grief also requires an object to be grieving. I think the object is internal; I think the true object of grief is the person we were before updating our worldview. When we grieve, I think we grieve who we used to be and the naïveté we held before having to forcibly update our beliefs, and we feel extremely small. We subconsciously understand that at some point in the future, we will be grieving the person we are right now because, in our ignorance, we are continuing to hold onto incorrect and harmful beliefs that we can’t see right now. 

But I think grief is beautiful. To grieve is to be human; to accept our impermanence, our propensity to stumble over ourselves again and again, and our longing for all the answers, for perfection, for something eternal that doesn’t exist. And from what I’ve read and from my experiences, this represents how we experience grief; it never really goes away, it just changes and transforms into something different that anchors us and gives us meaning.

---

I think my main takeaway is that our experience of various states of pain and despair is almost entirely caused by our perceptions and beliefs. Every time we’re experiencing one of these states, our task is twofold:

1. Surface our conditioned beliefs - we have to dig deep and understand what exactly is causing us pain and the difference between our mental model of the world and what we’ve experienced. We have to fight the urge to blame the cause of our pain and despair on something outside of us and recognize that the true cause stems from our internal perceptions and beliefs.

2. Recontextualize our past experiences - after surfacing our conditioned beliefs, we can revisit the experiences in our past that led us to form those beliefs and explore more nuanced and mature ways of understanding what happened. This will help break our attachment to our beliefs since their connection to our experiences will be weakened, making the beliefs much easier to let go of.

---

misc. thoughts

on therapy

I have mixed opinions on therapy. I still believe that it has the potential to make your condition worse in a few different ways. First, I think there’s a good chance that the mainstream-ification of therapy and the overuse of the concept of trauma has conditioned people to have lower resilience to things that happen and increased the potential of events to become traumatic. In other words, the belief in therapy as a concept and over-treating people for trauma is a self-fulfilling prophecy that has increased the incidence of trauma and made people worse off. It’s an instance of the placebo effect; if you go to the doctor with a couple of symptoms, and they tell you that you’ll be fine with some rest, you have a much better chance of recovering and not experiencing pain than if you go to the doctor with the same symptoms and they tell you that you need to be treated. Obviously I’m not endorsing just ignoring your feelings all the time; this is just an argument that we tend to over-prescribe, and over-prescription is dangerous for a variety of reasons. Additionally, I think some people build an attachment to the label of being “in therapy”. They either view their therapist as a panacea (which is false; their purpose is to highlight the work that you have to do and provide some guidance along the way, not to do your work for you), or they view being “in therapy” as an excuse, bolstering their victimhood complex and pushing themselves further away from taking responsibility over their lives.

At the same time, I know through what I’ve learned from others and my own experiences that therapy can be a vital tool in helping surface your conditioned beliefs and recontextualize your experiences. There have been several times I’ve been discussing things with my therapist, and she’s told me to stop talking because she can feel the toxicity of the beliefs underpinning my words, and she knows I can’t see it.

To bring those points together, I think therapy is most effective when approached with a very specific mindset:

1. Therapy as an ambulatory intervention - it’ll be extremely fruitful if you view it as a tool to help you become more self-sufficient as opposed to a crutch to rely upon and re-entrench your existing views.

2. Open-mindedness to change your mind - the ideal end state is a reconciliation of your experiences and your beliefs since that will minimize your experience of pain and despair. This will require a lot of work, and the process will be much easier if you approach therapy with the mindset that you will be doing the work that your therapist will be illuminating. It’s a starting point, and only you can improve your mental well-being.

on psychotherapy vs. spirituality

I used to think that there was only one overarching goal or path in our life: a spiritual path geared towards raising our energy level and bringing us more in harmony with our true purpose. I’ve recently come to accept that this is an incomplete understanding of our task on this planet; no matter how high of an energy level I think I'm embodying, I’m still more than capable of royally fucking up. And I know I’m not alone in this experience; there are so, so many “enlightened” priests, monks, and spiritual leaders that have inflicted significant harm on others through their immoral actions.

There’s a second path: improving the functioning and maturity of our brain through psychotherapy (either individually or with the help of a therapist). We must continuously challenge the beliefs we operate under and put in the work so that our brain is in the best shape possible to work with us in our journey to live our purpose, and not against us.

I think this is because it’s extremely, extremely difficult to separate the signal from the noise, to find our spiritual pathway and the pathway towards becoming our best self, when we’re constantly overstimulated and inundated with sensory phenomena. It’s so easy for us to operate under delusion and immaturity, telling ourselves that we’re following our heart. This is where we must rely on our brain to set boundaries and constraints and help us see with more discernment.

In sum, I think there are two paths, both of which are necessary and mutually reinforcing.

---