How Do You Describe Emotional Pain?

Break an arm and the cast immediately draws out sympathy. People even ask to sign it in recognition of your obvious pain. Tell someone you have a headache and everyone empathizes because we all have had one. Tell someone you are in extreme emotional pain and they start filtering the words you use to see if you have a mental problem. It is difficult to touch and feel. It lacks physicality. People offer words of comfort but generally don’t have a similar experience against which to understand.

Therapists were created for such moments. They are trained to recognize and understand emotional pain as a tangibility. It has a definable reality for them even if they haven’t personally experienced it.

Psychological pain, mental pain, or emotional pain is an unpleasant feeling (a suffering) of a psychological, non-physical origin. A pioneer in the field of suicidology, Edwin S. Shneidman, described it as “how much you hurt as a human being. It is mental suffering; mental torment. There is no shortage in the many ways psychological pain is referred to, and using a different word usually reflects an emphasis on a particular aspect of mind life.”

Intense ‘unbearable’ mental (psychological) pain is defined as an emotionally based extremely aversive feeling which can be experienced as torment. It can be associated with a psychiatric disorder or with a severe emotional trauma such as the death of a child.

It defines gender dysphoria.

I have it and now I have it twice over. I have developed a case of sciatica. Sciatica refers to pain that radiates along the path of the sciatic nerve, which branches from your lower back through your hips and buttocks and down each leg. On a physical scale of pain of one to ten, I give it an 11. It started three months ago and I am doing everything to make it go away. It seems that sciatica and gender dysphoria have a lot in common. It has been pointed out to me that sciatica could be psychosomatic and is brought on with extreme stress….hmmm have I discovered a physical partner in pain with gender dysphoria?

They are both excruciating and randomly strike without any kind of warning. They do not negotiate and require regular massaging to relieve the pain. For those of you who have had sciatica or watched someone experience it, you now have a measure of the emotional pain that gender dysphoria inflicts. Sadly, sciatica generates sympathetic nods when mentioned while gender dysphoria generates confusion and dismissal.

Fortunately, I have started to feel that my sciatica pain is beginning to recede. My gender dysphoria, on the other hand, is going the other way.

With it I have a 24/7 sensation of pain that can run up and down the scale but to see me you wouldn’t notice it. I have developed a professional level of hiding. Shame, guilt and fear of rejection have trained me over a lifetime to bury it deeply away so that I don’t even know it is there. With sciatica I have produced cries of pain with a few well-chosen curses that certainly gets the attention of those around me. With gender dysphoria I simply whisper a sigh of sadness rarely heard or understood by anyone.

I act normal and I seem normal but I have a birth defect that everyone has been trained to find socially unacceptable. I know that so why would I tell anyone? If I told them, would they really want to know so they could understand or would the subject make them uncomfortable and cause them to seek the company of others with whom to share a more common dialogue.

It’s my “dirty, little secret” after all. Other than fodder for gossip, it takes a remarkable cisgender person to even go out of their way to help ease the pain instead of feeding it.

That is so sad.

I continue to hope that my writing added to the multitudes of others will help those that are cisgender to at least understand the pain that we suffer and possibly ease it with their understanding and acceptance.

That is part of the cure.

Emma Holiday

Writers note: If you have read any of my writings on Medium you will have noticed a definite theme: the incredible pain of gender dysphoria and all the difficult aspects of just being transgender.

My writing has three specific goals:

1. Writing is my therapy. I have a very limited outlet for my thoughts so I write to find a way to process the most profound experience in my life. I need to understand and I need to accept myself to move forward.

2. Being transgender, for me, is a very lonely existence and if I can share some of the things that I feel and think as I go through the process of transitioning with others who are transgender and, in some way, lessen their pain and sense of loneliness, then all of this public exposure of my personal thoughts is not a waste.

3. I write to help cisgender people understand that all trans people want is to be simply understood, accepted and treated as a normal person. We are.

Thank you for reading my work.

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