Succumbing to Pain

Overwhelming pain can pull you into its well. My trick—and I am not recommending this, necessarily—learned very young, was to allow myself to sink completely into the pain, without one shred of holding back, until I 'came out the other side.' To not resist it, to not encourage it, to succumb. I think now, in retrospect, that this was my attempt to put down the heavy box—to give my interoceptive systems a chance to reorganize around something different than pain. Or in more scientific terms, it may have interrupted some of the reinforcing cycles of inflammation, cytokine responses and blah blah blah of complex molecular signaling. So in my case, 'paying attention to myself' was paradoxical—it was a totally inward experience, but in a way the acceptance took the pain out of the attention equation. Looking on this as an adult, I can see how I found a way to do the next-best thing to the 'neuroception of safety'—call it the 'organismic experience of acceptance.' Again, not necessarily recommending this. But I found it useful and the 'habit' is still there in my toolkit. (BTW, this trick is an exception to Weisman and Masharawi's model of lock-in; the acceptance was my key out of their binary.)