They say isolation is the best thing for pain, physical, and emotional. By they, I mean, of course, the sadists.  

A sadist will always insist that whatever hurts you the most is the best thing for you. After all, that’s their fucking credo, getting a superior thrill out of the pain they cause another.

“Don’t worry,” they will say “your suffering is really for the best. Truly, it’s the best thing for you and it will improve your character and your outlook both. You just can’t understand it because you’re too weak and by weak I mean fit to be dominated, to your breaking point, by the unsmiling likes of me.”

I never understood, until my fatal falling out with two old friends and their extended family, (actually, it was about a year before the fatal falling out became irrevocable,) that both partners in a couple can be both the sadist and the masochist.  They take turns in these roles and their grim struggle over who will give the merciless pain, and who will receive it at any given moment, is a highly addictive feature of their sacred bond with each other.

Mind you, these two were my very best friends, friends I never thought to doubt.   Thinking about it now, though it made me very sad to watch day after day of that vacation from hell, I have no problem with their painful arrangement, truly.   It is how they express their love for each other and it’s much different from my best idea of how to do that, but seeing them mercilessly at work on each other was not the deal breaker in our long friendship.  It was their shame and anger afterwards at being seen that way, and their need to blame and kill the witnesses, after destroying my good name among a large group of our friends.  Like enraged, morally rigid three year-olds in a brutal war to the death with a hated enemy with infectious cooties.  More grotesque by far at the age, nearing seventy, when the last chapter of our lives is unfolding, culminating, winding down, amid all the usual tragedies. 

They will blame their inability to reconcile conflict completely on you, and you will be the cause for all the terrible hurt, the rage and all the unforgiveness.  The worst thing of all, they will piously inform you and everyone else, is not to forgive someone who loves you.  And because you’re unforgiving, they will demand that nobody they influence or control forgives you either. Being united in punishing your inhumanly unforgiving nature is a rare instance of justice in an unjust world.  A group can really bond around a righteous cause like that.

The Aftermath (another thought)

The reflex to react with pain, to lash out, to righteously mete out punishment according to its due, is a feature among humans, and very common. The thing that matters most about this impulse to lash out is what happens next.  If you calm down, listen and speak softly, like mensches, like friends, this kind of human exchange usually pacifies everyone. If it doesn’t, if the conflict must last to the death and everybody must choose between good or evil, black and white, on pain of their own death, you may have to reevaluate the other parties in the conflict.

A word from our old friend physical pain

Emotional pain hurts like hell, unless you can isolate the cause and find some kind of peace.   Physical pain works the same way, but the immediate and inescapable physicality of it demands our full attention sometimes.

Emotional suffering can find a moment of relief in distraction and a good laugh makes your heart work and pumps out endorphins.  Pain in your body is a different animal, insistent and hard to distract yourself from for long. I am reminded of this every few minutes recently as I await tests to determine the source of bleeding (and inflammation, stiffness and pain) in my prosthetic knee joint, installed eight months ago, and see what the medical industry has in store for me next.