The danger in all this is that we pathologize human experience. We do this when we create diagnoses. Then people have to meet so-called objective criteria to fall into these diagnoses and we insist upon proof. Pain is a story, not a disorder. Pain is a dynamic performance which has a beginning (often the actual tissue injury or an inciting event), a middle (it builds upon itself) and an end (the pain resolves or it becomes completely unmanageable). Pain happens to someone (the main character of the story) and involves many supportive characters (doctors, family members, friends, co-workers). Denouements and resolutions occur. A plot unfolds, often of valiant suffering against the implacability and insensitivity of the medical system. Meaning and purpose is found occasionally in bearing up against this adversity or in overcoming it. As is true with any large story, multiple smaller stories or vignettes exist that together comprise the larger pain story. And, there is definitely an audience who watches the characters fulfill their roles. This audience and the sense of their appreciation of the story and its plots and meanings contributes to the dynamics of pain perception by reorganizing the brain and its neural circuitry as surely as learning to read creates circuitry that was never there before (See Boston neuroscientist Wolf and her excellent book, Proust and the Squid, for a description of how this works).
These are ideas that I discuss in more detail in my newest book, Healing the Mind through the Power of Story: the Promise of Narrative Psychiatry, ideas that will be discussed by Dr. Buszynski on Wednesday in the teleseminar, and during at the actual conference during the second weekend of December. For more details, of course, see www.nicabm.org.
