by June Jeong, staff reporter
A few weeks ago, I was doing volunteer work at my church. As the children were jumping up and down in excitement and getting ready for snack time, I tried to help a little three-year-old wash her hands properly, but she wanted to do it herself and ended up scraping her knee on the rough floor. I could tell from her facial expressions that she wanted to cry, but she surprised me by holding back her tears with pride and climbing back onto the stool. Next to the sink was a bag of Sesame Street Band-Aids, and she reached out for one and peeled it, applying the sticker to her wound. The child was only a few years of age, yet she knew exactly what to do to treat her pain without my help. In fact, most average adolescents know that when they get injured, their wounds need to be cared for. Children are taught from a young age that healing physical wounds is important. Whether they’re scrapes on the knee, stomachaches or paper cuts, exterior pain is usually attended to immediately.
The reality is, that as a society, watch over and help our bodies and our physical health far more than we do our mental or emotional health. For example, we visit the doctor for check-ups to make sure we’re alright, but the idea of getting one for our mental health is is unheard of and bizarre to us. We know that if an area of skin is irritated, we have a headache, or we want to throw up, it’s a symptom of another illness we may be suffering. But if facing emotional pain remains strenuous after several months or even years, most people are oblivious to the fact that they might be suffering severe emotional injuries, that they’re not just “sad” or “down.” We tend to react to physical pain much more proactively than we do to emotional pain. Physical pain garners much more empathy than emotional pain does because the vast majority of people assumes that psychological pain can be controlled and stopped, which simply isn’t the case. The stigma surrounding psychological suffering has made its victims feel too embarrassed and uncomfortable with speaking out or getting the help that they need.
Additionally, people often have the misconstrued belief that psychological suffering is easily taken care of. I mean, we’ve all been told to “just move on,” or to “get over it.” Occasionally, this does have some merit, but if someone is clearly hurting, this is a truly insensitive, dismissive way to respond to their suffering. These gaps in empathy are reduced only if we’ve experienced a similar emotional pain very recently ourselves. Yet ironically, aside from fatal injuries or illnesses, emotional pain often impacts our lives far more than physical pain does. It’s important to recognize that we all share the same fundamental emotional responses to difficult situations: sadness, anger, confusion, jealousy. Emotional pain isn’t a joke or brought to light for attention or pity. Alas, it often isn’t taken seriously enough. While we take action at the first sight of a twisted ankle or a bloody knee, we do little to help fix common emotional injuries such as humiliation, betrayal, heartbreak, grief, guilt, or loneliness. We instead hide them because we feel ashamed and weak. We take medicine and visit doctors when we’re feeling sick, but do very little to shelter and raise our levels of happiness and self-esteem when they are so clearly down.
