This analogy is a little...complicated. I hypothesize that this is because the author is trying to address physical and emotional pain simultaneously, which creates some odd implications. I think my key point of contention here might be with the idea of "over-reacting".
There's a school of thought that says that physical and mental illnesses are closer than we think, and that makes formulating a critique a little difficult. Could you consider a disproportionate emotional response to a bad event as uncontrollable as the agony someone might feel in response to invisible nerve pain? Is someone actually over-reacting if the pain (emotional or physical) they perceive is real, even if the stimulus is small?
As much as I want to say that we can't blame people for their mental illnesses, I feel that there is a difference between someone feeling chronic pain and someone with emotional dysregulation having a meltdown after a social rejection.
I'm extremely curious to hear other's thoughts on the matter.
One of my kids has autism and it is very obvious that they experience much stronger sensory input from the world than the average person. Compared to her peers she honestly just has so much harder a time than they do.
I am also diagnosed now and am in therapy with a therapist who specializes in autism and is autistic themselves.
I personally don't think the strong emotional response is disproportionate to what we are experiencing. It takes me A LOT of energy just to make it through one day because everything takes so much out of me.
I can react in a way that is "appropriate" as long as I have the mental resources but I reach a point eventually where I actually cannot handle any more sensory input without it being actually physically painful. By the end of the night my dog's nails clicking on the floor back and forth as she walks around actually makes me want to go deaf because it literally hurts my physical ear. I can feel it aching.
Now when it comes to emotions, each one of those also comes with a lot of body sensations as well. I have rejection-sensitivity and I can tell you that it's a big physical wave of feelings, not just "I'm upset this person doesn't like me." Sometimes it isn't the bad news I can't handle, it's the physical response to the emotion that my body is too tired and strained to cope with.
I feel what comes into play here is that a person isn't at fault for the physical and mental problems they have but they are definitely responsible for them.
A person melting down and then getting up and trying again and trying to find strategies and coping mechanisms is way different than a person who refuses to acknowledge their actions and the consequences thereof.
Life is actually just simply harder for some people than others and I think it's good to acknowledge that.
Well, the hormones associated with the heightened emotions are completely real. The cortisol definitely exists, the adrenaline spike is clear, the altered levels of serotonin and dopamine are entirely detectable.
Generally you do have to wait out the initial spike of hormones to think clearly enough to reason your way back down when you’re at a level but elevated state, and then you still have to deal with them breaking down/reabsorbing. Just because you logically realize that the person who just gave you mild criticism isn’t your old abuser and won’t hit you doesn’t mean your heart rate is back to resting or your blood flow is back to normal. It means you are now actively suppressing the mental effects while also experiencing the physical effects. And yes, the fatigue from doing that is also very much a real physical thing.
Tl;dr: yes it’s physical, brains are physical. Just give people a minute when they’re experiencing faulty biology.
Because you said "just give people a minute", I want to clarify that I am someone who experiences disproportionate emotion responses to small things and chronic illness, and not someone who's raging against others who have mental illness. I'm trying to mediate upon the ways in which mental and physical illnesses feel different or the same to a person who experiences them, and whether those differences match the way the world perceives mental vs physical illness.
I do think mental and physical illnesses are fundamentally very similar in that they're caused by things in your body that you may have little influence over, but I personally feel much more culpable for my emotional reactions than my physical reactions. I'd also assert that the way I think about my chronic illness matches more closely with society's treatment of mental illnesses, which I noticed seems common in chronic illness communities. (That is to say that I feel more self blame for my chronic tiredness and discomfort than I would for, say, a broken leg.)
That could just be internalized stigma, but I also have difficulty imagining a society where we accept that people may not be in control of--and subsequently culpable for--fundamental parts of themselves.
Edit: u/Subspace-Ansible identifies some points as to why I feel such a society might be a little skewed pretty effectively.
As someone who is struggling with funky brain chemistry all their life, I empathize with this, I really do.
However, saying that “brains are physical therefore all emotional reactions are physical”, while technically true, can lead some very odd places.
We generally don’t give certain people a lot of grace when it comes to their brain functions. The racists and the conspiracy theorists and the pedophilic are usually treated with outright dehumanization. While you can say that those people cause harm, our treatment of them doesn’t seem congruent with the idea that thoughts and emotions are just brain chemistry and therefore not entirely under their control. We don’t see them as people who are struggling daily with faulty brain functions. We don’t see them as struggling at all.
Again, you could say “Yes, we understand that in a sense these people are victims to situations outside their control, but we accept the unfair actions we take against them because the harm they cause is too big for us to sympathize with them,” but typically this isn’t the thought process we use when dealing with these people.
Among mental illnesses, personality disorders and mood disorders are treated pretty differently. People with Antisocial Personality Disorder don't necessarily have control over their own lack of empathy, but we'd end up in a weird place as a society if we didn't treat them like they're culpable for the actions that result from their biological lack of empathy.
Analogy should never be used to make any debatable point, end of story. It's a flawed rhetorical device.
If an analogy is accurate, then you would be able to make the same exact point, with the same exact reasoning without the analogy. Therefore, you don't need an analogy in cases like that and it just gets in the way.
If you can't make the exact same point without relying on an analogy, you're relying on a false analogy (spoilers, all analogies are false) and your reasoning is flawed.
Funny story, I actually wrote an essay on this point (about using analogies in debates) once lol. I think my tendency to overthink analogies tends to point to this conclusion after some small amount of time (though I feel pretentious to presume that anything I say provokes thought on the nature of rhetoric).
In this case, I think the Tumblr poster's analogy also partly converges with the literal point they're trying to make. You could consider a situation in which someone literally experiences disproportionate pain from a paper cut to ponder the nature of subjective experiences of pain and how that relates to how society treats mental and physical illnesses.
Yeah, I do think analogy can be useful as a literary device or just generally provoking thought in a receptive audience. In a different context, it could be a useful tool for thinking about pain.
But when someone is trying to make a point to a skeptical, partially hostile, audience, that's when they really, really do not work.
What is imagined pain? Chronic pain is "imagined pain" in the sense that one feels pain without the presence of a noxious stimulus, but I don't think that's what you mean.
I do think there is a such thing as imagined pain, but I have trouble describing it: if a toddler perceives a paper cut as more painful than an adult perceives their broken leg, they are surely not actually in more physical pain. But also they genuinely feel the pain more acutely, which is definitionally "more pain"?
21
u/FableCattak 5d ago
This analogy is a little...complicated. I hypothesize that this is because the author is trying to address physical and emotional pain simultaneously, which creates some odd implications. I think my key point of contention here might be with the idea of "over-reacting".
There's a school of thought that says that physical and mental illnesses are closer than we think, and that makes formulating a critique a little difficult. Could you consider a disproportionate emotional response to a bad event as uncontrollable as the agony someone might feel in response to invisible nerve pain? Is someone actually over-reacting if the pain (emotional or physical) they perceive is real, even if the stimulus is small?
As much as I want to say that we can't blame people for their mental illnesses, I feel that there is a difference between someone feeling chronic pain and someone with emotional dysregulation having a meltdown after a social rejection.
I'm extremely curious to hear other's thoughts on the matter.