So there are two viewpoints, right?
One is that trauma/pain/emotional damage/feelings of hurt generally correspond to “real,” valid experiences. From this point of view, if someone says, “That hurt me,” and “That” doesn’t seem to be something that’s Bad Enough, it’s time for us to reconsider our understanding of what’s Bad Enough to hurt people.
The other is that people’s responses to things aren’t necessarily “proofs” of real damage or hurt; people can convince themselves that they were emotionally abused or traumatized by reading the wrong things on the internet, essentially “stirring themselves up” into a negative emotional reaction and blowing their hurt out of proportion, and these people need to be brought back to reality somehow.
I am in an awkward position related to these two perspectives on human pain. I’m autistic. The thing is that pain might as well be imaginary, because it doesn’t directly correspond to things happening outside of a person.
What might be incredibly physically painful for one person, I might not even experience as pain. But touching some things or being exposed to loud things or overwhelming things might be incredibly distressing for me.
But I have no proof of the distress. I can’t actually show people the discomfort I feel in a loud, crowded mall, the way I can show them a scrape or a bruise, something that is socially acknowledged to “hurt.”
So it becomes, “Do I really feel this? Is it as bad as I feel it is?” I have become hyper-aware of the subjectivity of my own distress, and I have never been able to tell if I’m at a 2 or an 8 on my “pain scale” because my entire life I have been looking at the things other people say “hurt” (bee stings, a punch in the nose, a cut or a scrape) and looking at the things that I feel as...not hurt, per se, but a similar type of urgent, awful distress (food with bad textures, loud malls, being touched by someone I don’t like/without being mentally prepared for it) and finding the raw “data” of what I’m feeling to be incomprehensible.
How does a scrape “hurt” and a loud noise “not hurt” when my personal responses to those things don’t match those designations, when in fact the thing that “doesn’t hurt” feels...worse?
I have a hard time caring for myself because I don’t know how to know when it hurts enough that I should stop.
The first viewpoint on pain and hurt, the one where we’re supposed to acknowledge people’s hurt as “valid,” feels not quite right, because it’s still very grounded in a feeling of...realness. Trauma is “real” because look, the thing that happened really is traumatic, and here, other people are saying this hurt them too, it’s a real experience, your feelings are valid.
But we are just expanding the fence around Things That Hurt when we do that. We’re acknowledging that a larger category of things is “damaging” and “traumatic.”
It depends on a group of people saying all together, “That hurt me.” On the recognition that the Thing can be a Real, Serious Hurt. It’s about the thing itself.
I really think that pain, even physical pain, is a social category. How could it not be? It is a subjective, internal experience, and there are rules for how much we are supposed to hurt, how much this thing or that thing hurts, what means that a person needs help.
I experience things that feel terrible to me, but I cannot say why they are terrible in ways that others will understand. Sometimes I’m nowhere even near the fence around the things that are socially acknowledged as capable of hurting and damaging people. Is the fence wrong, or am I wrong?
People will tell me, over and over again, that I am experiencing something Unpleasant but not really That Bad, and there is no good way to argue against them. I will think “On my pain scale I would be at a 9 right now” but then I realize that nobody is really considering the fact that the thing could be That Bad. It’s just not that bad of a thing. It doesn’t make sense when I try to tell people that it’s a 9. So maybe, I think, I’m wrong. Maybe I’m at a 3 or a 4 and I just think it’s a 9. I wonder what would happen to me if I ever experienced something really bad. I’ve always had this incredible amount of insecurity about feeling “weak.”
I don’t know if the social ideas we have for what hurts people and what they can be okay with, and the difference between those two things, is ever going to really work for me. I don’t know if I can convincingly make the case that large parts of the world are much more serious and frightening and painful and hurtful than we’ve recognized them to be so far, because the way I experience the world, physically and emotionally, just is so wildly mismatched with how others seem to.
People have tried to bring these things into common knowledge. Sensory issues, and so on. But we, as autistic people, cannot offer proof that they exist, and I think that’s why so many textbooks and articles that define and discuss don’t even discuss sensory issues.
And it’s not just sensory issues. It’s everything. It’s the way “normal” things like eye contact and just the feeling of others’ emotions and presence can be so unbearably intimate. Can we reduce that down to just a single symptom? It’s an entire experience, an entire way of being.
