Are you sensitive to pain?

[noname223]

I accidentally hurt myself a lot today. First I did not notice it. It is complicated I don't have time to go into details. I ignored the pain for several hours and thought there might be another reason for it. Now at the evening I saw it was a wound at my leg and I realized how much I bleeded and how deep the wound really is. I was kind of shocked. And I really ignored the pain for many many hours.

Maybe that is overinterpretation but I think my mental pain might made me more numb to physical pain. I had a bicycle crash prior to my first psychosis. I bleeded a lot but the pain was not that bad. I was suicidal for two years till that day and the mental pain was way more sustainable and without a clear end. The mental pain was way more scary than that crash. Moreover you could see the wounds and people worried. My mental pain instead was not visible.

However that mental pain was only a foreshadowing of what was comingt. The real extreme pain developed after my first and second psychosis. The extreme psychosomatic pain after my crashs from mania into depression was unimaginable. I am always moaning about it but it was really extreme and I fear that more than anything. It felt like something was tearing me apart 24/7 for half a year. The pain got a little bit less after 6 months but it only vanished after 1 and at the second time after 2,5 years. I plan to kill myself when that insane shit happens.

The psychosomatic pain was also extreme agitation. And I think it is well known that severe agitation is very torturous. Even Jordan Peterson said it is worse than death.

Maybe my brain is programmed after all that shit to ignore pain. Or at least to be a little bit more numb about it. I think other people would probably have killed themselves already during that agitation period. My main reason for not doing it was no secure method was available.

My biggest fear is now psychosomatic pain because absolutely nothing helped against that. I am very anxious about it because my illness usually proceeds in cycles.

 

[FlameWhisperer]

Perhaps you are unto something. This takes me back in time to a few years back in the day where I stupidly tried to kill myself (I didn't know better + was on my pre-teen years) by cutting my forearm and thigh in a vertical, clean, deep cut. When I did it, I did not feel any pain at all while I was just opening holes on myself.

I was caught by someone while bleeding out and was taken to the hospital. I'll spare you the details of how that went until the moment they started addressing the wounds after the psychological evaluation they insisted in making. They said to me "This will sting a lot, given how deep you went." as they started disinfecting it. The person that was there with me was contorting their face in visible pain, while looking at me, a perfect pokerface, which led them to ask me "How are you so collected and calm?! Doesn't that hurt like hell?! It is not my wounds, yet it's like I can feel the pain myself in my arm and leg!". I thought nothing about it, really, so my answer was pretty much automatic: "I did this to myself, with the full intention of ending my life, why would it hurt? There is nothing that can possibly hurt more than what led me to want this."

This could be adrenaline speaking, but even in the following days, the pain was there, but nothing tolerable. If anything, the thigh hurt more because of the movement of walking and the times the wound opened again due to that movement of walking, but then again, not something intolerable.

That aside, whenever I hurt myself, I tend to not realize it until I feel the wetness of blood on the wound, and the pain that comes with the wound only usually arrives later after it stopped bleeding, and usually not something that hurts much.

I had a somewhat gruesome childhood, though, as I was abused by my mother, physically and psychologically (all sorts of tortures, hurting me physically in so many ways and with so many different objects), so maybe I am just used to the physical pain, perhaps.

Not to say I don't feel pain at all, I do, but in comparison to what people describe and I can see when they get hurt, and using a scale of 0-10, when people usually feel like a 8, I feel like 3 at tops.

 

[LunarPyotr]

Well it depends rly on what kind of pain do I actually experience. I can suck in a punch with a baseball bat or burn my hand and I don't rly realise it until I touch it.
But there's a funny twist.
When I had my motorcycle accident and the doctors removed the metal bars that were screwed into my bones, they didn't shave my legs before applying the sticky bandages and when the nurses removed them, they just pulled it straight away and it was hurting like hell. I was like swearing in Russian like so bad that one of the doctors, who actually spoke Russian, came in into my room and started asking me what's going on XD
I don't know why the nurses didn't spray the bandages with alcohol to soften the sticky pads but I was feeling the pain for a straight hour and there were even some parts of the skin where there was blood coming out. Well, no wonder that people hate hospitals

 

[Fwompje]

Not feeling pain is actually pretty common in people who feel really depressed. I also made myself pretty pain resistant because of frequent selfharm (also have a pain kink so perhaps I don't really mind it).

 

[suprswag]

I don't feel as much physical pain, yes, when I get cut, or a broken wound, it does hurt, but not as much as others may experience.

Emotional pain though, I am very sensitive to emotional pain. I cry from the littlest of things if I take them to seriously, or if I think about my life and what lead to me being like this.

 

[mcrmybeloved]

Well it depends rly on what kind of pain do I actually experience. I can suck in a punch with a baseball bat or burn my hand and I don't rly realise it until I touch it.
But there's a funny twist.
When I had my motorcycle accident and the doctors removed the metal bars that were screwed into my bones, they didn't shave my legs before applying the sticky bandages and when the nurses removed them, they just pulled it straight away and it was hurting like hell. I was like swearing in Russian like so bad that one of the doctors, who actually spoke Russian, came in into my room and started asking me what's going on XD
I don't know why the nurses didn't spray the bandages with alcohol to soften the sticky pads but I was feeling the pain for a straight hour and there were even some parts of the skin where there was blood coming out. Well, no wonder that people hate hospitals

I'm not sure why but I swear that type of superficial pain sometimes feels worse than "actual" pain, like paper cuts are the worst I can't stand having a paper cut which is hilarious if I think about all the time that I had to get rocks out of my skin and get stitches and didn't even flinch, so yeah I agree it depends on what kind of pain.

 

[Next-to-Nil]

I have Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, so I've never felt pain...
It's become kind of an absurd, morbid fascination for me if I'm entirely honest, and I feel like a horrible person for it.
I'm sorry you're going through this...