Unbeknownst to me, emotional pain has been my constant companion throughout life. I can’t recall a day that I haven’t felt the hot sting of shame or the agony of loneliness. Being starved of human connection causes physical suffering in a similar way to deprivation of food and water. The body’s mechanisms for managing this pain are analogous as well: once emotional pain becomes overwhelming and addressing the source of the suffering becomes hopeless, the mind dissociates from the sensations entirely.

Let me make that statement less abstract. Even though I’ve lived in constant emotional hurt for all my life, I have only begun to consciously acknowledge it as a reality. Hurt has become a real feeling to me, only in the last month or so. Decades of suffering and stewing in a cocktail of pain, longing, hurt, loneliness, anger, frustration, shame, despair, and the like was all pushed beneath my conscious awareness and into the recesses of my mind. Even though I was experiencing these feelings, I was incapable of becoming fully aware of them. Emotional pain was an abstract intellectual concept, not a real phenomenon. I stubbornly clung to this mindset even as every aspect of my life was debilitated by blindness towards my feelings.

The same mechanism of dissociation is at play in both emotional and physical wounding. We see for example, soldiers unaware that they’ve been shot for a short period of time after being with a bullet. There’s a parallel effect when a significant emotional event -like a breakup or a layoff- happens; sometimes it’s not acknowledged for a few moments. We term this shock. These are adrenaline-fueled examples of acute dissociations and don’t usually linger for long.

There are also chronic physical and emotional dissociation mechanisms at work on the physiological and emotional levels. For example, if you’ve ever fasted for more than a day or two you will experience the hunger significantly lessen as the fast goes on. The body is still hungry, but the inability to satisfy these cravings leads the mind to blocking out the sensation. Similarly, continuous experience of a painful emotion will lead one becoming numb to it. Go long enough and it will cease being acknowledged all together.

However, reality doesn’t dissociate from you. If you haven’t eaten in three days the body still feels the effects. If you haven’t talked to a human being in three months, those nerves and neurons crying out for connection are still shriveling.

Now here’s the cruel part. If you have dissociated from a specific pain and begin to experience fulfillment of the unmet needs underlying the pain, awareness of the pain will grow. So, if you’re connection-starved like me, beginning to move into social encounters will leave you more aware of the pain of loneliness than before. Just like a single meal will leave a starving man hungering for more. But with starvation, things are pretty easy to figure out. On the more nebulous and ephemeral emotional level, it will appear that achieving the desire is actually causing more pain than not having it.

This is an illusion, but one that’s incredibly easy to get blindsided by. Just because the painful emotions are moving towards the surface, does not mean they have breached the repression mechanisms and found conscious awareness. Nor is it necessarily the case that the individual is prepared and has the capacity to experience those emotions.

I’ve unwittingly stumbled into this trap many times in my life. Going to social events, trying to join groups always creates this painful contrast between the social experience and the rest of my lonely waking life. Reaching out and attempting to connect with people surfaces guilt, shame, fear, and other painful emotional states as all my failures and years and years of isolation are put into perspective.

There’s no way out of experiencing pain. Putting off facing the pain for later means that you’ll have to pay it back with interest. If you store it up through repression, dissociation, and bypassing, the charge will grow and grow until it explodes out of you causing more suffering in the process. If you go after the unmet need or the source of the suffering, every feeling that was put away is going to be surfaced over the course of that pursuit. The mind likes to squirm away from this work by envisioning fantasies where the desire has been fulfilled and life is perfect, without acknowledging that painful journey there. Mirages become preferable to oases.

Only one of these two paths actually brings release from the pain, with the caveat that there has to be awareness of and respect to why the pain was repressed in the first place. There was some initial deficiency in the emotional processing capacity, and likely further damage induced over events influenced by subsequent dissociation, that needs to be remedied before emotional release and the corresponding growth can occur.

What that looks like will be different in each circumstance, but acknowledging human emotional and biological reality is a long step in the right direction.