Dissociating From Pain

Issue 268

Key West, Florida 2025

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I.

During the past few years I have learned to dissociate from pain. This wasn’t intentional, nor was it what I expected, but I’ve noticed a shift, almost a slippage, in how I identify with the sensations in my body. This is the result, I believe, of the years that I’ve spent swimming, of spending so much time stressing my muscles while simultaneously calming my thoughts, of undergoing so many throbbing, thunderous swims with a feeling of equanimity—so that now the perception of pain feels somewhat distant, somehow outside my mind, somewhere far removed from my experience.

To sprint through the water remains a struggle. There’s fatigue. There’s the misery of tired arms and sore legs. There’s discomfort from craving more air. When I pull faster in the pool, I still feel a fiery, burning sensation in my shoulders, I still feel my chest tighten—this desperate, relentless scream for breath—and I still feel how my legs boil, yet I experience those sensations, today, as calming.

The key seems to be curiosity. Even though there’s an impulse to feel overwhelmed when my body struggles, I’ve learned to direct my attention toward the pain when I swim. There’s a paradox: if I shove away the electric, debilitating jolts in my muscles by ignoring them, by trying to labor past them, then those pains expand, they overpower my mind, bellowing upward, hot, red, darkening the corners of my vision; but if I concentrate on the precise texture of those sensations, then they begin to dissipate. So I aim the spotlight of my attention directly on the pain, as if I’m squinting at a sight on the horizon. My thoughts in these moments are ponderous, inquisitive, even as the discomfort grows.

This slight step, this slight dualism, locates the sensation in my shoulder without letting it enter my mind. The pain becomes just another experience, but it is the experience of watching rather than feeling pain. And it was remarkable to discover that I could experience agony, that my lungs could scream and my heart could pound while my mind remained serene. When I look closer, when I direct my attention onto the agony, the pain appears to vibrate. In my mind, it’s crimson, a wide spectrum, forever in flux, moving in waves, gesticulating inside my body. There’s burning, pressure, a bubbling. And if I don’t tense, if I don’t shove it away, if I just watch, it feels so very temporary. While swimming faster I still confront stress—my lungs still complain that I must gulp more air before each stroke—but this stress doesn’t disturb or even possess my mind. It is akin to watching a stranger rant and slobber and scream from a distance, though that stranger just happens to be my body.

When I’ve described this practice, I’ve heard one surprising criticism. This detachment, this almost meditative state, is perceived as less intense, or less aggressive. I’ve heard people explain that tranquility amid stress implies less effort, that it reveals an insufficient amount of passion. That it sounds impersonal or apathetic. That it is impossible to fully commit to an activity if you’re in the state that I described. There’s a perceived link between monomania and seriousness, so that if you’re not possessed by emotion, if you’re not aggressive, ravenous, then you’re not fully engaged, whether the activity is intellectual or physical.

What’s fascinating for me is that this criticism contradicts my own experience. The moments of tranquility that come during times of stress correspond, for me, with an increase in intensity: when I focus more on sensations, I’m more attuned to the moment. The alternative is for those sensations to possess my mind—so that the burning inside my arms turns into a screaming inside my head. True passion, some believe, is wild, raging, feverish—that it must be bursting, almost zealous, to be committed. Yet I know that if I embraced and identified with the pain, if I allowed it to disturb the clarity of my mind, it would slow my strokes in the pool.

II.

Over time this sensibility began to seep into other parts of my life. Moments that would have been strained, I realized, started to appear softer. If I faced aggression, even just the everyday, prosaic aggression that I might encounter from a stranger in public, it was attenuated, blunted, less severe. The threshold for my own irritation became peculiarly high. How I reacted in these situations was more deliberate, more a consequence of my choices rather than my reflexes. But curiosity remains the correct word, as that’s what it feels like to observe the shiver in my body when someone tells me something that I don’t want to hear.

In the kitchen, holding a plate filled with a freshly-cooked meal, my hand slips and there’s a crash. It is over before I hear the shatter: I will be cleaning sticky tiles rather than eating. What’s strange, but welcome, is that the pang of frustration that I do still feel vanishes right as it emerges. Even in a moment that’s defined by inattention—I did, after all, drop the plate—my mind remains observant. I feel the frustration in my gut, I feel it lift upward along my spine, but I can’t hold it tight. When I’m rooted in my body, there’s hardly any time between a spark of anger, its ignition, and when it burns out. Whether it was truly the years of swimming that nudged me toward a more meditative, detached state, or whether that was already my inclination and swimming was simply how this sensibility emerged, isn’t exactly clear.

A few years ago I was in the hospital for a small procedure on my arms. I watched as three different nurses spent more than thirty minutes digging into the top of my feet, and eventually my ankle, with various needles to insert an intravenous line, never quite reaching their target but eventually running out of gauze in the room to absorb the blood. I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed the way they carved a little archeological site on my foot—that would be mad, masochistic, really—but I would say that it felt distant. And that distance only increased as I dilated my focus onto the sensation. Rather than shove it away, it was better to watch closer, to lean forward and concentrate, the sensation of stabbing against my foot. And I must add that perhaps the most stupefying medical scene that I’ve ever witnessed came when the anesthesiologist stormed out of the room, saying I can’t watch over his shoulder. In that moment, I couldn’t imagine anything funnier and just couldn’t stop laughing, and the nurse, based on her shock, couldn’t imagine a more perverse reaction from a patient.

What’s typically called meditation—inhabiting the present, eschewing distraction, not identifying with impulses—does feel natural, as if that’s the mentality that my body prefers. To be possessed by each shiver, to reflexively respond as if I’ve been seized by my whims feels, to me, rather impersonal, as it would simply link my character with my most recent urge. I would live as an infant, oscillating between cries and laughter, sidestepping any foundation in favor of my latest emotion. The distance between the impulse that I observe and my reaction to that impulse, instead, seems to have lengthened so that even my most impassioned moment feels deliberate.

Although I think that it is crucial to emphasize that I feel loose, expansive, and not strained. My jaw isn’t clenched, I’m not shoving away negative sensations nor even grasping what feels good. What I feel is less compulsive, less distracted, more stable, but the experience is effortless, this sensation of immediacy that’s rooted in my body. I still adore a sweet taste, the scent of springtime, the electrifying pleasure of the novel, the astounding, the grand—and these experiences are simply enhanced by attention. What’s different now is that I perceive the same brilliance from an environment that’s less charged. With enough attention an empty room can vibrate with the same intensity as a more vertiginous experience. This is simply to realize that there’s an astounding, wondrous amount of richness in a single grain of sand. And that realization is, quite simply, a more pleasant way to inhabit the world. It has just taken me a long time to comprehend and begin to face the significant downsides of this practice.

III.

Eventually I began to wonder if perhaps these practices were leading to more pernicious tendencies. Diminishing my susceptibility to pain, to impulses, is perfectly fine, great even, but I don’t want to ignore messages from my body. I don’t want to lose my newfound equanimity, my sense that I feel truly comfortable even in troublesome environments, that I’m curious and attentive and composed even when the situation is unfavorable, yet I am questioning whether I’ve developed a peculiar ability to tolerate the intolerable.

The spine is typically a better judge of the environment than we admit: a tingle, a worry, a sense of disquiet, the vibration that you feel in your bones but can’t describe with your mind, is most likely a useful signal. There’s a wordlessness to the jitters that we feel, the hesitations that occur, when we encounter some people for the first time, when we’re walking down a dark street and we spot a silhouette in the distance—the figure who draws our attention with the signature of its walk. Perhaps we can’t articulate what triggered our disquiet, what about that walk that drew our attention, but our nervous system has a few million years of attuning itself to the environment, so that surge, that flood of emotion that we can’t explain is probably worth considering. Or when we have a downcast, blue feeling, a murmur of unease about the atmosphere in a room that can’t be described with language, but that can be deemed a warning from our gut that something isn’t quite right. To truly feel equanimity amid this discomfort might be mostly beneficial, perhaps even adaptive in today’s world, but it also might end up overlooking alarms from the body.

And my concern is that if I’m unresponsive to physical pain, even to suffering, am I constructing calluses that I don’t want inside my mind? This sounds like a recipe for stagnation, a practice that permits me to tolerate what I dislike about life without bothering to change. If there’s a leveling, a true equanimity between sensations, then my desire for development, for confrontation, for challenges, decreases, so that when my body shudders with emotion, sending an important message about my state and situation, I end up just watching the phone ring without answering.

Congenital analgesia, the inability to feel pain, is an extremely dangerous disease, because it’s rather important to lift your hand when you’ve touched a hot stove. People with congenital analgesia have shorter life expectancies, and they are often strewn with scars, marked along their fingers and arms and legs from dangerous encounters with the world that didn’t feel dangerous. To not feel pains means that you can, as a child, chew on your tongue, pull out your fingernails as a game, return home covered in blood, oblivious to the damage. I read one story about a child with congenital analgesia who pulled out all of their teeth after they learned that the tooth fairy paid cash. Although these are examples based on physical pain, it seems like an analogy for the downside of equanimity, of flattening the negative sensations inside your body. It almost certainly has a cost, not exactly because it represses sensations—the equanimity and tranquility are real—but because it ignores the meaning behind those sensations.

To feel thrust into the present when a plate shatters on the kitchen floor—not wishing that the crash hadn’t happened, but feeling comfortable, existing in the moment—is certainly better. Huffs and shouts and exhales about the environment, especially when the environment has already changed, when you’re confronting an actual reality, seem, at best, wasteful. Yet this stillness comes dangerously close to complete acceptance, an equanimity that expresses itself as indifference. There’s a risk, I think, of mistaking stillness for virtue, of allowing tranquility to slip into complicity. If you do truly exist in the present, ignoring what you can’t control, you’re probably not investigating what brought you to this present.

And finding meaning in life does require the creation of a story: one that investigates the present, ascribes meaning to the past, and sees a trajectory into the future. These are modes of thinking that require contemplation and a visceral connection to emotions about the past and future. Writing, in some ways, is the excavation of stories, and in this very essay I’m attempting to unearth meaning by turning the elusive, haphazard elements of my sensations into a story that helps me understand how my perceptions have shifted over time, and how those shifts—joyful, fulfilling, attentive—had unexpected consequences.

There’s surely benefit in stopping, in watching, in ensuring that life is deliberate rather than reflexive. I wouldn’t want to succumb to a life of habits, of existing in the well-worn grooves of repetition, hostage to impulse, chasing a list of haphazard wants. But perhaps there’s a danger in too much equanimity—as that seems to reject what’s beautiful and tragic and simply fundamental about living as a human.