PSYCHIC PAIN AND NEED MANAGEMENT

The human mind is uniquely characterized by its dualistic functioning. It's built in discrimination between pleasure and pain, good and evil and an infinite array of other polarities, makes it an extremely complicated matrix of interrelated information that offers it a propensity, matched by no other instrument in the universe, to afford it's user the capacity to experience a self-created emotional spectrum confined between the extremes of ecstacy and terror.

It's diabolical attributes do not stop here, but continue to include another property known for it's associative function. The one that furthers the complications of its matrix by associating all of these emotions with stimuli, both internal and external. The most unavoidable of these stimuli is the stimulus of NEED. The need to survive, procreate and have shelter. Need is so biologically engrained in man at the bio-cellular level that it's primordial origins probably predate the concept of his existence. Because of the mind's storing and associative properties, it makes connections between stimuli and emotional responses that are not necessarily linked by logic. Since needs are the most powerful stimuli that affect the mind and shape its structure at a primordial level, they are the only ones we are going to be concerned with at the moment.

Unmet needs (or desires confused as needs) are equated with pain and gratified ones with pleasure. Over the passage of time, when fulfilled needs only produce fleeting pleasure and the arising of more needs, the distinction between pain and pleasure starts to fade and is replaced by a constant nagging of needs. Needs are then seen as harbingers of pain and are perceived as the cause of pain, to be avoided at all cost.

The attempt to constantly avoid needs is also a need and consequently causes more pain and all that is experienced at this point is perpetual internal/psychic pain. This process of repression culminates in the banishment of that particular psychic dynamic to a dark corner of the mind where it is split off from conscious awareness and regarded as a forbidden pain-quarry or landfill where unresolvable anguish and agony are dumped.

Consequently, any stimulus that remotely hints to the subject of needs and their fulfillment can trigger deep terror, the origin of which is untraceable due to the existence of the abovementioned defense mechanism. This psychic force of terror then creates a reaction formation, equal in force and opposite in direction, in which the mind manically seeks more external sources of pleasure or pain relief such as drugs, compulsive gambling, sado-masochism and other aberrant or criminal behavior originally designed to reach a state of freedom from the unscratchable itch of a permanent state of seemingly unfulfillable neediness.

The aversion to needs and their being exposed unfulfilled to the "external" world is what determines the type of control that the mind perceives is needed to manage them. These types are: Internal controls and External ones. The need or needs are allowed to surface ONLY when their fulfillment is imminent or instant, then their exposure and the amount of anticipatory pain their experiencer is subjected to can be kept to a minimum.

Time Element: If the elapsed time between the arising of a need and its predicted fulfillment is relatively long then the need is suppressed to avoid the pain of its existence as an unfulfilled need (Internal Control). If the perceived time is short then the need is temporarily released, just long enough to be gratified (External Control). The urgency of gratification is a function of exposure minimization and is what causes stress. Conversely, the suppression of needs pending their long-term fulfillment also causes stress.

All this battling with needs is just an attempt to avoid the feelings of grief, despair and emptiness that accompany unmet ones. This causes mental agitation and stress which interfere with meditation and inner harmony. Therefore, feelings of grief and pain have to be experienced fully and allowed to pass unhindered before states of deeper equanimity can be experienced.

The desire to change the way one feels has to be vanquished. This is done by turning the attention of the mind inward away from external cravings including that of eliminating needs. This is the essence of meditation practice. With continued practice, a more subtle and discriminating intellect can be developed whereby the confusion of desires and needs can be observed and the two isolated from each other.

The next step involves the training of the mind to become more balanced in dealing with the arising of needs. Ideally, the goal to be achieved is a state in which the compulsion to fearfully repress or combatively gratify needs is eliminated, thereby achieving a state of grace in which the needs are eventually met, or not, through the implementation of consistent yet detatched action.

© Copyright 1999, A.W. Mooro. All Rights Reserved.