First- and Second-Order Pain

DALL-E made this with some help.

Like most people, I experience pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain, perhaps even spiritual pain. It happens to the best of us.

It would be nice if something as widespread and commonplace as pain were pleasant and enriching. But as it turns out, I don’t actually like pain that much. You might even say I hate it. I would very much like to experience less of it. I would like so much to experience less pain that I’ve thought quite a bit about how to do so.

Recently while pursuing these researches I discovered something—a method not (alas!) of completely eliminating pain, but of greatly diminishing it. This solution, or mitigation, works against all the kinds of pain I know of: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Nor is it an obvious solution. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone else talking about it, at least not quite in this way. So I’d better share it with you in case you are also one of those who dislike pain and would like to rid yourself of some of it.

The key to this method is to recognize the difference between first- and second-order pain. Let me begin to explain this idea by drawing from an experience of pain that happened to me.

Losing a Friend

Some time ago one of my close friends killed himself. He was a dynamic and vivacious person, completely the opposite personality to what you might imagine a suicidal person to be like. He had many friends. His action struck us as not merely unexpected, but as shocking, unthinkable, a gut-punch we could never have seen coming. And we, his friends, entered into a long period of questioning, processing, grieving, and mourning.

When someone close to you dies it is, of course, painful. In fact, the pain comes at you in several different forms.

There is the pain of loss. Yesterday you could call up your friend and have a chat; today you cannot. Yesterday you could ask if he wants to go camping next month; today you cannot. Yesterday you were thinking up a joke you knew he—especially he—would laugh at; today the joke has no place to land. You miss your friend. If he had, instead of killing himself, moved away to a far country that (somehow) lacked telephone service and the internet, and you knew he planned to stay there for a decade or two, then you’d suffer the pain of missing him. Missing your dead friend, then, is part of the pain of loss. But loss is only one of the varieties of pain his death brings you.

There is also the pain of fear and awe in the face of Death. It’s easy to forget, on these sunny, blue afternoons, about Death, its presence, its force, its inevitability. When someone close to you dies you are instantly made aware of the power, the relentlessness, the horror of Death. It’s as if you had been moseying along the grocery store aisle when, like a thunderclap, the fangs of a huge, mechanical dog snap shut a few inches from your face. You have been spared—but who was taken? The machinery of Death mangles everything it touches, mangles beyond repair. Almost everything in our world—a bad check, a bent fender, an unkind word—can somehow be repaired, but Death cannot be reversed. It is a one-way door. Yes, as with [Harry Potter reference redacted for spoilers], once you pass through this door, no magic will ever find you again. This mortal life, in the end, has no undo button. So when someone close to you dies, part of the pain is the shivering terror of seeing someone claimed and snatched away with such finality.

With a death there is also a subtle kind of pain we might just call changes of plan. When someone dies, things change. You had a lunch scheduled; now you don’t. You were flying out of town; now the trip must be canceled. Calls must be made, people must be told. At your deceased friend’s workplace, unfinished projects must be reassigned or canceled. Funeral homes must be contacted, caskets picked, money spent. A death brings a lot of complexity, a lot of logistics, a lot of upended plans, even some changing roles in the social fabric that surrounds the deceased. Now in ordinary circumstances this kind of logistical fussing isn’t terribly painful, though even at the best of times it can be stressful and a nuisance. But when coupled with a death, the pain of sudden changes can be serious, even overwhelming. And to feel overwhelmed is, I’m learning, actually one of the most crippling forms of pain.

We could go on. A death brings many kinds of pain, and these—loss, fear/awe, and change—are three of them.

What I want to point out so far is that these three kinds of pain are what we may call “first-order pain.” These are the kinds of pain that spring directly and immediately from their source.

  • Your friend is gone: you will feel loss. There is nothing complicated or indirect about that. Person gone equals loss felt.
  • Death destroys a future: you will feel fear, awe, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Death destroys equals fear felt.
  • Your friend is gone, therefore changes must happen, and you will feel at least the inconvenience of that. Person gone equals change happening.

All of this is first-order pain that happens inevitably because the original event happened.

But now I want to distinguish between this kind of first-order pain and the second-order pain that can also arise.

Second-Order Pain from Losing a Friend

After my friend died I spent a lot of time talking with others about how they were doing. I heard many different reactions.

A lot of people expressed guilt. That’s a different kind of pain from loss or fear or change: it’s a different feeling from those. They would tell me that they felt guilty because “I should have seen it coming,” or “He gave a tiny hint he was heading that way, and I missed it,” or “I knew something was off with him; I should have asked him.” They felt guilty because they imagined there was something they could have done to maybe prevent his suicide. The truth is that in this particular case there was no way anyone could have anticipated what he would do. Yet these conscientious friends tormented themselves, in some cases for months or even years afterward, that they might somehow bear some blame for his death. “If only I had … he might still be alive.” They suffered a very real, yet irrational pain, the lingering pain of guilt.

Some friends also expressed a pain I’ll call hypervigilance. They worried that others in our circles might also commit suicide. “If he did it, who else might also be thinking about it?” “If we couldn’t anticipate him doing it, what other terrible event is coming toward us that we can’t anticipate?” And again, this fear of what else might happen next lingered on for months or years, even reshaping some of their other relationships—and not always for the better.

What I began to see was that while some kinds of pain spring directly from the source, others appear more indirectly. It is common for people to experience guilt after the death of someone close to them. It’s so common it has a name: “survivor’s guilt.” But it’s not necessary to experience guilt in these circumstances. Not everyone does. And depending on the circumstances, the guilt itself may not be warranted. You can feel guilty even in circumstances, like those surrounding our friend’s suicide, in which you cannot possibly bear any actual culpability, any guilt. The pain of guilt in circumstances like these is a second-order pain.

Likewise, it isn’t necessary to become hypervigilant after someone close to you dies. It is common, but it isn’t necessary, and not everyone does it. An ongoing fear that something else bad is going to happen arises indirectly, not directly. It is a second-order pain.

Second-order pain arises not directly from the original source of the pain, but indirectly, from some other contributing source. Very often, perhaps always, the other contributing source is ourselves: our own thoughts and worries.

First- and Second-Order Pain in Depression

Let me give you another example, that of depression.

To me, the characteristic experience of depression is a sense of permanence, the feeling not only that I feel bad but that I will always feel bad. Ron Weasley captures this feeling perfectly in a few short words after he encounters Dementors for the first time. “I felt weird,” he says, “like I’d never be cheerful again.” In those seasons of my life in which I’ve felt depressed, that is exactly what it felt like.

Take careful note of this. In the experience of depression there are already two different “orders” of pain involved. You feel bad, experiencing a first-order pain something like sadness. But beyond this, you also feel doomed, with a second-order pain that comes to your mind as, “I’ll never be cheerful again.”

Depression is a filthy devil, and it comes to you lousy—absolutely teeming—with varieties of second-order pain that go far beyond the underlying sadness.

  • “I’m depressed because there’s something wrong with me.”
  • “I’m destined to feel this way.”
  • “I brought this on myself.”
  • “I’m trapped, I’m permanently trapped.”
  • “Maybe I deserve to feel this way.”
  • “Maybe God is punishing me.”
  • “Maybe God just doesn’t care about me that much.”
  • “I could fix this if I worked harder, but I just can’t bring myself to do that.”
  • “Maybe everybody feels like this all the time, they just won’t admit it.”
  • “I think it’s getting worse.”
  • “It’s just going to get worse and worse.”
  • “I have no future.”

Here’s what I’ve come to understand. These kinds of thoughts are not necessary. They aren’t true: none of them are true. At the very least we can say that they do not come to you from a rational source, a trustworthy and true source. They come from the anxiety, shame, and fear of your own mind. They are second-order in the sense that they arise from the underlying pain, the sadness or disappointment or overwhelmed-ness or whatever it is. They are “bonus pains” that ride along like remora, like parasites, on the first-order pain that directly hurts you.

They come into your mind and they haunt you. They may even offer to ease the underlying pain. But the longer you tolerate them, the more they make things worse. These thoughts are painful, but it is second-order pain. The first-order pain—the underlying hurt—is bad enough, and it won’t go away easily. But it gets easier to deal with when you let go of all the second-order pain.

I said at the beginning that I’d found a way of diminishing—not eliminating, but easing—pain. Here’s how you do it.

First, learn to recognize the difference between first- and second-order pain.

Second, push aside second-order pain. Accept only first-order pain.

Recognizing Second-Order Pain

How do you recognize the difference between first- and second-order pain?

First-order pain just happens. It arises from your body, your brain, your immediate circumstances. If you suddenly get fired from a job you love, that sucks, that hurts, it’s a first-order pain. It’s going to hurt for a while, probably several days, maybe a few weeks. But since it is a first-order pain, the intensity will diminish pretty rapidly. Your brain has to get over the shock. You have to get some grip on what happened. You have to make new plans. But these basics happen pretty quickly, and if all you felt was first-order pain, it would have dulled significantly in—let’s say—a few weeks at most.

What tends to happen instead is that you develop stewing thoughts. That’s what second-order pain lives on: stewing thoughts, rumination, mulling things over, ranting inwardly, telling yourself horror stories about the future. Now you didn’t just lose a good job. Now “I’ll never find a job like that again.” “This always happens to me.” “Nobody ever understands my work.” “My bosses always hate me.” “Those bastards will never give me a break.” These stewing thoughts lead to second-order pain, feelings of resentment, shame, regret, fear, and hopelessness.

You can recognize a second-order pain by how long it lasts. The human body, the human mind is pretty great at finding equilibrium, at adapting, at settling into a new groove, at getting itself comfortable again. If a long time has passed since a shock and you’re still hurting, you may be entertaining second-order pain. Of course, the bigger the shock, the longer it takes. They say it takes about a year to begin to get over the loss of a spouse, and that is for many people the biggest shock there is. So, losing a job? Well, it’s a big deal, but it’s not that big of a deal. So ask yourself: bad things have happened to me, and I’m still in the dumps. Is it the original pain, or something else, that’s keeping me down?

Second-order pain lives primarily in your thoughts. That’s different from first-order pain. If you were in a car accident earlier today, or if your boyfriend broke up with you, you received a genuine shock. In the case of the car crash, you received a physiological shock and your body and brain are processing it. In the case of the break-up, you received a mental, emotional, and social shock and your heart and mind are processing it. It hurts, and the hurt comes from deep down. The bad news is: it’s inescapable, you have to experience it. The good news is: it’s temporary, you’ll get through it soon. Second-order pain can hurt just as much if not more than first-order, but it doesn’t arise directly and it isn’t necessary. It arises as you think about things, as you tell yourself negative things about yourself, your world, your past, your future.

The trouble is that it can be hard even to realize what you yourself are thinking. You can have a phrase like “I’m doomed to fail no matter what I do” on such heavy rotation in your mind that you lose the ability to distinguish it from the background noise. That’s when a professional counselor can be so helpful. I’m told that CBT and DBT therapies have shown good evidence of reducing or eliminating these kinds of thoughts, the kinds that feed second-order pain. If what I’m saying today resonates with you, it might be worth looking into those.

A final way to identify second-order pain is that it tends to be irrational. If someone close to you dies and you feel sad, no one will say to you, “Don’t feel sad! There’s no reason to feel the way you do.” If they say that, they’re dumb, you should ignore them. To feel sad when someone dies is perfectly normal and reasonable. But if you admit to someone that you feel guilty for the death you’re grieving, they will probably say, “No, you’re not guilty, not at all. Let go of that. It’s irrational.” Second-order pain often hides in thoughts that seem just possible but aren’t actually reasonable or necessary.

This is one reason it’s so helpful to talk to others about how you feel. When you expose your inward thoughts and feelings to good people you trust, they can help you sort out the rational, necessary, painful thoughts from the irrational, unnecessary, painful thoughts and help you get rid of the bad ones.

It’s not easy to see the difference between first- and second-order pain. Before diving into how to solve the problem of second-order pain let me show you a few more examples.

First-order pain: You have a momentary mental lapse, forgetting the name of a student you’ve been teaching all year, and feel silly and embarrassed. Second-order pain: You then start to worry that your lapse is a sign of early-onset dementia.

First-order pain: A friend backs out at the last minute from a get-together you really looked forward to, and you feel disappointed. Second-order pain: You think, “This always happens. Just as I’m starting to get closer to someone they reject me,” and you feel unlovable and doomed.

First-order pain: You’ve had several headaches in the last couple of weeks, far more than you usually do. Second-order pain: “What if it’s a brain tumor? What if I’ve got the mummified fetus of my unborn twin lodged in my skull, like that one person I read about?”

First-order pain: You’ve been out of school for a week, and you’re already feeling bored. Second-order pain: “Life is boring. Nothing seems like it’s worth doing. Every body runs around in a frenzy to distract themselves from how boring life really is.”

Once you learn to distinguish between first- and second-order pain, you realize something amazing. The majority of the pain we experience is second-order pain. Life comes at us with plenty of first-order pain, unavoidable and sometimes intense, and we must endure it. But then we amplify, expand, and extend that inevitable pain with unnecessary second-order pain. We do not have to endure it. It is escapable, optional, dismissible. If we can get rid of it, we won’t always feel great—we’ll still experience first-order hurt—but we’ll have a lot less agony than we do now. As I’ve learned to get rid of second-order pain, I’ve found that most—more than half—of the pain I encounter can be set aside and evaded. I experience a lot less pain than I used to.

Getting Rid of Second-Order Pain

Here’s my own technique for dealing with second-order pain and the stewing thoughts that feed it. I’m not sure if I invented this technique or picked it up somewhere, but it’s proven very powerful. I’m no kind of therapist or doctor, so use at your own discretion.

When I notice that I’m thinking a negative, repetitive thought, I force myself to stop, right there in the moment. Then I look around me at the place I’m actually in—the physical space surrounding me at that moment, no matter where it is, the walls and ceiling, the floor or ground or sky. I take some detail from that place, any detail, the first thing my eyes alight on. It doesn’t have to be wonderful or interesting, just a detail. I describe in words what I’m seeing to myself. “That is a doorknob. It is a circular, brushed nickel doorknob. It has a little hole in the middle of it, where you might put a sort of key-rod thing. The nickel is a little reflective. I can see the white rug reflected vaguely in it, and that lamp.” Already by this time, I’ve begun to forget all about whatever stewing thought was nagging me before. And something else often happens: I begin to realize that this doorknob—yes, this ordinary, boring doorknob—is actually rather beautiful in its way. It’s amazing how many beautiful things you find around you once you get out of your head and start looking.

I have a vivid memory of staring at a concrete floor in a doctor’s office—the floor was the first thing that happened upon my eye—and realizing over the course of a minute or two that the concrete, once you really looked at it, far from being blank and featureless, was full of detail and even held a kind of beauty. I can’t tell you how liberating that insight was. Maybe that sounds crazy to you, but try it. See how it goes for you.

If you do this every time you notice yourself stewing on a painful thought, you will be amazed at how quickly those thoughts get quieter, less frequent, and eventually go away.

When you hurt, it’s good to tell yourself, “I’m hurting. This sucks. I’m in pain.” That embraces the first-order pain. It’s realistic and healthy.

But if a thought like “I’ll always be in pain,” or “It’s my fault,” comes along, push it aside. That’s a second-order pain, and it’s not true or necessary or helpful. Instead say, “I’m hurting, but I won’t always be hurting like this. Things will get better.” That’s not just positive thinking. In almost every situation, it’s really true.

The first-order pain remains. If you’ve lost somebody close to you, if you’ve just received your twentieth book proposal rejection, if the one you’ve adored has jilted you, you hurt. But the first-order pain becomes much more bearable if you recognize and deliberately set aside the second-order pain that makes it so much worse.


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