Pain And Pleasure – The Foundations For Emotions And The Foundations For Understanding Life

Hello and welcome back!


If you haven’t done so already, please do read Part One of this blog series here.

Today we’re going to be diving deep into the complex nature of pain and pleasure - and how pain and pleasure are at the root of all of our emotions and emotional experiences.

We’re going to be looking at how pain and pleasure are tools we can use to help us understand our more complex emotions and feelings, and how pain and pleasure can be tools for figuring out what we want, what we need, what’s working and what isn’t working in our lives.

Emotions are born in response to pain and pleasure - so understanding why pain and pleasure exist in the first place is a foundation for understanding our emotions and emotional responses.

Let’s dive in and see how we go!


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The Foundation Of Emotions And Feelings - Pain And Pleasure

When we understand that the roots of our emotions and feelings are going to be found in either pain or pleasure - we can start to understand that while our emotions and feelings ARE complex, multi-faceted and not anything we want to simply write off or ignore they are ALSO totally understandable when we look at them in terms of this pain/pleasure model.

As living organisms, our main goal in life is to survive. What we want most is to have our needs met, so that we can grow, express, become and experience all that we have the potential to grow into, express into and experience. 

Positive emotions and feelings are the result of experiencing that which supports this end.

Negative emotions and feelings are the result of experiencing that which doesn’t support this end.

We want to grow and express and anything that hinders that expression is going to ‘hurt’ - and anything that supports that expression is going to feel good.

Pleasure is a result of some part of us getting some need met, and pain is a result of some part of us not getting a need met/us being harmed or antagonized in some way - either real or perceived - these are the roots of our emotions and feelings. Pleasure is that sign that on some level we are being nourished and supported or that we are on some level aligning with reality. Pain is a sign that on some level we are being harmed, we are not in alignment with reality/our circumstances aren’t in alignment with reality and we are collateral damage, there is something that is hindering our thriving and our capacity to express and grow is being hindered in some way.

Why Is This So Complicated If It Should Be So Simple?

Now, where this gets complicated is the fact that in our early childhoods, we are in a temporary co-dependent relationship with our caregivers.

We are also totally unaware of how reality works, how our bodies work, what our needs are, how to get our needs met, how to operate and function - and are thus reliant upon our caregivers to literally teach us ALL of these things.

And unfortunately, none of us got perfect caregivers. But the problem is, from our childhood perspective, our caregivers WERE reality. What they believed was law, what they taught us about how to be, who to be and what was required for safety was all we knew, and from our vantage point, our caregivers had every capacity to meet all of our needs - to give us all pleasure and to take away all pain - and to US the only reasons that they would FAIL to do so, from our childhood perspective, was because WE were doing something wrong.

Our childhood perspective of the world was that our caregivers were doing everything in RESPONSE to us - that every time they met our needs it was because we did something ‘right’ and every time they didn’t, it was because we did something ‘wrong.’ And unless we were very much met in this, and given lots of support in understanding where our caregivers were doing their best and responding to us in ways that weren’t about us - we grew up deeply internalizing all of this as our model for what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’ in terms of how to be, live and behave.

None of us got caregivers who had a total view of reality, how it works, what is and isn’t best in TRUE reality, and none of us had caregivers that were able to perfectly provide for us, understand us, protect us, nourish us and keep us safe from all harm - thus all of us experienced pain that our caregivers either caused directly or that they couldn’t save us from on some level - we all got caregivers who were doing their best to navigate life in the ways that they knew how - and in this, depending on the degree to which our caregivers were able to understand us, were able to provide for us, had safety themselves, had access, were able to regulate themselves, were able to SEE US for who and what we were and support that, had the tools required to support us and were in a position to help us - is the degree to which we learned how to meet our needs in a productive way, while also being loved, supported and nurtured by our caregivers.

It cannot be over stated just how fundamental these first years of life are in setting us up to be either empowered beings who are able to discern reality and problem solve, able to regulate ourselves, able to have self love and compassion, able to understand ourselves or people with deep insecurities, pain, trauma, incapacity and a whole host of other pain that usually leads to coping, numbing, scapegoating and self sabotaging behavior.

It can not be over stated how much a SAFE environment in childhood sets us up for a successful adulthood where we are generally regulated and feel capable, and one where we have many problems we are trained to blame ourselves for having.

How we are in out adulthoods is a MASSIVE reflection of the care we did or didn’t receive growing up, and to understand this is to FINALLY be able to start to see why we are how we are, why we act how we act, why we have the habits we do, why we have the struggles we do and so on.

Our fundamental experiences with our caregivers shape SO MUCH of how we perceive ourselves and the world, and yet so often we neglect to take this into consideration and believe we all arrived in our adulthood with perfect vision and capacity and just have chosen to fuck things up/are broken. This could not be further from the truth.

This isn’t to say that ALL that we are and all that we experienced can be traced back to our caregivers, nor is it to say that we want to ‘blame’ them for anything that isn’t perfect in our adulthoods - it’s just to say we do want to acknowledge how BIG of a role our childhood experiences played in shaping who we are and how we experience and perceive life in adulthood.

We Weren’t Interacting With Reality But Rather With Our Caregivers Versions Of Reality


You see in this time of life, we were not in a direct one to one relationship with reality.

We weren’t experiencing the consequences of our actions or thoughts in direct relation to reality. 

We weren’t feeling pleasure every time we did something genuinely supportive or when we were nourished, and we weren’t feeling pain any time we weren’t in alignment with reality or when some part of us was being harmed.


Rather we were in a situation where the BEST thing we could do to receive nourishment, comfort, safety and our needs being met was to please, appease and go along with what our caregivers expected and approved of. Because it was THEIR attention, love and provision that was either the reason we got what we needed or not. We didn’t have the power to directly meet our own needs or to understand them - we depended upon our caregivers for that. And our caregivers again weren’t perfect people. 

Some of our caregivers would have raised us in a situation where we felt generally safe to be ourselves, to ask for what we needed and where we generally got our needs met and could expect that to happen - and in this we learned more about ourselves and reality as we grew, likely growing into rather empowered adults who felt better able to connect to reality how it really is.

Some of us were raised in situations where we were antagonized, not supported, not made safe, not given what we needed, ignored, denied and shamed, or where our caregivers simply didn’t have the capacity for whatever reason to help us feel good or sort out any pain we were in - and this would have moved us into a situation where our pain and pleasure wires got totally crossed and confused.


You see, in our early childhoods, being loved, approved of, seen and understood by those around us WAS the way to get our needs met. If this happened naturally, and if our caregivers were in a situation where they were generally able to meet our needs - this would mean that we have a more direct relationship with reality itself. We are able to be ourselves, we are able to see pain and pleasure as results of action and reaction, and we have the ability to express and be ourselves and to feel the pleasure of that, because it was a safe thing to do - it didn’t conflict with us being loved and therefore being provided for.

If we had a situation where being ourselves led to us being rejected, shamed, blamed, harmed or otherwise cut off from provision, or if our caregivers were simple not ABLE to meet our needs or harmed us due to their own issues - we learned that being ourselves, doing what was natural, doing what felt good to us WASN’T SAFE, and we would have learned how to adapt ourselves in ways that weren’t healthy IN GENERAL real reality, but that were required for us to be as safe as possible within the context of our family dynamics.

For instance, we may have developed a deep capacity to be caretakers for our caretakers early in life - learning that the more we could support THEM and THEIR feelings, the less they lashed out at us, the more they spent time with us, the more they tended to tend and care for us. This would have led to us ‘feeling good’ about doing this caretaking, because in the temporary codependent reality of this situation, this was how we got our needs met. But in REAL reality, this was something that is ACTUALLY going to cause us PAIN - because it’s not actually healthy for a child to be the caregiver of their caregiver. It’s not actually healthy for the child to have to augment themselves in this way in order to get their needs met.

So there will be partial pleasure in being the caregiver of our caregiver because that leads to the caregiver tending to us MORE than if we didn’t do that caretaking, but there’s also going to be partial PAIN in this because this means that we aren’t actually being fully supported and loved the way we actually needed to be supported and loved. We are being forced to grow too fast and take on too much - and thus there will be degradation and damage.

If we were abused or harmed by them, we were always going to look for how WE were the cause, what WE had done wrong and how WE were to blame - because it was way to confusing for us to try to understand why the persons we loved the most were harming us, why the people we depended upon for everything were causing us pain. We would have learned to dissociate, cope, numb, and a whole host of other strategies to try to survive the abuse - and this would have fundamentally altered our perception of self, the world and how to move within it.

Our coping mechanisms would have been born of childhood logic/survival - and this means that they likely will have negative side effects - but they will be the best we knew. And these will be then programmed into our being as ways to respond to pain we don’t understand, and will likely become the foundations for the coping, self sabotage, self hate, shame, blame, numbing and other ‘bad behaviors’, as well as deep trust issues, anxiety, depression, compulsive thoughts and other mental disturbances we tend to blame ourselves for in our adulthoods. Our ‘bad’ behaviors in adulthood feel good on a level because they were how we perceived we survived the pain in our childhoods, but the negative consequences will feel bad, leading to confusion and usually, a lot of self blame, shame and guilt. Tracing back our habits is usually hard, because our childhoods, to us, were normal and how we adapted will have adapted as we’ve grown making it less obvious where the roots of our ways of being and thinking come from.

If we had pain they couldn’t understand or do anything about our pain, in this we would still have perceived that we were the cause of them not saving or rescuing us, and we would start to look for the behaviors that we were doing in and around the time and we would have made a connection there that likely didn’t exist in real reality. If our caregivers repeatedly couldn’t save us from physical pain or abandoned us in our minds when we were hurting, we would have started to look for what WE were doing during these times - being too loud? Needy? Not enough this or that? And in that we would think that if we could control/change that behavior, maybe we could change how they were responding to us. This means we would develop an existential fear of the parts of ourselves that were loud or needy, feeling partially good when we suppressed those parts thinking this was going to get us our needs met, but bad because we are denying our actual true selves and feelings.

Both pain and pleasure exist at once.

If we were in a situation where our caregivers literally couldn’t feed us, couldn’t care for our bodies, didn’t understand what we wanted and needed - again, we would have perceived that this again was due to us and our behavior on some level. We would have been feeling like if we could just measure up, just do the right thing, just behave in the right way or change the ‘wrong’ behavior we thought was causing them to not meet our needs - that in doing so we would find our way into a situation of PERFECT love, that would then equal PERFECT provision.

The farther we were from being safe, the more things we would have been believing were ‘wrong with us’ that was causing our caregivers to not meet our needs/antagonize us. Sometimes our caregivers outright told us that who and what we were was the problem, and sometimes it was our own pattern seeking minds making up stories and connections about why we weren’t getting our needs met based on what we PERCEIVED was happening - even if this wasn’t reality.

We would have learned that if our caregivers got angry with us every time we were loud, that being loud was BAD. Even if this was a natural part of our true expression, if it felt good to us, if it was important for our growth and expansion - there would be a negative association with being loud because it separated us from our source of all things. We would then have pain coming from stifling ourselves, but also pleasure coming from being loved more/more safe when we were quite.

If our caregivers were overwhelmed and simply couldn’t meet our needs, if they came home from work at night exhausted and unable to spend time with us when we really needed them to - we would have started to look for what WE were doing wrong to cause them to distance themselves from us - linking it to our personalities, our behaviors, our ways of being - even if in REAL reality it had nothing to do with us. We would have learned to try to shut off parts of ourselves or emphasize parts of ourselves thinking this was leading to more attention - even when it wasn’t in real reality - and this would have gotten programmed into our beings as being how we HAD TO BE to get our needs met. So again there would be pleasure every time they DID connect with us and we would then try to figure out what we had done ‘right’ to cause that connection, and every time their was pain we would have tried to figure out what we did to cause the distance - and those would have been part of how we tried to figure out who and what to be.

We learn who and what to be based on how we are responded to by our caregivers, and later by other important authority figures as well as peers as we grew and our circle of influence expanded (meaning the social situations we were in also had a big impact on how we learned to adapt and mold ourselves to fit in in order to feel safe because that BASE program that acceptance = approval was set and directing us) - and thus if they weren’t fully in alignment with reality and able to meet all of our needs and help us to see reality for ourselves at age appropriate times, while helping us to transition into meeting our needs and seeing ourselves as capable of figuring things out - which hint, none of our caregivers did perfectly - we are going to then have parts of self and behaviors that are TOTALLY in alignment with reality but that feel BAD on some level because we were trained that they got us SEPARATION from our caregivers who were our source of all things, and we were going to learn that parts of self that were not genuine to us and behaviors that are actually harmful in some way are GOOD and pleasurable because they connected us with our caregivers or protected us from their wrath or antagonism on some level.

If our bodies didn’t work properly, if our minds were unique, if we didn’t fit into the systems of our culture and the world around us - again this would cause us pain. And the degree to which we weren’t raised to understand that this pain wasn’t our fault, is the degree to which again we are going to start to learn to do battle with these parts of ourselves and to see them as the REASON we aren’t getting our needs met and a FLAW in us, rather than seeing them as parts of self that need extra love, support and a different way of doing things.

We learned how to be in our caregivers homes, not in real reality. 

We learned how to be in society not in alignment with real reality.

Thus, we don’t have a simple relationship with pain and pleasure. 

The Programming That Still Directs Us Now

We were in a situation where our needs getting met, where being protected from pain and given pleasure were FULLY in the hands of others - and this was because we were in a situation where we didn’t have the capacity for autonomy, we didn’t have control over our own situation and we didn’t have control over the ways in which we get our needs were or weren’t met - rather we are at the whim of those who were caring for us.

We got the BASE program that being loved and approved of by OTHERS was the KEY to pleasure and that being rejected was the source of pain - and that fundamentally shaped how we grew and managed ourselves growing up and in our adulthoods.

This means that in this temporary situation, the BEST way to get our needs met was to align ourselves with what our caregivers wanted, expected and need from us, and to align with their ways of being.

We learned how to operate from their example, being that we had no other way of figuring out how reality worked, and we were deeply programmed in our NERVOUS SYSTEMS - deep down in our bodies that following along, being approved of, being liked, being loved and generally doing what those around us wanted and needed us to do WAS how we got pleasure and avoided pain.

We weren’t learning that when we are hungry, the answer is to feel the discomfort in our bodies, assess what it means, go get food, consume that food and then feel the pleasure of nourishment. We learned to feel the discomfort of hunger, to act in some way to get our caregivers attention, hope that THEY would figure out what was going on with us, what we needed and how to solve the problem, and that getting our needs met came through the middle man of being seen, heard, loved, understood and provided for by another.

The mechanism was foundationally correct - when I do THIS action, I get nourishment and that feels good and that good feeling let’s me know that I am being supported in my growth - when I do THAT action my needs aren’t met/I’m antagonized/I experience harm in some way, that hurts and let’s me know that I’m not getting what I need/am getting something that I don’t need in order to grow and express.

At the same time, we were developing STORIES about what we had to do be/could and couldn’t be, what was right and wrong, what worked and what didn’t - and these STORIES became our PERCEPTION of reality. This then dramatically altered what we BELIEVED was going to lead to us getting our needs met and what was going to lead away from that goal - and this started the whole complicated relationship of perception being out of alignment with reality and confusing our pain and pleasure understanding even more.

You see, once we got the ideas set in our bodies that we had to be this or that way or not be this or that way in order to be loved and therefore provided for - it started to become a self fulfilling prophecy. If we learned in our bodies that being quiet got us more love, even if being loud felt better to us on a REAL reality level because it was more in alignment with our TRUE expression, our minds and bodies would have developed deep patterns of shutting that loudness down - because we perceived it to be a reason we got rejected and therefore a reason we weren’t going to be cared for. This means that there would be PAIN associated with being loud - even in the absence of any negative consequence in our ACTUAL reality - because that STORY was so deeply imprinted into our bodies, that our survival mechanism of ‘do what has always seemed to work’ takes over.


You see, we are not living by conscious choice all the time.

Rather, we are operating from survival programs that we developed in our youth that are now running the show in the background - and this again is part of why understanding pain and pleasure is SO difficult.

In our childhoods all the stories we were shown and that we came up with around who and what we had to be/not be in order to be loved and approved of became what our bodies believed we HAD to do/be/not do/not be in order to SURVIVE. We would have been developing these stories as we experienced pain and didn’t get help, or experienced pain, did an action, and didn’t die. 

Everytime we were in distress, and we did something that either led to our caregivers caring for us (whether that was actually in response to us or not it didn’t matter, we perceived that our behavior was the ‘reason’ for them loving or not loving us and therefore caring or not caring for us) our bodies programmed that in as being the REASON we just survived - and that would then become an automatic PROGRAM we started to repeat over and over again every time we were in that same kind of pain. If we did something that we perceived was the reason our caregivers DIDN’T care for us - whether that was real or not - and we survived the experience of being in pain/wanting something, doing some sort of action, experiencing MORE pain and less pleasure - that would have been programmed in as the REASON for that experience, and thus our bodies would have developed a deep FEAR of doing that behavior ever again, thinking it was the REASON we suffered.

These programs are deep and often not conscious. We will have all sorts of stories and justifications for why we have to be or not be something, why we have to do or not do something, as our minds have learned to justify our programming. They have evolved with us over time, complicating our capacity to trace them back. They have both positive and negative outcomes and often seem nonsensical and self sabotaging, making us even MORE prone to thinking we are just doing something for ‘no reason’ vs. being able to see how the behavior is our attempt at keeping ourselves safe and well.

This is why we will now, in our adulthoods, fear being loud even in our own homes when no one is around - because to our bodies being loud MEANS experiencing pain. This is why there will be a sense of pleasure in over-care taking for others even if doing so is actually detrimental to us on a mental or emotional level, why validation and approval seems so important to us, why we self sabotage, scapegoat, numb and have all our other ‘bad habits’, why we may have mental and emotional instabilities and issues - because our bodies have programmed in that caring for others = getting our needs met.

You see how deeply complex this is?!

Now in our adulthoods, things are very different. 

We are no longer dependent upon others to care for us in the ways we used to be. 

Getting our needs met is a whole new ball of wax in our autonomous lives - but the problem is, we have all these programmed ways of being that were what we FELT we needed to do and be in our childhoods to be loved and safe that are no longer relevant to our actual growth and thriving - but we don’t see that. Unless we are doing deep work around our triggers and programs, we’re going to be operating on perception and programs we developed long ago, that worked in that temporary codependent reality of our childhoods, but that isn’t what we ACTUALLY want and need in order to thrive in real reality.

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Alright, that was a LOT for one day.

Let’s take a break here and come back next week for more on this pain/pleasure complex and how we can work with it to understand reality better!

<3

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