Eight Levels of Pain

I attended a service at my church, Creative Living Fellowship, some months ago where my minister, Rev. Michele Whittington, discussed the eight levels of pain. At the time of this service, I was deep in the throes of a gambling addiction and I could tell that I had reached the lowest levels of pain imaginable. Michele’s sermon validated my beliefs. With so many other sermons, I had been able to twist her words and make it seem like what I was doing with my poker playing was actually good for me. Now I had something concrete to show me that what I was experiencing was not healthy.

I am going to be using my gambling as an example for the purposes of this post, however, I think you will be able to extrapolate what I write into your own experiences with pain. Let me start by showing you the Eight Levels of Pain:

Forgiveness
Meaningful/Positive
Acceptance
——————————————–
Pain Natural
——————————————–
Hurt
Suffering
Misery Meaningless/Negative
Agony
Numbness

Let’s start in the middle. “Pain.” This is the natural “ouch” you feel when you slightly stub your toe on a chair, for example. It is also how you feel when someone calls you a name. For me, with gambling, it is how I felt in the early days when I didn’t win a game.

The next level is “Hurt.” This is where meaningless pain begins. Why is it meaningless? It is meaningless because this is where your reaction to the pain starts. It is no longer the natural pain that you initially felt, but now you add meaning to the pain. For example, let’s say that I was in a game of Hold’em, and I could tell that I was clearly the best player with four players left. Three players are going to be paid. Let’s say I pick up a pair of aces in a hand and I find myself all in (all of my chips are in the middle – if I win, I double up, if I lose, I am out of the game) against a player who has more chips than me and a pair of kings. I am an 80% favorite in this particular situation. Unfortunately for me, a king comes up on the flop (one of the first three face up cards in Hold’em). I lose the hand and I am out. Now, there was a 20% chance that I was going to lose the hand going in, so I have to understand that sometimes I am going to lose. Instead, I react with hurt. I say, “Why do I always lose in those situations?” Now, I remind myself that this sometimes happens, and I stop letting it bother me after I start another game. In other words, I react with hurt, but I get over it pretty quickly.

This would be the equivalent of stubbing your toe on a chair and complaining about who put the chair there, but once the pain fades, you carry on with whatever you may have been doing.

The next level if pain is “Suffering.” To keep going with my poker scenario, let’s say it was the same hand where I had AA and my opponent had KK before the flop. This time when the K hits on the flop to give him a winner, I not only act hurt, but I take it a little further and I start complaining about how unfair the game is. I may step away from the table and stew over my bad fortune for a while longer than I normally would. In fact, I could let is stir around inside of me for a day or two – replaying the hand in my head over and over. Even though there is nothing I could have done to change my luck, I am still upset over the fact that it happened at all. This takes you a step above hurt. In this case, you have stubbed your toe and find yourself writhing in pain on the floor for a few minutes.

The next level is “Misery.” If you thought you were feeling bad before, this is where you really start to become destructive with your thought system. In a numbers game such as poker, there really is no excuse to reach the last level, let alone this level. Poker is a game of percentages. Even if you have the best hand 100% of the time, that doesn’t mean you are going to win 100% of the time. That is why it is such an insidious disease. Some days, the luck will be with you, but most days, it will seem to be against you. But if you average it all out, you will find that you are winning and losing about as much as you are mathematically supposed to be.

Misery is when you go beyond suffering and begin to think that something outside of you is actually in control. You will stew over your bad luck for days. In fact, you will completely ignore your good luck and see that as “deserved” after what you’d already been through. Your main focus will be almost entirely on the bad luck you experience.

There is a reason why we are more attracted to bad news than good. We seek out bad news, because it is new and different. Bad news holds out attention better than good news because we still have hunter gatherer instincts. If something bad happened in the caveman days, it always required immediate attention. Bad news requires immediate attention by all involved, so the good news is often left by the wayside – available just in case their is no bad news to report. Even though we don’t have to worry about being stomped on my a mammoth anymore, our brains haven’t caught up with our current situation and they continue to seek out the bad news.

At this point, we begin to think that the world is “going to hell in a hand basket.” We become miserable with our lot in life. We begin to think that the world is against us and there is nothing we can do about it. This is, of course, absolutely false. While we may not be able to control our circumstances, we can control the way we act towards them. Hurt, suffering, and misery are all choices we make about how we respond to our environment. Nothing more, nothing less! We can choose to react differently.

“Agony” is also a choice. This is another step above misery. Not only are we quietly miserable about our environment, but now we are becoming out and out hostile towards it. For me, I would be screaming out loud at my computer, turn around and start pounding my fists into my bed (I learned to use my bed instead of my desk, because it was much less physically painful). I would scream and swear and curse the poker gods. My behavior toward others was downright hostile, especially at the poker tables. I would curse at other players (virtually – as 99% of my poker was played online) and berate them and harass them for being so lucky until they lost. I took particular pleasure in giving them a taste of their own medicine when they lost. But all I was really doing was making myself look like a fool.

Agony is clearly a behavior that is chosen. It is the most outwardly visible pain of the eight. The first three “meaningless” pains mostly happen internally. For that reason, they often feel, to the “victim,” like natural pain when in fact, they are not. That is not to say that agony doesn’t feel like natural pain to the “victim.” However, clearly, it is the reaction of the person that is controllable, not the instigating factor.

Let me use driving as an example for a moment. Let’s say you are driving along and you suddenly realize that you have had the misfortune of needing to stop at the last four traffic lights. You become aware of this now, and you begin to wonder if this is going to be a pattern. Sure enough, just as you are about to arrive at the intersection, the light turns red causing you to have to stop. At this point, you are experiencing “Hurt.” You are feeling a big uneasy about your luck. As you start moving, you look far ahead and notice that the the next traffic light is currently green. You decide to step on the gas a bit to see if you can beat this pattern that you have fallen into. However, just as you get close, the light again turns red. You lament the fact that you have now had to stop at six consecutive traffic lights, and at this point you are “Suffering.” Your gut is getting a bit tied up in knots, and you have completely stopped listening to your radio. You are completely focused on the fact that you are experiencing some incredibly bad luck. You decide that you are going to drive a little faster than normal to try to catch the next light and break this horrendous pattern you have fallen into. Sure enough, you are not only the first one out when the light turns green, but you have crossed the opposite crosswalk before the other cars who were waiting with you have even left their starting positions. Again, you notice that the light is already green, so step on the gas to the point that you are more than ten MPH over the speed limit. And sure enough, you cannot beat the red light, again! Now you are feeling miserable. You are stewing in your seat, and you are just so completely focused on your bad luck that you don’t notice anything else that is going on around you. You are just sitting there looking at the light and feel astonished at how long it seems to be taking. Time seems to be stretching out now, and you aren’t even in a hurry to get anywhere, but you are still feeling this way. You decide to stick with your strategy of trying to go faster to end this exceedingly frustrating pattern and you notice that the light is just turning green. You begin to think that maybe you have finally broken the pattern as you close in on the next traffic light, when all of a sudden, a slow moving car turns left onto you road right in front of you causing you to slam on your brakes, you start honking, and cursing, and screaming at the person flipping them off with all the energy you can muster. Part of you wishes you had a gun at that moment. And to top it all off, you have been slowed enough to have to stop at the next traffic light. You sit at the light pounding on your steering wheel and your dashboard to the point of cracking your dash. You continue to scream and curse your bad luck until you just completely run out of energy. All of the sudden, you just become quiet. You are completely “Numb” to the world. The highest level of pain. You are in so much pain, that you don’t feel the pain anymore. In fact, as you pull out when the light turns green, you become aware that you don’t care what happens to you, you are not stopping for another red light. You don’t even think about your speed, you aren’t even aware of it. You just step on the gas and accelerate. As you come upon the traffic light, it turns red a full five seconds before you reach the intersection. But it doesn’t matter, you aren’t stopping. You go right through the light oblivious to the vehicles that have already entered the intersection. You may hit them, you may not, it doesn’t matter – you are numb – you can’t feel pain anymore. And all this happened because you realized you had to stop at the first four traffic lights.

Driving is a lot like poker. Sometimes you are going to have runs where you get only green lights, sometimes you will have runs where you only seem to hit red lights. Most of the time, you will have a mixture of both. But sometimes you will have those runs where, if it is a run of bad beats, it just gets you to the point that you don’t care anymore.

When reaching “Numb” in poker, you begin to not think about your hands anymore. There is a term for this in poker circles – “tilt,” or “tilting,” or “going on tilt.” You play has no rhyme or reason, you don’t care anymore. Since you feel like you have no control anyway, why even bother playing well? Why bother trying? Why not just take risks and let the cards fall as they may – maybe you will just get lucky. It is when poker players usually lose their most money. When you get to this stage of being numb, this is when you become the most destructive – not only to yourself, but to others as well. Not only do you not care about your own safety, you don’t care about the safety of those around you.

Hurt, suffering, misery, agony, and numbness are all examples of meaningless or negative pain. Why meaningless? Because it doesn’t have to happen. All of these types of pain are controllable. In other words, you can nip this kind of pain at the bud. Certainly, if you stub your toe on a chair, you can’t avoid the pain that you will feel. That is natural pain. But, in the example of the driver who realized he’d had to stop at the last four traffic lights – does he have control of how he reacts? Absolutely! He could just say to himself, “Well, how unlucky for me!” He can decide that nothing is going to change the way he drives. He is going to accept the circumstances as they come.

So we have talked about natural pain and meaningless, or negative, pain so far. So now we need to talk about meaningful or positive pain. Can pain really be a positive? Absolutely! Think about the scenario of stubbing your toe on that chair. This is going to be a bit of a stretch, but stick with me here – “Ouch, I stubbed my toe on the chair! Oh well, it is what it is. I have stubbed my toe, there is not much I can do about the pain. No need for me to get too upset about this, I have to just accept the fact that I did that, and forgive myself for not being more careful.” “Acceptance” and “Forgiveness” are meaningful pain. They are both examples of pain that you choose to learn from.

You have just realized that you stopped at the last four traffic lights. Instead of getting upset over something that you cannot control, you choose to accept it. You choose to realize that there will be days when you catch every red light just as there will be days that you seem to catch all the green lights. If you find that you have a pattern of catching red lights every single morning on your way to work, you will come to realize that that is just the way the lights are set up. You will accept that and resolve to solve the problem by leaving earlier to make sure that you don’t find yourself rushing to get there on time.

Being a successful poker player means that you have to be able to accept the game the way it is. It is a game of percentages. Yes, the game can be lucrative if you have the right mindset. However, if you make money, but can’t accept the game for how it is, and you find yourself diving into agony and numbness, is it really worth playing? This is what I discovered. While I was a winning player, I just had a great deal of difficulty accepting the game the way it was. I couldn’t get my mind off the belief that I was suffering bad beats at a greater rate than others. And even if I could do that, I couldn’t handle the number of times I had to lose in order to win. You can just imagine how difficult it is to be happy with a 1% success ratio. That means you are losing 99% of the time. I wish I could have learned to take it, but I couldn’t. And because I couldn’t, it was affecting who I was outside of poker.

I accepted that about myself. But that is only the first step of meaningful pain. The last step on the positive side is “forgiveness.” When I decided to quit poker, I had to forgive it. I couldn’t quit and be angry that it took away four years of my life. I had to accept that it was a part of my learning process. I had to accept that I needed to go through what I needed to go through in order to realize who I really am. I thought I was going to be a superstar poker player. I was certainly moving in that direction. Whether I would have made it or not is of no consequence to me anymore. I knew that if I kept playing poker, even if I became a winning player, that I was going to always be an addict. It was always going to rule my life rather than the other way around. If I knew that I could play poker and still rule my own life, I would probably still be playing. But I couldn’t. Since I couldn’t, I needed to stop playing. So I forgave myself for that fault, and moved on with my life – finding a way that I could be in control. Even then, I understood that I can never completely control my life – merely the way I react to circumstances and situations around me.

So what about that chair that I kept stubbing my toe on? I accepted that it was something that was going to keep happening if I didn’t make some kind of change. So I moved the chair. I have also forgiven the chair! It must have been something in the fung shui of the room! Now the chair sits out of my path, and I don’t stub my toe anymore! The whole room feels more pleasant to me as well.

Happy New Year/Decade

Namaste