#45: We're built to process pain.
Why, as pleasure-seeking creatures, we love art that makes us cry.
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On the final day of my ENWT (Empty Nester World Tour; more on this next week), I was tucked into my own bed for the first time in two weeks.
My brain was fried, swirling between Copenhagen and Greenland time zones. As I attempted to delay my descent into sleep until at least 8:30pm, I picked up my phone and scrolled. Landing on the New York Times Book Review, I cocked an eyebrow at the headline. Then obviously I clicked.
The author Craig Fehrman recounts how his son Henry “dissolved into tears… so intense that he couldn’t speak” when Fehrman had asked him if he liked the ending of The Wild Robot. Since Henry was the type of kid that “politely declined to engage with The Grinch, even as his parents promised that Christmas would ultimately be saved”, Fehrman figured Henry wouldn’t be finishing the other books in Brown’s trilogy. Instead, Henry read the first two Wild Robot books over and over again while waiting for the third volume to be released. He was even the main character, Roz the robot, for Halloween.
Fehrman, or more accurately Henry, highlighted an idea I’d been dragging around with me during my travels… quite literally in the form of a Harvard Business Review article featuring Bruce Springsteen. I’d found this double-underlined, chicken-scratch-annotated printout in a red folder that must’ve been lost under my desk years ago.
While its original purpose had been inspiration for my remarks at a virtual leadership gathering during the quarantine of 2020, it served as TL inspiration this time around. I was specifically drawn to a term coined by HBR author Gianpiero Petriglieri to describe Springsteen’s leadership style: resilient hope.
“The kind of hope borne of staring at the truth — especially the truth of loss and fear — without losing faith. A hope that takes you through hardship, not away from it,” Petriglieri explains.
He goes on, “It is through art that the unspeakable and the unheard find a voice… That is why the artist’s leadership is usually trustworthy: It either speaks to and for people, or it has no power at all.”
Between Springsteen and Roz, something clicked. There’s been a loophole all along in our resistance to talking about the “hard things”. It’s in art, in entertainment, in the pastimes we seek out when we want to feel something. And it turns out, we don’t just want to feel the good things. We don’t want cotton-candy sweetness that hurts our teeth. Those types of art and artists would have “no power” as Petriglieri puts it.
But give us an Adele breakup album, or The Titanic, or even Shakespeare’s borderline gibberish Romeo and Juliet… And we eat it up like a starving man given his first meal in weeks.
So are we big fat liars that don’t know our own minds? Or have we forgotten something about the emotional process… And the ways in which we are hardwired to work through pain, rather than skirt around it.
We are pleasure-seeking animals, not masochists.
It just turns out that there is pleasure in acknowledging and releasing pain.
Researchers found that our brains literally release endorphins (the body’s in-house version of opiate painkillers) during sad movies, which reduce our sensations of physical and emotional pain. (They tested this by making people watch sad movies and then do wall sits. Imagine a bunch of puffy-eyed research subjects being directed to do their first wall sit since high school immediately after watching Schindler’s List, wondering what the hell is going on.)
In other words, hidden inside the sensation of grief is its own antidote. And without fully understanding why, we’ve been creating and seeking out sneaky places to have the emotional release that triggers the cathartic endorphin relief. But that’s not all. We’re also practicing being hopeful on the other end of a movie that has just torn our guts out.
As Brené Brown puts it, “Hope is a function of struggle… We develop hope not during the easy or comfortable times, but through adversity and discomfort.” (If the podcast gods are listening, I think Springsteen and Brown would have a hell of a conversation.) Hope is by it’s very nature resilient. And we have found a way to build that resilience by exposing ourselves to struggles that are not our own but still feel real through art and entertainment.
It’s as if our brain has been tricking us into taking our resilience vitamins by wrapping them in the sweet fruity gelatin of art and entertainment.
As a grief writer, I am relieved. As a member of society, I’m a little confused. Why are we so resistant to just feeling our feelings, while simultaneously looking for a way to process them through someone else’s feelings? Maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe I should just be glad it’s happening at all.
But I look back at Old Sue, who avoided sad songs like the plague but inhaled sad books like a sleeve of Oreos, holed up in her room for hours on end. She didn’t know that she was secretly processing her emotions, and because of that, they continued to scare her. Her conscious mind was still on high alert, shutting down so many experiences for the sake of preserving her cold hard exterior. I want her to know what she was secretly, subconsciously doing — taking her resilience gummies! I want her to know that she was stronger, more flexible, more adaptable than she realized. I want her to know that emotions couldn’t break her, even though she was terrified of them. I want her to know that releasing her death grip of top-down control was the right path all along.
I am so grateful to artists and entertainers for giving us an outlet. But I want more from the audience. I want recognition of what we’re doing. I want you to own it. Because I want you to trust that when tragedy inevitably strikes, you are capable of surviving it.
You’ve been taking your resilience gummies, your endorphin system is up and running — you just have to remember that you already know how to ride the waves of pain to the shores of relief.
While noodling on the impact of art in my post-loss life, I couldn’t shake another example of emotional processing through entertainment.
It is decidedly not highbrow. Not even midbrow, like a young readers fantasy trilogy or Springsteen… It’s a Marvel movie. Avengers: Endgame. (This is your official spoiler alert by the way!)
For the Marvel-averse (or those just re-entering pop culture after living under a rock for years), the scene I am thinking of is, surprise surprise, a death scene. Iron Man saves the world in an epic end-of-movie battle. And loses his life in the process.
In our Deagle before-times, Marvel movie viewing was a family affair. The last movie we saw as a family was Dr. Strange, just one week before Mike died. (In fact at the hospital, I remember asking the ER doc, “Didn’t you shock him with the white paddles like in Dr. Strange??”)
When Avengers: Endgame was initially released, I gave it a wide berth until I could watch it alone at home. I didn’t know what the ending would be but I did know not everyone was going to make it out alive, and I wanted complete visual and audible privacy to let my emotions flow. And flow they did. All I remember from that initial viewing was sobbing and sobbing during that final scene. And then the feeling of cathartic relief I have come to know was right around the corner (thanks endorphins, you’re the best).
Fast forward to the present, where the Marvel Universe has a special place in my heart… but I still didn’t think it would resonate in this post about emotional processing through art. Even though I had sent myself two emails with MARVEL in the subject line in the past week (my very sophisticated system for keeping track of TL ideas during work.)
But then I boarded another airplane.
Side note: I have a terrible problem with the ‘cone of distraction’. I find myself inanely drawn to what’s playing on the screen of the passenger next to me. I’d just met Daniel — a Danish team member — when I sat down next to him for the Air Greenland flight. For the first four hours, I’d tried with marginal success to tear my eyes away from his screen. Then in the final hour, he pulled up one last movie.
Avengers: Endgame.
Well, ok, damn. Message received. I watched the final scene, side-eye, no sound. Then sent one more email to myself to include the scene in this post.
Back at home, I pulled up YouTube to hear what’s actually being said.
As Iron Man aka Tony Stark’s friends gather around him weeping, his wife Pepper leans in close and looks into his eyes. He holds her hand with his last bit of strength.
“Tony, we are going to be ok. You can rest now,” she says.
Sitting on my couch, nestled into the Treehouse on that gorgeous rainy day, fall leaves beginning to swirl and water racing down my rain chain, I once again sobbed.
I said something similar to Mike. He was already gone when I said it. But I held his hand and said it anyway…. “It’s going to be ok, baby. It’s going to be ok.”
Yes, it's a movie.
Yes, they are wearing robot suits and just saved the universe from an alien warlord. But in the end it is a human experience. And watching this imaginary family go through it just like my flesh-and-bone family did helps. Through the fictional mirror of tragedy, I feel connected to humanity as a whole. I get a safe place to cry about the grief that is mine and the grief that is human too. And I am a little better prepared to face the hard stuff ahead, because I know we’ve all been doing it for generations.
We think we won’t survive pain, but we’re built to… if we let ourselves feel it. Relief follows release. Hope follows struggle. Resilience is just what we’re made of.
As Fehrman says about The Wild Robot, “Roz gave Henry a reason to push through the first book’s sad parts. She also gave him a model for how to make sense of those sad parts — for how and why to keep trying until he was ready to appreciate that, sometimes, sadness isn’t a bad thing to feel.”
If there is an eight-year-old finishing a book that makes him sob and immediately engulfing the next, maybe pain is not as detrimental as we imagine it to be. Maybe it's even essential to living a vibrant life.
In resilient hope,
If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:
Post #14: Things will be great again. Giving each other permission to believe in the future while honoring the pain of the present.
Post #22: The resilient experiment. If you can learn from “failure” without self-judgment, you can be resilient.
Post #30: The beautiful, the painful, the dazzling. How I learned from loss to be unafraid of life.
Post #32: I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. It’s time to rewrite, and rewire, the narrative of suffering and struggle.
Post #39: From lifequake to lemonade. The way you tell your story matters.
This is one of my favorite posts of yours. I can relate to the definition of "resilient hope". It's what I aspire to each day.
This is wonderful, Sue. I joke that Chris and I have "synched our cycles" in that we have written on similar topics on the same day. This week's "music therapy" has a similar theme. We need catharsis, however we can get it, and art usually delivers. xo