Clean Pain and Dirty Pain: The Two Types of Emotional Suffering

“Pain is physical; suffering is mental. Beyond the mind there is no suffering. Pain is essential for the survival of the body, but none compels you to suffer. Suffering is entirely due to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on; to flow with life.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj

There are basically two types of emotional pain and the key to liberation is learning to distinguish between the two.

Dr Steven Hayes, a noted psychologist and pioneer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, calls these two types of suffering clean pain and dirty pain.

I tend to think of them as natural pain and unnatural pain.

Clean pain is what you experience when something intrinsically hurtful or stressful happens to you.

It might be a bereavement, a relationship breakup, the loss of a job, an accident or ill health.

Those situations trigger a natural stress response and unless you’re highly dispassionate by nature, you’ll almost inevitably feel bad for a time. That’s clean pain. There’s a concrete, objective cause and effect and the pain has a limited duration. You may experience hurt, a process of natural grief, but then the hurt naturally subsides.

Dirty pain stems not from an objective situation or event but from your subjective thoughts about a situation or event (whether real or imagined).

Perhaps something unpleasant happens, or you’re worried that it might happen. But rather than dealing with it and letting it pass, you start spinning all kinds of stories about it in your mind.

“This is the third headache I’ve had this week. What if there’s something seriously wrong with me? Didn’t my cousin have the same thing and die of a brain aneurysm?”

“Why did he break up with me? I know he said it wasn’t anything to do with me, but what if it was–? What if there’s something inherently unlovable about me? What if I never find anyone? What if I’m destined to be alone forever?”

“How am I ever going to find a job now? The economy is terrible and there are no opportunities! What if I end up on the streets? What if I become a bag lady?”

Any of that sound familiar?

Clean pain and dirty pain can easily be distinguished.

You see, emotions actually have a very brief life cycle. 90 seconds to be precise.

A few years ago I saw a fascinating interview with Jill Bolte Taylor, a neurologist who had a stroke and actually found herself in a blissful state of enlightenment (her book My Stroke Of Insight is well worth a read).

As Taylor explains:

“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body. After that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.

Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds.

This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away.

After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.”

Of course, for many of us, painful emotions tend to last far longer than 90 seconds.

That’s because we have a tendency to keep re-triggering the emotion over and over again.

We do this with our thoughts.

As I explained in my article ‘The Secret to Understanding and Managing Your Emotions’, your emotions are basically the body’s response to the thoughts and stories you’re choosing to think.

When you can’t let go of a negative story in your mind — almost always a story in which you cast yourself either as victim or judge — it causes a feedback loop.

The story you’re telling yourself triggers an emotional response (if it’s a bad story you can bet the emotions accompanying it won’t be pleasant), which then influences your behaviour which in turn reinforces the thoughts you’re thinking. And on and on and ON it goes.

This feedback loop is what results in depression, anxiety and other such neuroses. In the words of U2, we get stuck in a moment and we can’t get out of it.

This is dirty pain because the original triggering event — assuming it even existed in the first place! — is in the past. It’s gone and yet rather than move on from it, you keep it alive with the stories in your mind.

Left unchecked, the mind will tend to eat itself up telling all kinds of terrible stories about how unworthy, unlovable and inadequate you are — or how the world is a dreadful and hostile place and everyone else is out to get you.

This is dirty, filthy pain indeed. As it says in the Bhagavad Gita, “you grieve over that which does not warrant grief.” It’s an illegitimate grief because it’s based on nothing more than thought, imagination and projection.

When a difficult event or situation arises in life — one with concrete and tangible reality and not just an imagined problem — the emotionally mature person deals with the situation as best they can.  Then they let it go and move on from it.

They allow any clean pain to move through them without getting hooked into all kinds of dire and dreadful stories about it.

Any pain or grief will tend to resolve itself in a relatively short time. That’s how emotion works when we allow the energy to flow and dissipate in an unconstricted manner.

Whenever you find yourself suffering emotional pain, it’s very helpful to stop and investigate whether the pain you’re experiencing is clean or dirty.

If it has a legitimate cause and you allow the feelings to be and avoid feeding into them with thought, it may not be easy but the pain will pass.

Dirty pain is always based on your thoughts, interpretations and projections about something. It might have been a real, objective event that happened in the past or it might be an imagined future scenario. The body can’t distinguish between a real thought and an imagined thought. It triggers an emotional response either way. And the more you feed it with thought and mental narrative, the worse it will get.

I’m convinced that the large part of human suffering is dirty pain.

In the West, we live lives of freedom and affluence. We enjoy everyday luxuries that even a century ago kings couldn’t have dreamed of. Yet we suffer. We worry about the past (which no longer exists), the future (which is nothing but imagination), what other people think, how we measure up to society, how our jobs are going, how much wealth we have.

The mind being what it is, you could have all the money and success in the world and still be in a state of complete misery.

Statistics released by the World Health Organisation showed that in 1990 416 million people worldwide suffered from depression or anxiety. By 2013 this has increased to 615 million.

Certainly, there are many legitimate challenges and pains we experience in life. Even the happiest of people are not immune to this.

But when we realise just how much of our suffering is caused by our mind — by thoughts, judgements, desires and aversions and the inability to simply let things go and let things be — we can see how the real issue isn’t that we have problems. It’s that we are the problem. Our minds are creating problems and suffering where none need exist, and it’s all based on unquestioned thought and assumptions.

The good news is that with a little self-awareness and the willingness to question the thoughts that are causing you to suffer, it’s actually pretty easy to let go of it. Once you learn to use the blade of discrimination and self-inquiry to cut yourself free of needless suffering, you become a truly wealthy person.

As well as learning to take an objective approach to the thoughts and emotions you experience, another key to creating a peaceful and balanced mind is to adopt the mindset of karma yoga and have an understanding of how to manage the gunas, the three energies or forces that shape everything in life, including your body, mind, thoughts and emotions.

As Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, which I consider the greatest book of wisdom ever written (although technically it’s not a book):

“To succeed, you must lift yourself up by yourself. The mind alone can be your greatest asset or it can be your worst enemy. By cultivating self-mastery, you ensure the mind works for and not against you. Such a mind remains tranquil, composed in both light and dark, pleasure and pain, and praise and criticism. […]

Without doubt, the mind is by nature restless and difficult to tame. But it can be mastered through constant practice and objectivity. Along with self-control, practice and objectivity are the essential to one’s progress.”

About Rory 130 Articles
Rory Mackay is a writer and artist who was born and lives in Scotland. Having practised meditation and studied Eastern philosophy since he was a teenager, his life is devoted to sharing the knowledge, wisdom and tools that transformed his life. In addition to teaching meditation and traditional Advaita Vedanta, he has written two metaphysical fantasy/sci-fi novels ('Eladria' and 'The Key of Alanar') and releases electronic ambient music under the name Ajata. When not at work, he can be found in nature, walking his rescue dog, and studying and translating Vedantic texts.