Words that work?

Anyone who has ever been asked to rate their pain on a scale of one to 10 (or sometimes one to five) knows how difficult that can be. But it is far from being the only way to communicate your pain experience. At the recent Live Well with Pain conference Balbir Singh spoke of the inspirational Unmasking Pain project that works to create new, artistic and cultural expressions of pain.

Prof. Deborah Padfield has said that “[Pain] requires a language which works on a more instinctual level than words. One such language is visual language – with its ability to contract the unconscious in maker and viewer” (Perceptions of Pain, 2003).

And cultural historian Joe Moran has written: “One of the impulses underlying art is our sense that other kinds of dialogue have failed, and that we need to absent ourselves and communicate at one remove if we are to communicate at all. If it were easy to make ourselves understood… there would be no need to paint pictures, make music, or write words” (Shrinking Violets, 2016).

So where does that leave those of us pondering our one to 10 questions?

“Let a sufferer describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry” wrote Virginia Woolf. And, of course, Wittgenstein famously ended the Tractatus with the words “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”

But in the middle is the no-man’s land of patient pain communication – a necessary but not sufficient condition for diagnosis and treatment. And it is here in this gap that the work of Balbir Singh and others seeks to provide new and innovative ways of expressing pain.

Quincy Jones (yes, that one!) once put it like this: “Recycle your pain into purpose,” he wrote in his memoir, 12 Notes on Life and Creativity (2022).

“We have the ability,” he went on, “to channel our life experiences into something greater than ourselves.” And that purpose, the ‘something greater’, in my experience, is what ultimately leads to the ability both to put pain into perspective – to manage it, to channel it, use it, and maybe even control it as well as communicate it effectively, bridging the gap between the inadequacy of words and the need to be heard.

I’ve worked on a number of creative projects looking at bridging the language barrier and one such, in collaboration with Brunel University, led to the production of a short video, summing up both the problems and, perhaps, possible solutions.

You can watch the video here:

“Recycle your pain into purpose. We have the ability to channel our life experiences into something greater than ourselves.”

Quincy Jones