Reactions to Pain

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Please note: I'm not looking for any "adult" answers here, or any answers which concern "adult-related" activities although I can see what inferences some people could make from this post. I'm perfectly normal when it comes to my preferences with "that" and anything pain-related is out of the question.

How do you react to pain? With a lot of kinds of pain, I have a really strange reaction and sort of enjoy it. If it's a really tiny, sharp pain then I won't enjoy it, but if somebody is, for instance, trying to crush my fingers in their hand I quite like the feeling, or the feeling of putting my hands on my face and pushing really hard or biting down on my lip. This is apparently a very autistic trait and I wondered if anyone else has experienced it. It sounds like such a bad and strange thing but apparently it can be quite normal if you have AS or Autism.

I don't like pain.

Second degree burn on my wrist:
"Ouch"


3 bones broken in foot:
*walk up stairs, sit down* "Mom, I think I broke my foot!"


Machetti through the knee - 5 stiches:
*not noticing. Going to walk up stairs. Hearing a slurping, squishing noise*
"Ewwww"


Dislocated elbow:
*trip, turn over, feel the back of my arm* "Hey man, I just dislocated my elbow."
"Oh."
"I think I need to go to the hospital"
"... Ohhhhhoh! Oh my god!"

Etc.

Though I was kind of a baby when I broke my ankle. I refused to move and yelled at people who tried to look at it.

Yes, I do know what you mean. I also have a strange reaction of sorts to pain, and that's probably one of the reasons I've self harmed quite a lot in the past. It sounds strange but while I don't exactly "enjoy" all pain, there are some types of pain I do almost enjoy. It's hard to explain. Pain can make me feel more real and safer and can make me feel better. On the other hand pain is a bad thing however you feel about it because when you think about it, it's a signal from your body that something is happening to it which is not good for it- e.g. you've injured yourself or are ill.

pain hurts
it is a miserable affair, and it is best to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Minor pain can actually be somewhat enjoyable. I used to have a habit of intentionally turning my foot a certain way so that I would get a cramp, turn it back so the cramp would go away, and repeat the process. Call it a form of stimming, I guess.

Pain is just a signal. I learned to block it out. Mostly.

Some kinds of pain hurt, but don't feel bad. I don't know why. I have a habit of using self-injury of various sorts to deal with overload; thankfully I never banged my head very often, so there's no long-term damage except for lots of scars.

On the other hand, I can be completely overwhelmed by menstrual cramps. It's very odd... like stuff coming from the skin is irrelevant, but stuff coming from the internal organs is processed as overly significant. I'll just put it down to my weird sensory system and leave it at that.

I like the feeling of chewing off little pieces of flesh from inside my mouth and chewing my lip open, and I like to peel the first couple of layers of skin off of my arms when I'm stressed or bored. I'm really sensitive to most other types of pain in a really bad way though, even being tickled is really painful. My friends stopped trying to tickle me when they realised doing it will result in me instinctively lashing out. Sometimes outwardly I won't show I'm in pain but a lot of the time I'll just start crying.

A slight headache or other little pain can cause me a lot of distress. A little cut can bother me a lot too. However, I find something like getting a tattoo to be relaxing (I have 8 tattoos). My biggest tattoo is a tribal cross that runs down the center of my chest (over my sternum), down my stomach and around my navel. From the sternum it goes out up to my nipples and over my ribs. The tattoo artist commented on how I just sat there without grimmacing or anything. Yes it hurt, but in a relaxing way.

I generally have a low pain tolerance. But to be honest, I've never really had any serious injuries. Only thing I can think of is when I was about 8 years old I fell off my bike and onto some strange species of palm tree with spines on it. It cut my face all up, I had to go to the emergency room, and it did hurt.

But I say that I have a low pain tolerance for several reasons. Here are some examples:

- I never had to be put on anesthetics when I got a filling in my teeth when I was 6 years old.
- The last time I had any sort of pain reliever was over 3 years ago, when I had a surgery to remove a flap of skin between my two front teeth.
- When I get sick, I continue on with my life anyway. I don't lay down in bed all day.
- I can usually ignore pain. That's not to say that I don't feel it, but if my mind is occupied with something, I can sort of tune it out.
- I never complain about headaches and joint pain (although I do sometimes have them), unlike my younger sister who has issues with this.
- The last time I cried because of physical pain was when I was 11 or 12 years old, and I was accidentally kicked in the balls while I was practicing martial arts.

I was going to say that I'm glad I'm not a woman and I don't have to deal with that internal pain (which, I agree, is worse), but I think I just changed my mind after remembering that last incident.

"Ow." Or sometimes, I laugh.

Or if it's too much, I can just completely take myself away from it by reciting poetry in my head.