How To Choose Your People Chapter 12

Chapter 12 — Pain (1.8)

PAIN (1.8)

If you've ever taken care of a fellow in pain, you know how demanding, cranky and irritable a normally good-natured person can be.

Pain itself is not an emotion, but a perception that warns the individual that his survival is threatened. However, there is a particular emotional response to pain which occurs on a small way-stop between Anger and Antagonism.

SCATTERED ATTENTION

A person cannot stay high-tone when he is in pain, so this is the level to which he drops. His attention scatters; he wants to be elsewhere (anywhere else); he's testy, snappish and impatient. He's fighting the pain; but his mind is so scattered that he's completely ineffective.

Joe is cleaning the garage when a bee stings him. He makes a wild slap at the bee, misses and knocks over an oil can. He picks up the oil can, fumbles and drops it. Snarling, he lunges at the half-dead bee on the work bench and hits his head on the open cupboard door. His comments during this fiasco are unprintable.

Pain so interrupts a person's orderly control of his environment that he fights it – with churlish, ill-natured thrusts. Extreme heat (one form of pain) produces emotions in this band of the scale. We see this in the person who climbs into a closed car on a hot summer day; he becomes impatient and cantankerous. Those same hot summer days are the ones which produce an eruption of riots and "crimes of passion."

PAIN TOLERANCE

An upscale person can tolerate more discomfort in the form of extreme heat, cold, light or noise. The lower a person is on the scale, the lower his pain tolerance. Grief considers everything painful (knowledge, reality, experience and most sensations), so don't confuse him with 1.8 where pain is real and sharp and the emotion is much more alive. Grief will complain of pain when his shoe pinches a little, whereas the hightone person might not even consider the shoe uncomfortable.

SPORTS

We see many sports played across the level of 1.8 on the tone scale (although the top athletes themselves are usually higher tone than this). Ice hockey, for instance, is essentially an Antagonism game that produces frequent injuries. A player gets pushed against the boards; he drops to 1.8 and turns around clubbing with his stick at the offending opponent. Another player gets hit, so he too swings. Soon the whole thing turns into a donnybrook that sends half of the players to the penalty box.

SUMMARY

It's easy to identify someone in this tone: splice together equal parts of Anger and Antagonism, then sprinkle a little salt on the wound.

That's pain. ow!