The fact is when you have chronic pain, not only is it, in essence, difficult for you to understand - 'Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve or cause this?' - it is quite literally impossible for people who don't have it to completely understand.
To normal people, pain is fleeting, it's an annoyance, a temporary inconvenience, and a signal that they have an injury. To us, the word fleeting isn't even in our vocabulary when it comes to pain, it isn't temporary, it rarely stops even with medication, and there is no injury the pain stems from. It's just there. Always.
This is a hard concept for people to grasp, they can't imagine constantly being in pain, especially for no good reason. It's because of this that they're so inclined to minimize or trivialize our pain.
'It can't be that bad, stop being a cry baby.'
'I would love to not have to work and spend all day in bed!'
'Pain is a part of life, get over it. If you just got out more/exercised more you'd be fine.'
'I know someone who has x and they work. You're just being lazy.'
These are a few of many things that I've had said to me. What they don't understand is how severe the pain of chronic illness victims actually is. Some of us have broken bones and not realized it until the swelling and bruising kicked in because we just assume pain is related to our condition. This isn't an exaggeration; we are so conditioned to our level of pain that broken bones are only middling on our pain chart.
That's another thing, too. The pain chart. You know which one I mean, the one at the doctor that has silly faces that are numbered one through ten, and they use it to gauge your pain. The problem is, my 5 may be someone else's 10. My 10 might be someone else's 'I would rather die than experience that.' This is what makes chronic pain so hard for even doctors to treat and understand. They can't gauge our pain because we are so accustomed to it we don't have the same perspective on it that others do.
It's so frustrating, and so disheartening that people would rather minimize our pain than try to understand. They can't understand, not really. But they can try. Trying means so much, it really does, because it means you see and understand that we're sick and in pain, even if it's invisible, even if we have our mask and armor on protecting us with our smiles from the rest of the world. Sometimes just listening when we're complaining can help.
But all in all, the best thing anyone can do is not trivialize the nightmare that is being trapped in a body like this. They can't imagine our pain, and I wouldn't want them to, but just by doing something like acknowledging that this truly is a nightmare, that we are in a living hell, you're taking that trivializing away.
