On Social Pain
Excerpt from Girl of Light & Shadow: A Memoir of My Daughter, Who Killed Herself (2022), pp. 114-116
IN THE SIXTH GRADE, therefore, Beth suddenly found herself stranded between opposing prepubescent tribes—the fun, good-looking kids with letter jackets and the creepy, bedwetting brainiacs with pocket protectors, who would probably fail to launch, spend their lives eating Cheetos, collecting Pokemon cards, and hacking government servers from their moms’ basements. Or something like that.
This caused her real pain, as we shall see.
But first, let’s rewind a couple years to pick up another thread in the fabric of her increasingly conflicted social life.
Back in the fourth grade, when my rabid little reader wasn’t off in the shade snarfing down a tasty paperback, kickball and soccer were the introvert’s favorite social engagements. Not only did she have a quick mind, but also a quick pair of feet. She lapped up any excuse to run. And, according to the sports desk, she was very fast. Faster than most of her peers. As she recorded in her journal:
I was still the new kid in town, but there was a newer one named Jake. We both liked to race other kids. He was one of the few who could keep up with me. I remember he told me I was pretty fast "for a girl." Pretty much the most annoying thing a boy could say.
That spring, after enduring the sting of Jake’s backhanded gender-biased “compliment,” Beth penned an outraged editorial for class, describing an early experience of social exclusion she had suffered during kickball on a previous playground:
Have you ever been told you can’t do something, just because you’re a girl? When I lived in Houston, there was a bunch of weird, outcast boys who always hogged the kickball at recess. They would fight anyone who tried to get the ball. The outcasts had bruises all over and lived in the principal’s office. However, they weren’t friends. They were more like inseparable enemies who used each other for punching bags. One day, my friends and I were bored, so we asked if we could play kickball with them. They started hollering and spitting at us. We asked them why they wouldn’t let us play. They said, “Because you’re girls!” We finally understood and stamped away.
Apparently, this novel experience—my daughter’s initiation into the cruel reality of gender discrimination (something she would experience again, in quite another form)—had been painful enough that Jake’s insult brought it all back a year later.
Her feelings had been hurt as surely as if one of those weird, outcast boys had used her delicate, developing brain for a punching bag, and left neurological bruises.
I’m not waxing metaphorical now.
Beth endured a garden variety species of what neuroscientists call “social pain,” a deeply aversive emotional reaction to having some aspect of yourself, your identity, your very being devalued or rejected by individuals or social groups that matter to you. This negative state of mind is characterized (to use the high-falutin technical terminology of affective neuroscience) by “hurt feelings” arising directly from “social injury”—discrimination, ostracism, abandonment, even loss.
Grief, too, is an expression of social pain. As least if it’s caused by a social loss.
Not only do people suffering from social absence or exclusion use the same language as they do to describe physical hurt and pain, but two decades of research have proven that social pain and injury leverage much the same neural circuitry—and evolutionary programming—as physical pain.
“Pain,” therefore, is not a figure of speech. It’s real. It lights up identifiable parts of the brain.
I tell you this, at this pivotal point in the unfolding origami of Beth’s life story, because if, indeed, suicide is largely a social phenomenon, then repeated small, seemingly “ordinary” instances of social pain early in life represent seeds that might sprout too many sharp, protective spines in years to come. Fending off friend and foe alike, if they’re not properly pruned.
Paradoxically, then, as social pain becomes chronic, like physical pain, excessive “protection” repels connection, validation and belonging—the most potent, life-giving social painkillers on the market. Thereby feeding a sinister cycle of escalating solitude, social isolation . . . and, eventually, unendurable pain. Possibly suicide.
One way that scientists first demonstrated the neurological basis of social pain, ironically, was by using a ball game called Cyberball, imaging the brains of participants who, like Beth, were deliberately excluded, in this case by a craven computer program masquerading as other online players. Argh.
But why, exactly, is this painful, rather than merely “annoying,” as Beth described Jake?
Simply put: human beings did not evolve to survive alone. Once upon a time, being separated from the tribe or clan for very long—by accident or exile—was a death sentence.
On the savannas of prehistoric Africa, where hominids first emerged from our more ancient ancestors—harking back to those cute, rat-like critters scurrying about underfoot when the sky rained down fire on the dinosaurs, precipitating the prolific diversification of mammals over the next sixty-five million years—we were some of the tastiest McNuggets in the neighborhood.
Puny, pathetic primates without the speed or strength of our predators, we overcompensated by manufacturing gigantic brains capable of processing gigabytes of social data so that we could efficiently organize, defend, hunt, gather and franchise fast-food enterprises with no nutritional value. To survive and remove hominid-burgers from the local butcher shop, we became the most hypersocial species on the block.
Our evolving neurological wetware quickly flagged wandering off alone in the bush among saber-toothed slaughterhouses as a “social” condition sufficiently life-threatening to require an automated detection and alarm system so loud and aversive that we couldn’t turn it off until we had safely returned to the warm and sacred circle of society.
Pain, in its natural habitat—like hunger, thirst, fever and projectile vomiting—is simply trying to protect us, to ensure our survival as an organism. Why? So we can pass along our designer genes. After that, it’s just fine and dandy if we die. Evolution doesn’t care if we’re happy.
As the ultimate evolutionary tinkerer, natural selection generally uses existing components lying about the garage.
Since even the earliest mammals came with pre-installed neural circuitry designed to alert them to physical threat, danger or damage, the lazy brains of their descendants decided not to reinvent the wheel. They borrowed physical pain to build their increasingly social alarm systems, simply disconnecting the wires that lit up specific body parts, deeming diffused agony more socially stimulating.
To conserve venture capital, the machinery of our forebears’ two overlapping pain systems both employed “endogenous” opioids—the body’s natural painkillers—for fuel. Caring and meaningful social engagement would accelerate opioid production (ahhh), while grief and loss, loneliness and social isolation would shut down the pill mill (argh).
Voila! Social pain was ready to go public. And, in the absence of patent or copyright law, subsequent species plagiarized the specs with impunity.
All that we, bands of entrepreneurial hominids added to the original design—in order to upgrade the intensity, duration and frequency of social pain—were self-awareness, civilization, middle school and, ultimately, Instagram.
This caused her real pain, as we shall see.
But first, let’s rewind a couple years to pick up another thread in the fabric of her increasingly conflicted social life.
Back in the fourth grade, when my rabid little reader wasn’t off in the shade snarfing down a tasty paperback, kickball and soccer were the introvert’s favorite social engagements. Not only did she have a quick mind, but also a quick pair of feet. She lapped up any excuse to run. And, according to the sports desk, she was very fast. Faster than most of her peers. As she recorded in her journal:
I was still the new kid in town, but there was a newer one named Jake. We both liked to race other kids. He was one of the few who could keep up with me. I remember he told me I was pretty fast "for a girl." Pretty much the most annoying thing a boy could say.
That spring, after enduring the sting of Jake’s backhanded gender-biased “compliment,” Beth penned an outraged editorial for class, describing an early experience of social exclusion she had suffered during kickball on a previous playground:
Have you ever been told you can’t do something, just because you’re a girl? When I lived in Houston, there was a bunch of weird, outcast boys who always hogged the kickball at recess. They would fight anyone who tried to get the ball. The outcasts had bruises all over and lived in the principal’s office. However, they weren’t friends. They were more like inseparable enemies who used each other for punching bags. One day, my friends and I were bored, so we asked if we could play kickball with them. They started hollering and spitting at us. We asked them why they wouldn’t let us play. They said, “Because you’re girls!” We finally understood and stamped away.
Apparently, this novel experience—my daughter’s initiation into the cruel reality of gender discrimination (something she would experience again, in quite another form)—had been painful enough that Jake’s insult brought it all back a year later.
Her feelings had been hurt as surely as if one of those weird, outcast boys had used her delicate, developing brain for a punching bag, and left neurological bruises.
I’m not waxing metaphorical now.
Beth endured a garden variety species of what neuroscientists call “social pain,” a deeply aversive emotional reaction to having some aspect of yourself, your identity, your very being devalued or rejected by individuals or social groups that matter to you. This negative state of mind is characterized (to use the high-falutin technical terminology of affective neuroscience) by “hurt feelings” arising directly from “social injury”—discrimination, ostracism, abandonment, even loss.
Grief, too, is an expression of social pain. As least if it’s caused by a social loss.
Not only do people suffering from social absence or exclusion use the same language as they do to describe physical hurt and pain, but two decades of research have proven that social pain and injury leverage much the same neural circuitry—and evolutionary programming—as physical pain.
“Pain,” therefore, is not a figure of speech. It’s real. It lights up identifiable parts of the brain.
I tell you this, at this pivotal point in the unfolding origami of Beth’s life story, because if, indeed, suicide is largely a social phenomenon, then repeated small, seemingly “ordinary” instances of social pain early in life represent seeds that might sprout too many sharp, protective spines in years to come. Fending off friend and foe alike, if they’re not properly pruned.
Paradoxically, then, as social pain becomes chronic, like physical pain, excessive “protection” repels connection, validation and belonging—the most potent, life-giving social painkillers on the market. Thereby feeding a sinister cycle of escalating solitude, social isolation . . . and, eventually, unendurable pain. Possibly suicide.
One way that scientists first demonstrated the neurological basis of social pain, ironically, was by using a ball game called Cyberball, imaging the brains of participants who, like Beth, were deliberately excluded, in this case by a craven computer program masquerading as other online players. Argh.
But why, exactly, is this painful, rather than merely “annoying,” as Beth described Jake?
Simply put: human beings did not evolve to survive alone. Once upon a time, being separated from the tribe or clan for very long—by accident or exile—was a death sentence.
On the savannas of prehistoric Africa, where hominids first emerged from our more ancient ancestors—harking back to those cute, rat-like critters scurrying about underfoot when the sky rained down fire on the dinosaurs, precipitating the prolific diversification of mammals over the next sixty-five million years—we were some of the tastiest McNuggets in the neighborhood.
Puny, pathetic primates without the speed or strength of our predators, we overcompensated by manufacturing gigantic brains capable of processing gigabytes of social data so that we could efficiently organize, defend, hunt, gather and franchise fast-food enterprises with no nutritional value. To survive and remove hominid-burgers from the local butcher shop, we became the most hypersocial species on the block.
Our evolving neurological wetware quickly flagged wandering off alone in the bush among saber-toothed slaughterhouses as a “social” condition sufficiently life-threatening to require an automated detection and alarm system so loud and aversive that we couldn’t turn it off until we had safely returned to the warm and sacred circle of society.
Pain, in its natural habitat—like hunger, thirst, fever and projectile vomiting—is simply trying to protect us, to ensure our survival as an organism. Why? So we can pass along our designer genes. After that, it’s just fine and dandy if we die. Evolution doesn’t care if we’re happy.
As the ultimate evolutionary tinkerer, natural selection generally uses existing components lying about the garage.
Since even the earliest mammals came with pre-installed neural circuitry designed to alert them to physical threat, danger or damage, the lazy brains of their descendants decided not to reinvent the wheel. They borrowed physical pain to build their increasingly social alarm systems, simply disconnecting the wires that lit up specific body parts, deeming diffused agony more socially stimulating.
To conserve venture capital, the machinery of our forebears’ two overlapping pain systems both employed “endogenous” opioids—the body’s natural painkillers—for fuel. Caring and meaningful social engagement would accelerate opioid production (ahhh), while grief and loss, loneliness and social isolation would shut down the pill mill (argh).
Voila! Social pain was ready to go public. And, in the absence of patent or copyright law, subsequent species plagiarized the specs with impunity.
All that we, bands of entrepreneurial hominids added to the original design—in order to upgrade the intensity, duration and frequency of social pain—were self-awareness, civilization, middle school and, ultimately, Instagram.
