Billie’s mother insists that she can stand pain if she makes up her mind to (“You could stand anything for a minute, an hour a day…”) What did you think of this? How did this philosophy help or hurt Billie?
“Standing the pain” can build endurance, but it can also encourage suppression rather than processing. For Billie, it seems to reinforce her tendency to internalize rather than express pain.
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“Standing the pain” can mean delaying the pain; however, the pain will be felt and affect one’s health. Sometimes it takes decades to process painful events. As life continues I believe Billie will/did unravel some truths in order to settle painful points in her past.
I’ve experienced times when I needed to slow down the pain. Get through this morning, and if that’s too long, try for one hour, fewer minutes, which leads to the concept of living the moment; most difficult.
I think that this philosophy helped Billie while she was in some difficult social situations. I didn’t think of it as suppressing the pain forever, but using it as a tool in the moment. Then, the pain could be processed later. She always dwelt on what happened, which was one way of processing what happened.
Isn’t that what a lot of parents say to their kids? Or what adults in general say to kids? “ Suck it up!” “Shake it off!” “ no crying”. It’s what I heard all the time, growing up. Adults tell kids that no one likes a cry baby, so we learn to bottle everything up.
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Standing pain is another way of shutting down true feelings. Billie was taught to ignore her emotions, this led to her very stilted childhood.
I think it helped Billie even though it was only a temporary solution.
I think it helped Billi’s to survive.
Billie’s mother minimized Billie’s feelings. It was another way Billie was made to feel unimportant and an outsider. It encouraged her to hide her feelings and not learn to deal with them.
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Again, I have conflicting opinions about this way of dealing with difficulties, be they physical or mental. Life is filled with pain and we can’t elevate every painful episode to catastrophe status, but we have to deal with each. One of the ways of dealing with the minor things is to tell ourselves to push through the pain. I have a 12 year old granddaughter who has a good level head on her shoulders, but many of the girls in her class are “drama queens” for whom everything that doesn’t go their way is a disaster or insurmountable obstacle. For these scenarios, learning to stand the “pain” which helps to realize what real pain is would be acceptable to me. Yet, Billie’s mother did seem to discount Billie’s serious concerns. It seems that some individuals do this because they simply don’t want to have to deal with the problem. Billie’s mother is fortunate that her dismissal of Billie’s concerns did not have serious ramifications such as depression, suicide, etc.