Considering pain

Considering pain

How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? While this episode doesn’t focus on alcohol directly, it offers a powerful lens on pain that’s highly relevant to anyone dealing with addiction, withdrawal or emotional fallout. Host Lynne Malcolm chats with historian Joanna Burke, whose own experience of "writhing in pain" after surgery sparked a passion to understand how people talk about suffering.

Burke recalls reading Virginia Woolf’s claim that pain is outside language, then being told by her partner, "you've been talking nonstop for nearly an hour about how people can't talk about pain". That irony pushed her to write a history of pain and to question whether the real silence lies with those who don’t want to hear about it. Across 300 years of history, Burke shows that pain is deeply social.

Beliefs about angry gods, bad habits or germs shape how pain feels, but they also influence who is taken seriously. She explains the "chain of feeling" where some groups – slaves, animals, women, infants, poor people – were seen as less sensitive, and therefore given less or no pain relief. As she puts it, "there's nothing democratic about pain". For anyone who’s ever felt dismissed about their suffering, this episode hits hard.

Burke talks about patients censoring themselves out of shame, or to avoid "inflicting pain" on loved ones. She also questions the familiar one-to-ten pain scale, introduced mainly to help pharmaceutical companies prove their drugs work, and argues that numbers strip away the rich, metaphorical language people use to describe pain. There’s hope here too.

Burke argues that talking about pain – in words, art or music – can ease isolation and help people "suffer better" by making sense of what they’re going through. If you’ve struggled to explain your own hurt, physical or emotional, this thoughtful conversation might make you wonder: what would happen if you let yourself really talk about it?