Why's it so hard to talk about pain?

One interesting discussion that Glucklich brings up in his article, “Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self” is about language’s (specifically English) insufficiency in communicating descriptions of types of pain to another person. This interested me because I tried to think about the times that I had tried to describe a painful sensation that I was experiencing where I felt that the language I used adequately and accurately represented what I was feeling. Most often, it is usually a metaphor that is used to best describe a painful sensation. Glucklich refers to Ronald Melzack’s questionnaire that offers a number of specific descriptors that patients can use to communicate the sensation that they are experiencing. Many of the descriptors, such as piercing, gnawing, drilling, or burning are metaphorical. What the individual is experiencing is like these things, but it’s obviously not actually what is happening. Glucklich makes an interesting commentary about how these things are approximations and are often not even really accurate or relatable experiences but they still are the best way to communicate the sensations:

““How many readers of this journal have been shot, crushed, gnawed at (by rats?), seared, or even pierced? In what way is it safe to assume that someone is communicating meaningfully when he or she says that his or her stomach feels as though it were being sawed? As a matter of fact, the sensation of being shot is not ‘shooting’ at all; it is more of a blow followed by heat” (397).

This is a problem that exists for other senses as well. For example, describing something that’s spicy as “hot” or describing a chord as “happy” might be the best ways to communicate those feelings so that another person can understand. So then, why is it so difficult to communicate the sensations of such a central human experience as pain directly? This is a question that I’m not sure has an answer but it’s definitely interesting to think about the ways that people have to get creative to accurately describe sensory experiences. I feel like this challenge becomes pretty evident in what I call “WebMD spirals.” People will often go to the internet to try to find explanations for why they’re feeling ill and might struggle to type in vague symptoms or descriptions of the types of pain they’re experiencing only to find a WebMD or Mayo Clinic page suggesting they have some horrible disease or life threatening condition. Because the language we use to approximate our experiences with pain is so loose, it can, at times, not be specific enough and this is one practical example of that.