How do you experience physical pain

Compared to almost anyone i know my pain tolerance is enormous. I feel the pain, the pain is there, but it doesn't mentally bother me as much. Pain is an abstract to me as are other emotions. I prefer not to have it, and if i do have it it hurts. I just don't get upset by it. It's just pain.
I was wondering if there was some communality between the AS tendency towards intellectualizing.

A while back I was forced to endure a lot of physical pain. I fought it without the use of opiates (even though they were prescribed for me) and just took paracetemol.

I don't like physical pain but I can endure it. Emotional/mental pain is the killer for me. I feel like I am going to go out of my mind when that happens.

I really don't know. I know my dad and my uncles experience pain in a way where the pain/bother of going to a doctor massively overweighs the pain they feel.

topaz wrote:A while back I was forced to endure a lot of physical pain. I fought it without the use of opiates (even though they were prescribed for me) and just took paracetemol.

I don't like physical pain but I can endure it. Emotional/mental pain is the killer for me. I feel like I am going to go out of my mind when that happens.

did you sense as if the pain was not really part of you, but just 'something that happens'?
I'm typing this with a cracked rib, which smarts. However i know it smarts so i ignore it. The pain still is there, it's just that it's not meaningful or something.

TNSe wrote:I really don't know. I know my dad and my uncles experience pain in a way where the pain/bother of going to a doctor massively overweighs the pain they feel.

Yeah, but that's different. My partner doesn't go to the doctor for nothing short of a heartattack because she hates it so. Still she can't stand pain, it makes her cranky and nervous.

petrossa wrote:

did you sense as if the pain was not really part of you, but just 'something that happens'?
I'm typing this with a cracked rib, which smarts. However i know it smarts so i ignore it. The pain still is there, it's just that it's not meaningful or something.

In a way - I used to 'watch' it rise and just let it run its course. I spent many months disabled and being dependent upon other people and that was far worse than any physical pain.

Yep. A kind of intellectual detachment. And being dependent is indeed much worse.

I either complain too much or too little, and I'm not good at going to the doctor for all sorts of things.

I welcome pain and see it as a positive thing. It alerts me to a 'malfunction' in my body somewhere. Sometimes, I intentionally hurt myself to test my pain-threshold too. What is pain anyway? - it cannot kill you directly.

Kevin

I guess for me it depends. Sometimes, if I'm agitated (it's worse then), gentle touches on my forearms can feel like a wire scrub brush grinding me. Don't know if it's due to my being agitated to begin with or what. Other times it is normal. Sometimes light touches on my inner thighs can feel very sharp, or twingy, or "high pitch" for lack of better words. Not always though.

When I was birthing my fourth son, I didn't have any meds since he came so quickly, and it hurt unbelievably, and it turned more into something like an out of body experience. I screamed at the top of my lungs and literally almost brought blood to the nurses arm I was squeezing her so tightly, all the while, I looked at myself squeezing the life out of her arm and was thinking, while screaming violently, "I am really squeezing her tightly, I bet that hurts her. Wow, I can't believe I'm screaming like this, how embarrassing." I was calmly aware of what was going on, but powerless to stop it. It was really strange.

I'm kinda of wimpy I guess. Being tickled is unbearable torture to me. On the opposite note, if I'm really down in the dumps, I hardly respond to being tickled.

i couldn't possibly begin to imagine the pain of pushing a melon through a hole the size of a pingpongball. There's a limit to how much pain one can endure. I once broke 8 ribs, my shoulderblade, and my clavicle at the same time. There i for sure wasn't 'distanced' from the pain. It took a morfinedrip directly into the spine in my neck.

But in my youth i used to gain bets by letting people push out their cigarettes on my arms without flinching and continuing the conversation as if nothing happened. My nickname was 'the fakir' I'm still covered in burnmarks 40 years later.