This is particularly important in the context of people who have a history of trauma where choice was taken away from them. Directly affirming control over a potentially painful situation enables each patient or playmate to know that, fundamentally, they hold the power. “They understand that it’s for their benefit, and it’s within their control,

“Oh, Saint Catherine of Siena drinking the pus from another nun’s breast tumor.”

The pain matrix, she says, is concerned with three things: alarm, location, and context. It’s the sensation of ouch, the position on the body where the ouch is coming from, and how you’re feeling about all of that.

“The idea of our understanding of the brain is that [if] one area is very active, it’s going to use up more oxygen,”

Another popular reason for desiring pain is that it creates a contrasting sensation that intensifies pleasure.

“pain brings us immediately and brutally into the present.”

a German study where the research team, led by Dr. Herta Flor, used big, big magnets to peer into the brains of masochists. The resulting paper, “Contextual Modulation of Pain in Masochists: Involvement of the Parietal Operculum and Insula,” published in the delightfully named Journal of Pain in 2016, is dense and intimidating, and I am awed by it.

Ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter has a phrase that describes the way she suffers during the hundreds of miles she runs: she calls it the pain cave. I like the image. Pain creates walls, a container of sorts, sealing you off from the world. But there is an opening to that cave, a light in that fucking tunnel, an end to this. And it’s coming.

cilice