Some people love pain and they are infatuated with emotional pain, and they confide in their pain, enjoy it and sometimes celebrate it as well. They simply enjoy their pain, sorrow, hurts, guilt and dwell on it, build their personalities around these emotional elements of pain. Enjoying ones pain could be ecstatic and it could be addictive to some extent. Such people crave pain and create situations to cause themselves emotional pain. Some of them accumulate their emotional pain and then burst it out. Most of them enjoy an irrational and brief burst of relief after having suffered emotionally or after having sustained a loss. It is a sense of freedom, which comes with being unshackled. Having lost everything, they often feels that they have found themselves, that they have been re-born, that they have been charged with natal energy, able to take on new challenges and to explore new territories. This elation is so addictive, that they often seek pain, humiliation; punishment and contempt as long as they are out in open and involve the attention of peers and superiors. Being punished accords with the tormenting inner voices which keep telling him that they are bad, corrupt, and worthy of penalty. This is the masochistic streak in them.
As Paulo Coelho said:
“Five minutes in Anxiety are better than one hour of happiness”.
Some people like to inflict pain and create emotional black mailing on others and seek self pity. They devalue sources of supply, callously and off-handedly abandon themselves, and discard other people, places, partnerships, and friendships unhesitatingly. Some of them though by no means the majority - actually ENJOY sulking, regretting, disparity, and freakishly emotionally controlling others ("out bursting"). But most of them do these things absentmindedly, automatically, and, often, even without good reason. Someone said that this is an art and could be related with some form of Romanantism. Now talking about Romance and art, along with emotional pain, sounds interesting, going back in time reading about legends of Ghalib or Meer, we see so much pain, sadness in their lives, poetry and their entire work. They created masterpieces while being sad and being in emotional distress. I wonder what would had happened if they had found or met their lovers and lived happily ever after. Would they have still been able to produce equally outstanding poetry? Can’t say much as it seems that they were infatuated with their sadness and pain. Did they actually struggle for the achievement of their happiness? Or they simply didn’t care much and loved the way things were and maybe they created all such situations to be entangled in emotional pain and sadness. They took refuge in alcohol, and survived with that addiction. While being sad and lifeless in their own regard, they repeatedly talked about their grief, unfaithfulness and then this line also tells a bit about all those poets out of which one named his Takhaluss after the ward “dard” (pain), Khuwaja Meer Dard, now imagine his infatuation with this term, isn’t a bit too much? And the line from a famous ghazal sang by Abida Parveen: “jab say tu nay mejhay dewana bana rakha hay”.
“Gham ko sehnay may bhi Qudrat nay maza rakha hay.”
Hakim Nasir
There is one famous Indian song, sung by Kishor Kumar:
Jab Dard hi nahi tha seenay may tab khak maza tha jeenay may”
Romancing with the pain, what a great thought and point to ponder. What is unusual about such people’s behaviors premeditated acts of tormenting others while enjoying their anguished reactions is that they are pain orientated? "Pure" sadists have no goal in mind except the pursuit of pleasure, pain as an art form. They haunt and hunt their own victimization for a reason - they want themselves to reflect their inner state.
When they are sad, unhappy, disappointed, injured, or hurt they feel exaggerate their feelings to express their emotions sincerely and openly since to show and to admit their frailty, their neediness, and weaknesses. They deplore their own humanity, emotions, vulnerability, susceptibility, gullibility, inadequacies, and their failures. So, they make use of other people to express their pain and frustration, their pent up anger and aggression. They achieves this by mentally torturing other people to the point of madness, by driving them to violence, by reducing them to nothingness in search of outlet, closure, and, sometimes, revenge. They force people to lose their own character traits and adopt their own instead. In reaction to his constant and well-targeted emotional drama, they become drama kings/queens, vengeful, restless, lacking empathy, obsessed, and sentimental.
Having constructed this withering hall of human fame, they gather attention of audience. The goal achieved. As opposed to the sadist, they get on this ride of emotional pain, indefinitely, for the pleasure of it. They traumatize, humiliate and abandons, discards and ignores, insults and provokes only for the purpose of purging their inner demons.
When they attain their desired results of attention by showing of their emotional pain, unhappiness, they he act almost with remorse. An episode of extreme sympathy is followed by an act of great care and by mellifluous apologies. Their emotional pendulum swings between the extremes of paining themselves and empathically soothing with the resulting pain. They seek love on those grounds while ignoring what they have and dreaming what they cannot get, they admire other people’s caring by abandoning their in hand partners and clinging, viciousness and remorse, the harsh and the tender are, perhaps, the most difficult to comprehend and to accept. These swings develop their emotional insecurity, an eroded sense of self worth, fear, stress, and anxiety. This reminds me these verses that I wrote long time ago:
khud aag day ker apnay nasheman ko,
khud hi say inteqaam lia hay khabie khabie
diwangi-e-shoq say kaam liya kay khabie khabie
hadd say siwa jo bharnay lagi jo be-qraria’n
aisay may unka naam liia hay khabie khabie
So basically these people like self inflicted pain. After self inducing pain, they feel ecstatic. This is kind of phenomena for the derivation of the unknown pleasure. Their purpose of purging their inner demons by possessing others, in their emotional trap. And then what they do is ignore their surrounding, just get compulsive and obsessive towards one thing, maybe religion, lover, friend, hobby, addiction (gambling, alcohol, or drugs), studies etc. They ignore their loved ones while being in such states or phases by not listening, understanding or agreeing to what they have been told. They can’t take criticism or suggestion. They behave in a childish manner and deal their own life with remorse, become morbid, wear black at times, listen to sad music, want to live in dark, hate day light and other people. They don’t socialize, they don’t go out, and they just create their own sad environment.
However, having said all that, this all could be dealt with in an amicable manner by consulting a (Counselor/Therapist) Psychiatrist or a Psychologist. As we know that a lot of this is happening on a subconscious level and in many instances they may not be aware of it. So in other words we need to reach out and extend help in identification of such cases and hence hearing them and guiding, referring for professional help.
