Pain Cannot Be Destroyed

But it can be transformed.

As far as I can tell, pain can’t be destroyed.

Enter any drugstore and the rows and rows of “pain killers” will lead you to believe otherwise. But it's an illusion. A useful one, sometimes. But an illusion.

We can numb pain, sometimes remarkably well, with procedures and pills. We can divert it temporarily, but pain has a way of continuing its movement through us, changing form as it goes.

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She had back pain. Mild to moderate pain. It was annoying most of the time, like a pebble caught in the shoe of her spine, irritating when she moved. Sometimes it was debilitating, and she wanted to know how to get rid of it.

She’d tried the usual course: medication, injections, physical therapy.

“They’re just Band-Aids,” she said.

Then she asked: “Is there a cure for this?”

She said the word softly, full of hope and fear in the same breath, believing I might have an answer no one else had given her.

I didn’t.

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The promise of modern medicine is to fix what’s broken. To cure.

The formula is unmistakable: something hurts → see a doctor → get a diagnosis → get a prescription → get better.

Some things fit nicely into that formula.

Often, pain does not. Especially chronic pain.

Originally, the word cure came from the Latin cura meaning care, concern, attention, responsibility. To cure someone once meant to sit beside them, to watch over them, to carry them through illness. A physician cured by staying close, not by solving.

Cure was relational, slow, embodied.

But by the 19th century, medicine had shifted drastically. Bodies became problems to be solved, not people to be accompanied. Hospitals became places of intervention rather than refuge. Surgery grew safer with anesthesia and antisepsis. Germ theory reframed disease as something identifiable and, at times, eradicable. Treatments became more effective, outcomes more measurable, and gradually cure moved from a posture of care to a metric of success. Anything short of it—for patient or clinician—became failure.

Cure came to imply finality: the disease is gone.
Certainty: the body is restored.
Success. Closure. Resolution.

To cure, as we know it now, isn’t relational. It’s procedural, quantified, and often painfully binary.

This shift has consequences.

When medicine defines cure as the ultimate goal, anything incurable becomes a kind of shame—a failure of the body, of the clinician, of the system.

I see this most clearly in chronic pain.

People living with pain are repeatedly promised an answer, a solution, a fix. But that’s the illusion. There is no fix. And the gap between promise and reality becomes its own injury. Because when a promise is broken, trust fractures.
Patients stop trusting doctors.
Doctors stop trusting the system.
The system stops trusting itself.
The foundation thins.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

What is pain, anyway?

A symptom? A sign? Physical? Emotional? A signal? A story?

I've sat with patients long enough to know that the honest answer is: all of these, and none of these. Pain resists the categories we build for it. It spills over the edges.

I’ve come to believe pain is best understood not as an object to be eradicated, but as a force that moves through us. I don’t mean this only scientifically, but experientially. Pain has the capacity to create change. It alters bodies, behaviors, beliefs, relationships, identities.

It reshapes the way we stand. The way we sleep. It changes what we say and what we stop saying. Who we call. Who we stop calling.

Think of someone you know who has lived with pain for years. They are not who they were.

Perhaps then, pain is energy.

Energy is the capacity to create change. It cannot be created or destroyed—only transformed from one form into another. Heat becomes motion. Motion becomes electricity. Grief becomes muscle tension. Fear becomes a migraine.

The promise that chronic pain can always be eliminated is often an illusion because to cure pain would mean to get rid of it. To destroy it. But energy cannot be destroyed.

It can, however, be transformed.

From one form to another.

Self-hate becomes self-compassion.
Hypervigilance softens into safety.
Shame becomes vulnerability.
Isolation gives way to connection.
Anger transforms into empathy.

The pain does not disappear.

But it changes.

And when it does, we change too.

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