In this spoken excerpt from her book Two Trains to Understand the World Today, Charlotte Kemp explains that pain functions as the body’s alarm system, signaling that something is wrong and prompting corrective action. She argues that acknowledging pain—whether a physical injury, a headache, or an emotional upset—allows the mind‑body conversation to stay in harmony, whereas suppressing pain with medication or avoidance teaches the body to issue louder alerts later. Kemp shares a parenting anecdote about letting children see their own cuts so they learn to recognize and address injury, and she extends the principle to all life areas—relationships, career, health, finances—suggesting that each pain signal should be examined rather than ignored, because unaddressed pain spreads and can erupt at inopportune times.
Chapters
I was fascinated to discover recently what the purpose of pain really is and how to use it to our advantage. When we experience pain, it is our bodies alerting us with alarm bells that something is wrong and that we need to take action. Is your skin near a flame? Remove it urgently and treat it. A cut on your leg? See how bad it is, clean it, and treat it. A sharp headache and blurred vision? No, don't take another painkiller, but work out why you are plagued with headaches and address the problem. Good parenting advice I received is that when a child hurts themselves and there's a cut and blood and blood is running out, let the child look at the boo-boo. Don't hide it away. We need to look and see and recognize it. If we turn away from pain and try to subdue it with painkillers, then all we're doing is telling the body that it needs to take a more dramatic alert next time. But when we acknowledge it, then we're letting our bodies know that we are aware of the problem and will take appropriate action. Then the conversation between our bodies and our minds works in harmony instead of creating a a war between them. This applies to everything in life. No matter how much pain or difficulty there is, we have to look at our relationships when there's a pain alert. We have to look at our careers, our policies, our health, our finances when something is alerting us that there is a problem. Trying to ignore or suppress that information does not make the cause of the information go away. It just spreads the pain through to other parts of our lives and then potentially bursts through. at the wrong time. I'm Charlotte Kemp, and this is an extract from my recent book, Two Trains to Understand the World Today.
