I was always confused about where, to be exact, my heart is situated. I know- infact everybody knows it is on the left side, nestled behind the rib cage but I feel it more towards the middle or the right side than the left. Frankly, I feel the same sensation when I place my palm on the left side as on the right side as on the middle. No, that does not mean I have a dysfunctional body. I am sure I am just fine and it is on the left side but most of the time, I’m dubious. The more pressing question however is – does my heart actually hurt when I do not even know where it is? And if that’s a stupid question, surely this is not: Where anyway, does it hurt?
Of late, I have been victim to a lot of hurting but from what I understand from some people, I have very much reciprocated the gesture. This, if nothing else, has made me wonder about the idea of hurt- whether it is only a metaphysical phenomenon or it can actually be substantiated by physical proof and what is the connection between the heart and your hurt. Is your heart actually hurting when you hurt?
The limbic system- the part of our brain which deals with our emotions, not only registers emotions but linked to the thinking brain enables us to make decisions, judgments, have preferences (likes or dislikes) and essentially explain our ‘feelings’ for things, for example: the feeling of being hurt.
So now that we know it is not just a figment of our imagination, the situation begs the question, where does it hurt? Human beings that we are, we like to substantiate everything in order to believe it. Can we or is it a philosophy so deeply wrought into the land of ambiguity that we cannot answer it? Surely we can try.
We associate hurt with the heart. The bleeding heart that makes up the curious world of fictional characters, stories, songs, movies, poems, literature novels is a pulsating organ whose scientific function is to supply oxygenated blood to the organs of the body and take unoxygenated blood to the lungs to be oxygenated. The fact that your life depends on it makes it a romantic symbol of love, life and ultimately, hurt. Here, I am not just talking about heart break or love lost (unrequited or otherwise); I am talking about something someone says (which is hurtful), friendships falling out, a fight with someone you love, losing a match, someone’s death, loneliness… all that makes you distraught and broken and alas, deeply hurt.
Heart and hurt are not strung together with invisible strings in the human mind, as I thought. When you hurt, your heart physically responds to it by either beating too fast and pumping more blood per second or beating slower and plummeting, like falling into a deep abyss of depression we medically call low blood pressure.
Hurt is not just a vein popping in your head afterall.
Having said that, is that all where it hurts?
Actually, no. The concept of the metaphysical hurt is true insofar as to show that emotions are complex grounds to tread on and science uptil today has not fully figured out the intricacies that lay behind and beyond.
As research progresses though, it has revealed that the human brain registers emotional and physical pain similarly and there happens to be no distinction; that when you talk about grief, sorrow, death, essentially emotional hurt, you are actually physically feeling the hurt, not just in the heart but everywhere.
You can get headaches or your body starts to numb, your chest becomes constricted, or your stomach aches or your arms and hands shake, your eyes dilate or you start feeling nauseous. You can feel shortness of your breath, tightness of your muscles, lethargy, weakness… and then there is this unfamiliar feeling all over your body, a kind of current that goes up and down your body; you can’t shrug it, you can’t explain it, you can’t forget it and it takes a long, long time to go away. It is physical, even when it is emotional.
Different people may experience different kinds of hurt across different levels of hurt but it is very much there. So the next time, someone comes and tells you your comment hurt them, do not brush it off lightly, the hurt is not some metaphorical balloon in the air, it is felt, maybe in the heart but definitely somewhere in the body. You never know just where.
Among some online searches, I found these to be some very important references and articles which ought to be visited: Emotional Coping Brain, How emotional pain can really hurt?, It hurts: How we biologically experience physical and emotional pain, Why emotional pain can physically hurt?
