Where Do We Place Our Pain?

The great question of pain is where we place it. Do we, as Resmaa Menakem says, process, express and honor it, transforming it into clean pain? Or do we force it into the people we perceive as less than human—immigrant, migrant, anyone who isn’t white or male—turning it into a weaponized dirty pain?

We want to place our bad feelings into another person. This is a fantasy. Separation, although a developmental milestone in adolescence, is often exacerbated in adulthood when it fails to integrate back into a whole person. 

Separation in Action

I flip open the text thread. Its green shades show no response from my father, who is German. My mother is Mexican.

There’s tension in my shoulders, unanswered invitations for conversation. If I call or text my mom, she responds. I don’t always like what she says, but she doesn’t leave.

My head spins. Of course, I desperately want us to understand one another.

Separate.

The temptation is to split—to cast one parent as all good, the other as all bad. But separation is more complicated. 

Physical. Spiritual. Emotional. Splitting’s height and width feel profound.

I check again—any reply? No.

We talk frequently about the weather. I ask, “Do you have passports yet?” I listen to stories about neighbors or community members. But the conversations cannot erase the racism, the tropes about immigrants, my father’s embrace of La Migra to “clean up illegals.”

I resist feelings of “ending” or “death.” But—death.

Separate.

To bring the split together, we must first see it. Pain itself is a split. 

Think about cutting your finger: the skin tears open, and blood oozes. Morbid, yes—and traumatic. The inner cuts we inflict—through racism, abuse, supremacy—are morbid, too.

Love and hope ask more than feeling. They are commitments—to be with the oppressed, to join their struggle for liberation (Freire). 

Love is the seventy-year-old woman who holds a brown woman as she watches her husband being kidnapped off the street. The seventy-year-old is with.

I archive the group text. Tears fall.

Among those who see themselves as white, I notice what I call a lowercase “p” psychosis: centuries of violence calcified into the nervous system, leaving a fractured psyche.

Symptoms—denial, splitting, projection, avoidance—aren’t clinical, but strategies for escaping unbearable truths. They are subtle, collective and normalized disconnections from responsibility and embodied awareness.

Pain is Everywhere

The pain of white-identifying people is real. But the survival strategy it produces is hollow, built on insecurity and fragile self-regard. 

La Migra bullies and intimidates. Power by domination. Power from loss. The act of a loser who forces the experience of losing onto others. 

They are internally cocooned from the harm they cause, and also defended by a nostalgic slogan: “Make America Great Again (MAGA).” When great is defined with an outlet of physical and mental violence, inflicted on anyone not defined as white, the pain slashes through communities and neighbors. It also severs white-identifying persons’ ability to connect to their own conscience.

The last thing my father said, when we disagreed about immigration and sexual abuse, was: “This (conversation) isn’t going anywhere. I am not going to engage.”

While there may be points of commonality, the question remains: how do we get on the same page without collapsing into a fusion or merger? 

I whisper to myself, Do we have to believe the same thing? 

Can I answer “yes” when it comes to the value and dignity of human life?

We also observe this dynamic politically. The Republican Party fuses around a single agenda, herding together for protection and defense. This is less about strength than it is about low self-esteem. Separation demands unity at the cost of individuality.

Rage. Subdued expressions of anger. Despair quickly holds me in place.

My mom texts: Your dad is in pain, too. 

My Dad, like many others, is still trying to push his bad feelings about himself into me because he won’t do the work inside himself. It’s fantasy. We feel something we cannot work with from an ego perspective, or our decision-making function, which grounds us in reality, and our younger parts are in infantile-like states, without anyone to help. The split deepens, heightens, and concretizes into silence—his action/s. There is no one to make sense of the pain.

And so I am left holding both the silence, the ache of what is severed and the fragile hope that naming pain might still open a path toward wholeness.