What's on Your Injury Pile?

When being inconsolable is the point

Part I of a four-part series

Imagine you get some crappy news. Someone is sick, your article got turned down, you didn’t get the second job interview, maybe the wrong person got elected president. You know the sort of thing.

What does your brain do in this moment?

If it’s anything like my brain used to be, it has one standard, go-to reaction. I call it The Injury Pile.

For most of my life, whenever things went significantly wrong, my brain would immediately assemble a list of all the other things that were going wrong in my life and the world. The more unexpected the wrongness was, the more intense this reaction would be. Basically, my brain behaved as if the best response to finding out something bad was to identify as many other bad things as it could and heap them all together in a big-ass, depressing pile—the bigger and more depressing, the better.

Except it wasn’t enough to present me with the Pile. What my brain really seemed to want was for me to insist that OTHER PEOPLE see the Pile. As many as possible. So I would find myself compulsively reciting all the items on The Injury Pile to everyone I was close to.

Although the details vary with our individual situations, this recitation usually sounds something like this: Can you believe it, I didn’t even get a call back for that job interview. Plus my rent is going up and I will never be able to buy a house at this point. Meanwhile at my current job my boss is terrible and I can’t get my supervisor to listen to me about it. I’m sure I’m going to get fired.

Every Injury Pile is skewed to the bleakest account of our situation—a case against our thriving presented in the starkest, most black-and-white terms. Often, if we’re honest, we don’t even fully believe all the details of the case that we’re making. In the hypothetical Pile above, for example, the owner of the Pile might not truly think they’re going to get fired at any moment. If they were pressed for details on the situation, they might even be forced to admit this firing was the least likely of a number of potential outcomes. But when we’re in Injury-Pile mode, it’s as if we are driven to insist that only terrible results can be expected.

And I do mean driven. Injury-Pile mode feels compulsive, like talking about the Pile is something we have to do. In trying to pinpoint the feeling it always gave me, the best description I could come up with is that it’s like scratching a bug bite until it bleeds. The scratching is intensely satisfying for a moment, but it is also never over. Scratching just begets scratching. Building up the Injury Pile and insisting on the worst version of everything carries a similar emotional signature. It’s a feeling of being riveted by something that on some level also registers as a self-defeating process.

From one angle, though, heaping up the biggest, more impressive Injury Pile might seem to make sense. When we’re in distress, we want support. We want to be comforted. Maybe presenting the worst possible case makes it feel more likely that we’ll get that support.

That might work as an explanation, except for one thing. You’ve already probably noticed it if you’ve ever been on either end of an Injury-Pile conversation. It’s this:

No response to an Injury Pile ever seems to be sufficient.

When we’re the person presenting our Pile, everything anyone says about it feels somehow unhelpful, diminishing or dismissive. Even if the listener reacts with what seems like genuine sympathy, we still come away frustrated. The Injury Pile seems to demand something more, even if we don’t know exactly what it is. As soon as we can, we reboot the process and share the Pile with someone else. We keep trying different people in the hope of getting some different, better reaction we can’t define even to ourselves.

When we’re the person hearing about the Pile, we feel like nothing we say lands right, no matter how hard we try. In fact, the Pile Owner often seem to ratchet up the injuries the more we try to be understanding. They stack the Pile higher and higher as if to to trump whatever helpful or consoling things we say, in a way that can feel almost aggressive.

So what the hell is going on? Why do our brains mulishly reject every sympathetic reaction from others, while also simultaneously insisting that we share the Injury Pile with people as fully and frequently as possible? What the hell is even the point?

I thought about this a lot, when I was trying to break out of this cycle. And here’s what I eventually realised:

The point of the Injury Pile is to deny our own pain.

I know this sounds counter-intuitive, given that we seem to be insisting on the reality of our pain to anyone who will listen.

But the Injury Pile is a kind of alchemical process, which our brain uses to turn emotional pain we might have had to feel into something else that it thinks is preferable.

And this is a problem, because our brain is wrong about the Injury Pile being preferable. As I eventually figured out, Injury-Pile mode actually traps us in more pain, for longer, than if we hadn’t created the Pile the first place. If we don’t know that this is going on or how to stop it, we can get trapped in compulsively building and displaying our personal Pile for weeks, months, years. We build and maintain and display the Pile with all the energy and focus that we could have put toward the things we most want to do in this world.

In the rest of this series, I’m going to explain how the Injury Pile works to block pain, why this emotional alchemy stunts us and prevents us from getting what we want, and how to stop this whole thing from happening.

See you next week for Part II.