The Facade of Well-being
There are a few reasons why people with chronic pain wear a facade of well-being or ‘masking’ their pain from others. Some of those reasons involve defense mechanisms and other reasons are quite functional coping methods. The facade is, therefore, both necessary and carries with it some problems if someone with chronic pain is not careful.
Be The Mask
With chronic pain wearing the facade helps be the facade. If we spend all our time focusing on our pain, talking about our pain, thinking about the pain then our life will be about the pain. Negativity within cultivates more negativity. It creates a heavy weight within and if, in addition, to the pain, like me, we also deal with depression which means we’re fighting twice the battle. Just as being around negative people who doubt our pain or cause us to stress makes our pain more difficult to deal with.
Therefore, if I cultivate a persona that can laugh and smile, be positive and joke, while in pain it will diminish the power of the pain. To some extent, laughter is indeed the best medicine. I wear this facade in the workplace and I smile, joke around and laugh. Eventually, a bit of that facade becomes me and slowly a bit of the stress of bearing all that pain at work is lessened by wearing that persona.
A Mask For Every Place
Another reason to mask the is for pure practicality. When I was working there was a certain expectation of how to behave and the facade serves that purpose. It’s not that co-workers were not sympathetic, in some cases. Or that some might have even be aware I was in pain, only that on a daily basis functionally it’s practical to hide pain and discomfort in the workplace. Work was necessity back then even when my chronic pain condition was quite severe. Work can sometimes even be a distraction but I had to distance myself from the pain and masking helps with that.
The facade used to get through the workday helped me not focus on the pain. It masks it from others, which is practical if you help customers directly or need to interact with people a great deal and it keeps a distance between the pain and yourself. However, this becomes difficult when the pain is severe or acute and then the facade itself breaks down, but for baseline pain levels the facade serves a purpose in everyday life.
Family Facade
The family facade is put in place because of love. People don’t want to see their loved ones suffer and I felt it’s painful to my family members to see that suffering all the time. I tried to mask it when I could to ease the burden my family might carry from seeing me in pain and pain they couldn’t help with.
When we are supporting a family we may feel even more compelled to keep up a facade of well-being to show that their fully capable of supporting their family. Tolerating the pain and deny that we may not be coping. To some extent, we do express their level of pain with their spouse, or a symptom that’s bothering them, or a bad pain day, but rarely to the depth that is truly felt and the real impact the pain is having on them. The ‘realness’ is what the facade hides. Can having a work facade and then a home facade be detrimental? Is it more stressful and tiring than shedding the work facade like a jacket at the end of the day and being free of it?
However, whether we mask our pain from our family or not they know us better than anyone and, therefore, they know our ‘tells’. They know when our pain is bad and whether we have a facade or not it still affects them. It will affect each family different but it will affect our significant other, our children, and extended family in different ways. Even our decreasing lifestyle, or career modifications affect them and their desires.
How does our lack of long term goals and plans affect their outlook? How does seeing us suffer in extreme pain unable to hide it behind our mask affect them or just knowing you suffer all the time silently and they cannot help? It is not the same answer and it can be a complex answer but it is one that should be explored. The facade we use to protect our family from seeing our pain should not stop us from having open and honest conversations about your condition with them. Try to acknowledge the impact there is and have open communication about it.
Facade as Strength
There is a defense mechanism aspect to masking the pain and putting on a facade of any sort. To some extent, with an invisible disabilities I believed I was perceived as weak, lazy and chronic complainers whether I was or not. Therefore, the facade is to literally present to the world someone who is strong and in control despite the pain.
Granted, in a negative work environment when faced with a biased employer or co-workers there may be people who have those misconceptions of people with invisible disabilities. However, more often than not it is the guilt over what we can no longer do or they think we should be able to do that plagues us or even guilt others add onto us. We project onto others that surely they to must believe we are not living up to society’s expectations and are lazy and weak.
We also assume people believe we are chronic complainers because our illness comes up in conversations so often when it is so much a part of our life and we feel no one really wants to hear any of that. So there is this aspect of ‘show no weakness’ facade in order to not feel the negativity of others or what the perceived negativity might be. However, this defense mechanism assumes that is what people are thinking, for one. It’s also based on a lot of internal assumptions about what the chronic pain sufferer has to be. It is better to confront the beliefs behind it rather than try to ‘be strong’ even when we don’t feel strong at all.
Facade as a Barrier
That facade itself isn’t to blame for the feeling of isolation that comes with a chronic pain condition but it’s a side effect. Because pain needs behavior indicators of some sort for another person to know someone is suffering. If we hide them they can’t possibly know your pain. We excel at hiding their everyday baseline pain because that’s normal for us. It’s the more severe pain we have difficulty with. Living day in and day out with this pain that no one can perceive that takes such an emotional and mental toll on them can be deeply frustrating and isolating.
A lot of resentment can build up that people do not even seem to care that we’re suffering so much. Or that people assume we’re suddenly cured or perfectly fine on days they ‘look good’ or have the audacity to laugh as if it is inconceivable that someone can be in pain and look good or laugh. These are all problems of having an Invisible Disability, such as fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions, and this is why it is vital that in all aspects of life there is open communication to allow for more awareness to develop.
A mask is to be worn not lived
Some degree masking the pain and the facade of well-being are fundamental coping strategies, however, we must be wary we are employing them too much. If we use them too much, hide too much, repress too much then we will resent others for not understanding, we will feel more and more isolated and it could lead to frustration, anger and depression.
We need to be willing to communicate with all the people in our lives, in various degrees, to create a level of awareness. The fact is no matter how great we are at believing we are masking all our suffering, we are not. People close to us know all the signs we are incapable of hiding behind a facade or laughing off with a joke and a smile. Signs such as smiles becoming fixed, eyes glazed, attention distracted and the personality flat. When pain is acute it drains out all vibrancy and personality leaving someone appearing not themselves, which is very obvious to friends and family and often to co-workers as well.
Facades take effort and even that becomes noticeable. Yet we fear to let the mask drop entirely to loved ones because underneath is a great deal of emotional strain, frustrations and suffering we do not want to worry our family with. Consider the facade to be a useful, functional tool to be utilized when you are out in the world and must mask your pain in order to blend and function. Keep in mind, it is not a facade you need to maintain at all times with family and friends; in the end, they see more than you think.
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reprint from brainlessblogger.net
Chronically Nikki 
Many Thanks for your post that may be used as a therapy helper. I know personnally the power of pain (in any case different from yours) but also the practical aspects of hiding pain and manage with suffering. I’m no specialist. Never. Just a human being, trying, modestly, to add the following aspects to your post.
With time, I learned to hide pain the way you did, as described in this post. But what I learned was also to let these little lies to what they are, I mean, mental approaches. To what I consider to be so uplifting in our lives : compassion.
All of us know that, compassion reached higher public consideration. For me, maybe I tried this approach of life a bit too late, probably thinking that heart cannot help. But it did and it does. Every day, every time when wearing masks is inadequate. As many of us tried and still try, shifting from mental approaches to what heart can bring us is trying a very soothing path. Doesn’t work all the time, but still. I’ll never pretend that mental approaches, of which pain hiding, are of no use but I finally learned that heart has instead a tremendous power as pain rises. As pain rises, while mental approaches treat it with bad words, running for desperate solutions opening it wide for fear and anger, heart greets pain and suffering to help our body to release. Not a magic wonderland at all but a try to let the pain go while it has been welcomed. Simple as that.
I hope that many of us dealing with pain, having to hide pain, having to fight with diseases as you do, n.a., can give more time for heart, compassion and love for themselves. If, for anything we learn as we are living here, the experience of living with kindness can help us, life would be sligthly better. This is what we hope for. Thanks, n.a.
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So true. I feel we have to have a lot of self-compassion for our journey. That can be difficult at times but necessary as everything else. And masking pain is definitely a burden in the long run. It serves its purpose, functionally, but it is constrains us long term. It can be quite isolating to wear a facade all the time with all people. I likely did at one time, but I could never sustain that now.
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