Emotional pain is real. As children we were taught that, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” I don’t know who wrote that little jingle, be he shouldn’t quit his day job. We have all lived long enough to know that words can hurt us. In the same way, we can experience emotional pain when people betray us, lie about us, walk out on us, and let us down.
Dr. Dean Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, conducted a fascinating study on emotional pain. Participants in the study played a video game in which they simply tossed a ball to other players. They were told there were people in other rooms controlling the other players, but that wasn’t true. The video game was programmed to slowly exclude the person being studied. In other words, the ball was being thrown to everyone except the person holding the controller, which made that person feel rejected and left out.
The study showed that once the person began to feel rejection, it activated the anterior cingulate and insula parts of the brain where pain is registered. Ornish concluded, “Subjects’ brains responded the same way as if they experienced physical pain. Rejection doesn’t just hurt like a broken heart; your brain feels it like a broken leg.”
We’ve all been there. We have all felt the pain of rejection. In Psalm 27 King David prayed, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me (v.10).” We don’t have any reason to believe that David’s parents ever forsook him; his mother’s name is not found in the Bible, but in Psalm 86:16 David said he served God just as his mother did, and in I Samuel 22 David asks Saul for permission to let his parents come stay with him. It is believed that “When my father and my mother forsake me” was a common expression to refer to the hardships of life.
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