The Gift of Pain

Mark´s photo

"In 1946, while working in a leprosing sanatorium, the physician Paul Brand discovered that the deformities of leprosy were not an intrinsic part of the disease, but rather a consequence of the progressive devastation of infection and injury, which occurred because the patient was unable to feel pain. In 1972, he wrote: "if I had one gift which I could give to people with leprosy, it would be the gift of pain." Matt suffered from a kind of psychological leprosy; unable to feel his emotional pain, he was forever in danger of permanently, maybe fatally, damaging himself.

After Matt left my office and before writing up my notes, I did what I sometimes do after a knotty, affecting consultation. I walked round the corner to buy a takeaway coffee and then returned to my consulting room to zone out by reading who knows what on the Internet. The truth of the matter is this: there is a bit of Matt in each of us. At one time or another we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why."

(Extract from the book "The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves" by Stephen Grosz)

a) Some grammar about the text:

• Find in the text the antecedent of the relative which in bold and say its function in the sentence.
• Look at the verbs in bold -working, to feel, give, be, damaging, writing up, to buy, reading, feeling, knowing -and give reasons for their forms in each case.
• Find a Conditional Sentence and say which type of conditional it is.
• Make a list of the verbs which are followed by a specific preposition and learn them.
• Find a prefix which means "the opposite"
• Look at the expression "affecting consultation". Why is affecting written with the ending -ing? Could it be written in a different way in a different context? If so, give an example.

b) Guessing the story behind the text:
Think of questions to ask in class to find out about Matt´s story and the person who has written that passage.

c) And finally, the writing:
After asking your questions in class and listening to the answers of your classmates about Matt, try to reconstruct his story.