Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized

nuggets of health. Have you ever heard about the children born without pain sensitivity?

It's an incredibly rare congenital condition.

It only affects around 100 people in the whole world.

And on the surface, it sounds amazing, right?

Like, how cool would it be to never feel physical pain?

Well, actually, it's a nightmare. These little kids who can't feel pain,

they also have nothing to protect them from injury. One of these kids named Isaac, when he was a

toddler, he would throw a tantrum, and he would smack his face so hard into the ground that he

was almost breaking things. And he would just laugh because he thought it was

funny. He would chew on his tongue until it bled. He would poke his fingers into his eyes because

they felt weird. But he was actually damaging his eyeballs. Now normally your pain receptors would

send a strong message. Stop biting your tongue. Stop poking your eyes.

Stop hitting your head. But for him, no pain meant that there was little to stop him from harming

himself. Ashlyn is another girl who feels no pain. As a baby, she never cried when she was hungry

or when she had a really bad diaper rash. And again, this seems

like the ideal baby, right? But then one day they had her into the doctor for regular checkup,

and they found out that she had this huge tear on her cornea. And normally this would be

incredibly painful, but because she didn't feel pain, she wasn't able to alert her parents to her injuries or her needs.

Now, Ashlyn and kids like her, they live in danger every day because they don't have the automatic protective alarm system of pain.

In her life, Ashland has walked for two days on a broken ankle without realizing it. She sat in a pile of

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