Facing Sufering

13 . Quote attributed to Herbert George Wells (better known as H.G. Wells, 1866-1946), author of The War of the Worlds.

14 . Lawrence W. Wilson, Why Me? Straight Talk about Suffering, Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 2005, p. 19.

15 . Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, New York: Washington Square Press, 1963, p. 166.

16 . Doug Manning, Don’t Take My Grief Away, San Francisco: Harper, 1979.

17 . Unless what he wants is to pull out the tooth as soon as possible to get a reward from his family members! (Cf. Sylvie Galland and Jacques Salomé, If Only I’d Listen to Myself! Resolving the Conflicts that Sabotage our Lives, Element Books, 1997).

18 . To say nothing of the “sick tyrant,” who doesn’t ask for anything, but never ceases to brag about it!

19 . S. Galland, “L’attachement à la souffrance”, ” [Attachment to suffering], Optima, nº 217, February 1992, pp. 27-28.

2

Expressing Our Pain

“Give sorrow words.”

Shakespeare1

–I can’t find the words to express the sorrow I feel…

Many of the sympathy cards that we send or receive begin with words like these. Whether it is the unexpected loss of an unborn child or any other misfortune, even if it was anticipated, it seems like we are left speechless when confronted with pain. It is not easy to express what we feel when we find out that a friend has been diagnosed with cancer, or when a senseless accident leaves a young neighbor maimed, or when an acquaintance has been the victim of an assault…. An inner need compels us to express our feelings of sorrow, so difficult to shape out of a mixture of emotions, confused with feelings of anger or helplessness.

If enduring pain is difficult, it seems even more difficult to bear it silently. It seems that we have a basic need to express it, although we don’t know how. Upon arrival into this world, the first thing a newborn does is cry in protest, from separation, from fear, perhaps. He who suffers, no matter his age or cultural situation, usually speaks up, whether by complaining or crying about his pain.

Recounting your sorrows, writing them down to feel heard, talking about your illnesses and surgeries, is part of a real therapy. Who hasn’t ever noted the expressions of satisfaction or relief on older women’s faces when share stories with others about their surgeries, childbirths, or illnesses?

But many of us have been taught to reject the best channels for releasing pain. Someone didn’t know how to tell us that at the right time tears are an undeniable relief. And there are countless people who go through life without even venturing to share their sorrows with those with whom they should share them. Because of their personality, because of their upbringing, they think that sharing their problems with someone else is a weakness. Or, because of the nature of their problems, they are ashamed to share them. They ignore the fact that sharing what they feel with someone they trust could help them to see more clearly and release negative emotions, especially if that person is a professional who can provide solutions for their personal situation.

Just being listened to and finding our suffering reflected in the stories of others, such as in support groups, helps us to feel less isolated and to better understand our situation. Upon realizing that others share our problems, and even suffer and struggle as much or more than we do, it is easier for us to gain perspective on our own pain and cope with it. In reality, “people who do not find a way to express their suffering run the risk of being destroyed by it […]. Without the possibility of communicating with others, change is not possible. Remaining silent, shutting oneself off from relating to others, is death.”2

The courage to cry

When emotions overcome us, sometimes we cannot hold back the tears. Although tradition reminds us in many parts that “big boys don’t cry,” all human beings, including men, feel the imperative need to cry at some time or another. We are designed to cry: crying is natural.

It is true that, in some societies, those gentlemen who cannot hold back their tears in the face of sorrow are still treated as weak and unmanly. But attitudes are changing, and today we see more and more men who have the courage to cry in public, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. There are some men who look too brave and masculine to cry, like when the volunteer firemen in Haiti rescued a boy from the rubble of the earthquake in 2010, when the soccer player Iker Casillas won the World Cup in South Africa that same year, or when tennis player Roger Federer lost the Australian Open in 2009. From pain, sorrow, or joy, we all need to cry sometimes.3 Some hold it in, others cannot. Crying is natural, and it is part of our body language to express our extreme emotions. Our reaction to the need to cry is cultural and depends largely on our education.

The language of pain

The language of pain is complex and ambiguous. If pain compels us to complain, there is the paradox that, when we try to explain our suffering, few of us know how, including those who suffer most. Our response to pain is, for the most part, learned. It depends mostly on personal context and culture. So, the great tennis player Rafael Nadal, after an epic game against the equally famous Novak Djokovic, claimed to have “enjoyed suffering.”

For millennia the language of pain was tinged with religious and philosophical connotations. But with the advent of scientific medicine, our modern societies refer to disease with more and more secular terminology. When facing illness, pain, and death, a growing number of our contemporaries no longer rely on spirituality; instead, they turn almost exclusively to science and public services in which they have placed their remaining faith. In place of the undeniable benefit of meditation or prayer, they prefer immediate, technical solutions. So the management of these quite personal realities is passing from the existential to healthcare, as if they fell to the social healthcare system in the first place.

In other times periods or latitudes everyone has had to live with the elderly, the sick, and the dying. In our environment the attention to those who suffer has become so socialized and technical that the majority of our citizens have almost no contact with the final stages of life until it affects them directly. Hospitals and mortuaries keep the sick and the dead separated from the healthy and the living. One of the most immediate consequences is that today very few of our contemporaries are emotionally prepared for a personal encounter with suffering, and even fewer still have adequate words to express their pain or to communicate with those who are suffering. We don’t know what to say in painful situations, for the simple reason that we have never faced them and we haven’t learned from family tradition what to do in these cases.

Not even medical terminology has found a way to adequately express the level of pain we experience. We don’t know how to describe our own suffering, and when we try we often find that we cannot go beyond a superficial communication, because we are unfamiliar with the language that pertains to it. Hardly anyone speaks of those things in a society that maintains the illusion that it is entitled to avoid every inconvenience. This amplifies the feeling of a lack of understanding of those who are suffering, including with those people they trust.

At the doctor’s office, the physician uses scientific medical terminology that leaves the patients unsatisfied because they do not understand it, but it protects the professional from uncomfortable questions from the patient and family, in case they begin to ask profound existential questions to which the physician often does not have an answer.

Our growing confidence in science is accompanied by a growing fear of the effects of disease and of the power of health professionals. So pain not only grips us with a sense of helplessness, but often it also leaves us without words. And this silence adds the weight of loneliness to our suffering.

The right to be happy

The situation becomes more complicated in our societies because the media have convinced us that we should all be happy. Although no one guarantees us the right to happiness, we are frequently bombarded with advertising that says happiness is within everyone’s reach, immediate and with minimal effort. But it’s one thing to have the right to pursue happiness and it is another to try to get it, no less, by buying a car, a house, or an insurance policy. Reality does not always conform to our wishes, and making our happiness dependent upon the things we have or the people who surround us is a sad illusion. As much as this and that can contribute to our moods, in the case of subjective experiences, the roots of happiness are planted in our attitudes, in our inner being.

This explains why, even if we are able to avoid many problems, we continue to feel unhappy. Not suffering does not mean being happy. Our inevitable clashes with reality poison our existence, laying waste to the small patches of happiness—passing and ephemeral—that are within our reach. All too often events are not responsible for our discomfort, but the interpretation and the attitude that we take toward them.4

To prevent a lot of avoidable unhappiness we would have to learn to accept things as they come to us, and the rest as they are.5 Acceptance does not mean resigning ourselves to reality, rather, recognizing its existence and reacting intelligently and positively in the face of it. Living is not an easy matter. So, instead of fearing that our happiness is running out, it is easier to fear that it never begins. Someone once said, with a bit of humor, that “looking on the bright side of life won’t damage your eyesight.” Therefore, considering the large amount of pain that already exists in the world, our best option is to look more on the bright side, to try to help and even smile—if possible—even though we are hurting. Because every minute wasted on negative thoughts is a minute of life that we cannot get back.

Constructive suffering?

That doesn’t mean unhappiness is inherently good. It means that we can deal with it in ways that are more positive and intelligent than others. Stefan Zweig was certainly very adamant when he said that we owe everything to pain: “All science comes from pain. Suffering always looks for the cause of things, while well-being encourages passiveness and does not look back.”6 Without going that far, we must acknowledge that at least an essential part of universal literature arises from the need to express human drama or overcome it. The Debate between a man and his soul (Egypt, 2000 A.C.) reads: “To whom can I unburden myself today? Anguish chokes me. Not even the silence wants to listen to me. Perhaps my only confidant is death…”

The most beautiful poems are often the most desperate. The strength of Greek tragedy lies precisely in having given expression to the drama that battles in each human being faced with an inevitable, mortal destiny against which he rebels and of which he feels simultaneously victim and culprit. In their conflicts, tears, and anguish, love and suffering intersect at the same time like cause and effect. A large number of literary works express man’s fight against adversity and his ceaseless efforts to communicate pain, understand its meaning or overcome it somehow.

Biblical literature, deeply rooted in our culture, continues to provide comfort in suffering because it contains some of the strongest testimonies to pain. As Pascal said, “Solomon and Job knew and expressed human misery better than anyone: one in prosperity (see Ecclesiastes) and one in adversity. One experienced the vanity of the pleasures and the other experienced the reality of suffering.”7 The book of Psalms contains 150 prayers, including many inspiring psalms of “orientation” and some appalling psalms of “disorientation,”8 that is to say, of complaint, lament, and protest over the injustice in life. Meditation or prayer with those prayers is good for us because it helps us to put our hurt into words, through the experiences of those who felt heard and received comfort in their suffering.

In the art world, works of art that are downright cheerful are scarce. Comic art and laughter often mask grimaces of pain. For example, of Don Quixote it is very aptly said that “when you finish laughing, you should cry.” It has been said that the great artists are beings “cursed by suffering” and that someone who has not suffered has nothing to say.

In fact, many artists have appointed themselves as a spokesperson for suffering, lending a catalyzing aspect to their artistic creations. Some of the greatest works of art are inspired by pain.

Sensitivity—an essential trait in an artist—either makes you suffer more than other people or it enables you to express your pain with more emotion.

Although it may seem exaggerated, the truth is that if we take a list of the greatest artists in history, and we go through it almost at random, starting with musicians, this thesis seems to be confirmed. Johann Sebastian Bach was orphaned at the age of 10. Mozart died of illness and misery at 35. Beethoven, grandchild of a madwoman, son of an alcoholic and a maid, was deaf as an adult, and still wrote the sublime Pastoral. Debussy, who had such refined taste, grew up in a very poor neighborhood with a mother who had, among her other faults, a heavy hand and a fondness for using the whip.

Edgar Allan Poe, who lost his mother at the age of 3, wrote: “I could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath.” R. M. Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet (written when he was only 27 years old and the recipient, 20), wrote that “the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself. […] I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for […]. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us […]. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?” Later he would add, “Give every man his own death,” a statement that turns out to be almost prophetic for someone who died young as a result of a wound caused by a rose thorn….9

Vincent Van Gogh, the afflicted painter, ended up losing his mind after fighting desperately against madness. After painting day and night, up to one painting a day without any success or recognition, he experienced self-mutilation, hospitalization, and finally suicide at age 37, without having ever sold a single painting. In 1888, two years before his death, he wrote from Arles to his brother, Theo, who sent him funds so that he could continue painting, “Sometimes I feel too weak in the face of the given circumstances, and I’d have to be wiser and richer and younger to win the fight. Fortunately for me, I no longer count at all on any victory, and in painting I look for nothing more than the means of getting by in life.”10

Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian painter of anguish, wrote the following: “Disease, Insanity and Death were the angels which attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout life. […

] I learned early about the misery and dangers of life. […] When [my father] punished us, he could be almost insane in his violence. […] In my childhood, I was always treated in an unjust way, without a mother, sick, and the threat of punishment in Hell hung over my head.”11

The great genius of dance, Vaslav Nijinsky, was forced at 16 to give in to the sexual demands of the great Diaghilev, director of the famous Russian ballets, in order to study and further his career. All his short life, which ended in insanity, was consumed with the fear of misery. Towards the end of his life he wrote in is his Diary: “I live, so I suffer. But my face has rarely seen tears: my soul has had to swallow all them.”

Anguish and worry may indeed be conducive to artistic creation because the artists, being more sensitive that the average person, express their pain in their works. Their art, like therapy, helps them overcome especially difficult circumstances. A creative personality finds new means of expression even for pain. Moreover, artists suffer the chasm between the imperfect reality in which they live and the marvelous art that they long to create. Through their art, they build bridges between those two worlds. In the face of the horrors of pain and their admirable struggle to not allow themselves to be destroyed by it, it isn’t surprising that artists feel an overwhelming need to create beauty. But there is no doubt that their masterpieces emerge more from their genius talent than from their misfortunes.

1 . “Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’er-fraught hear, and bids it break.” (Shakespeare, Macbeth).

2 . Dorothee Sölle, Suffering, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975, p. 76.

3 . Former US president George H. W. Bush, after the death of two of his crew in a plain crash, wrote the following: “I’m afraid I was pretty much a sissy about it, cause I sat in my raft and sobbed for a while. It bothered me very much. I did tell them, and when I bailed out I felt that they must have gone, and yet now I feel so terribly responsible for their fate, oh, so much right now...” (All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings, New York: Touchstone, 1999, p. 51).

4 . See Eduard Punset, The Happiness Trip: A Scientific Journey, White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2007.

5 . “Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game” (Voltaire).

6 . Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer who lived from 1881 to 1942, author of Decisive Moments in History: Twelve Historical Miniatures, Ariadne Press, 1999 (1927/1940).

7 . Pascal, Pensées [Thoughts], § XV.

8 . W. Brueggerman, The Message of the Psalms, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1984, pp. 51-52.

9 . See Paul Tournier, Creative Suffering, Harper & Row, 1983.

10 . See The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, (Selected and edited by Ronald de Leeuw, translated by Arnold Pomerans), London: Penguin Classics, 1997.

11 . Reine Caulet, « Je crée danc je souffre, » dossier Douleur, pp. 35-36.

3

Heeding the

Warning Signs

“The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.”

Thomas Jefferson

According to William James, the greatest discovery of our time is that we can influence many aspects of our lives just by changing our attitude.1 Shakespeare already said poetically, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.”2 Or as Ramon y Cajal stated more clearly, “Every man, if he so desires, can become the sculptor of his own brain.”3 In the past, artists and wise men said it—now science also supports it.

“Today we know that self-confidence, enthusiasm, and excitement have the ability to promote higher brain functions. […] When our brain gives meaning to something, we live it as absolute reality.”4 According to the experts, this means that “the healing process greatly depends upon what is happening in the mind of the patient. The challenge for medicine is to find a way to put into motion the body’s extraordinary healing powers.”5

Pain has allies

What happens in a person’s mind is the aspect of suffering that is most difficult to understand and control.6 Running a race with his friends, a young boy falls and scrapes his knee. But in the excitement of winning the race, he ignores it and keeps running. At the end of the race, the pain in his knee regains his attention. Seeing blood, he realizes what has happened, gets scared, bursts into tears, and runs to his mother. She hugs him, calms him, cleans the scratch, and puts a Band-Aid on it. Soon the boy goes back to his toys and forgets about his wound. There are men who work at gruesome jobs (slaughterers, butchers) or who play violent sports (rugby, boxing, etc.) that require a lot of strength and the ability to sustain blows, but they are unable to watch the birth of their own children, or they faint in the hospital when they see a needle approaching.7

There are factors that increase pain perception and others that reduce it. But we ignore them for the most part. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung said that we all have a hidden side of our personal reality that we cannot face openly and that we cannot change. It is our unconscious, which he called simply our “shadow aspect.” We cannot run away from it or make it disappear. “Shadows make up part of our life.”8 We should listen to what they have to say. Now, listening to pain does not mean letting us be monopolized by it, because there are certain attention levels that aggravate situations.

Fear

Fear is, without a doubt, our worst ally against pain. Suffering always grows with the specter of fear. We all fear suffering. But often our own fear aggravates and intensifies pain, turning it into an obsession that is as or more destructive than the actual cause of harm. Fear involves additional stress that can paralyze a life or make life unbearable when it confines the sufferer in a prison of panic. For those who live under the constant threat of a sword of Damocles, it is very difficult to live in a state of tense anticipation.9 But this state does not resolve their problems; rather, it worsens them. Pain may be inevitable, but our sense of misery is, to some extent, optional.10 Hence the benefit of learning to face our problems realistically and to take control of our emotional reactions.

Many people can overcome their fear by relying on some form of outside help, professional or spiritual.11 But how can we overcome it when we don’t have help from anyone?

Loneliness and abandonment

Because suffering is such a private feeling, it is often accompanied by a strong sense of loneliness. People who suffer chronically often aggravate their situation with the feeling that no one understands or sympathizes with them as they deserve. If they then begin to think that they are a nuisance, or a bother, this further increases their discomfort.

There are many kinds of pain that we cannot deal with alone. In many cases, assistance from a health professional is essential. But family, friends, and the religious community can successfully help us to cope with adversity and misfortune. Loneliness is one of the most distressing aspects of suffering to bear. If burdens are shared, they become lighter. If we cannot share our burdens with someone, they often become heavier. So, when we suffer, what we need most is not for someone to explain why to us, but for someone to be with us and express sympathy. At the same time there is nothing that relieves misery—others’ and our own—like doing our best to help others with their pain. To this end, professional training is useful but not essential. The most important thing is sensitivity. Sitting beside someone who is suffering and listening quietly can be enough.12

Frustration and discouragement

A lot of our suffering comes from the mere realization that our reality does not match our desires. One day it dawns on us that we will never have again what we had in the past, or that we will never achieve in life what we had dreamed. And so we further poison our present, incapable of accepting our reality as it is. The wounds of the soul may scar badly, and only those who feel them can know how much pain is caused by a thwarted love, a lost job, a failed marriage, a friendship that ended in betrayal. The passage of time often helps, less so when the consequences are permanent. In that case, time does nothing but aggravate the constant pain of deterioration or of aging. And an endless problem can destroy anyone’s spirit. As the poet wrote:13 “The worst pain in the world

Is not the one that kills with a blow,

But the one that, drop by drop,

Undermines the soul and breaks it.”

Nevertheless, all these trials can help us learn. Experience teaches us to be wiser and more prudent, to protect ourselves. We should also understand that it doesn’t mean that we should put our protective barriers up so high that they isolate us from reality. Because if after a broken heart, we don’t love again, we can fall into the trap of resentment and hatred. Disappointment, if untreated, worsens into bitterness, and bitterness into cynicism. After we hit bottom in the sea of life, it is only by trying to swim that we can float again.

It is human to make mistakes. But one of the most important things we can learn in life is to take away positive lessons from our mistakes and move on. If we are self-indulgent in our status as victims, if we insist on blaming everything on life’s events, if we anchor ourselves in situations of complaint and pity, it will be difficult for us to take charge of our lives. Resentment and frustration do nothing but exacerbate suffering. The cure for bad memories is not fighting them but making good ones.

The shadow of the past

One of the greatest sources of our unhappiness can be the shadow of the past. We cannot will ourselves to forget just by wishing it, and the more we try not to remember certain problems, the more they are on our minds. Memory is fickle and selective. We forget countless good things that we enjoyed, but we remember setbacks, defeats, disappointments, insults, and betrayals…. John Irving said, “Your memory is a monster; you forget –– it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you –– and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”14 If we let it, our memory can take us to the cemetery of disappointment, bury us in the past, and haunt us mercilessly with our dead dreams.

Perhaps nothing causes as much chagrin as happiness lost. After having found happiness, sadness stings deeper and more cruelly than if we had never known felicity to begin with. A famous beauty watches herself age in the mirror, battling gray hair, weight gain, wrinkles or flabbiness. An athlete who was admired for his physique suffers the withering of his body to a greater extent than the rest of us who were always average or unattractive. Those who loved or were loved despair after being abandoned. Those who possessed wealth and lost it are much more unhappy than those who were always poor. Whether we like it or not, our past casts its shadow over our present.15 As Lord Byron said, “The memory of joy is no longer joy; the memory of pain is pain still.”

The actor who was an idol cannot stand to be forgotten. The athlete who dreads being replaced may try to prolong his career by using chemicals…. It is difficult to cure yourself of past triumphs— of glory lost. The writer becomes depressed if her latest book sells fewer copies than her previous book, and the singer grows somber if he books fewer performances than before…. Far from being content with what life gave us for a time, we feel that the past no longer counts, no matter how great it was. Money accumulated no longer satisfies if we don’t keep earning. Admiration once received is worthless if it is no longer given. Beauty once possessed becomes a bitter memory once it is lost…

Why do we place so little value on what we have accomplished, once it has passed? A growing number of people undergo countless operations and inject any chemical into their bodies just to look younger, but they often end up looking deformed…. And there is the vain politician who isn’t adverse to making any compromise to improve his image, trying to get the votes that will enable him to remain in power….

The phrase “time heals all wounds” expresses a relative truth. The wounds, it is true, often heal. The skin pulls back together, renewing itself until it forms a new barrier against infection. But the new skin, the healed area, usually remains more sensitive than the surrounding skin. More fragile. And each time that the scar comes into contact with a foreign object, there is a memory of the initial wound. The injury heals but remains fragile. The same thing happens when a word, a thought, an image, brings back the memory of suffering from long ago. The wound is healed, but the fragility of the memory remains. Years pass and the scar lingers…as long as love or memory remains.16

A sense of failure

We humans are the only living beings that trip over the same stone a thousand times and then blame the stone. Nevertheless, what we suffer from could help us to identify the causes of our failings. This realization can allow us to take personal responsibility for what happens to us, to question the beliefs that society imposes on us, and then change direction. That’s the opinion held by Jose Luis Montes (Spain, 1965), former administrator of several international corporations such as Epson, Xerox, and Tech Data: “I believed that success meant reaching the top and making lots of money,” he admits. “I achieved everything the system says you should to be happy, but when I got to the top I felt empty.”17

Moved by a profound longing to find himself and undertake a life project based on values, not on profit, Montes sold his business a few years ago. What he calls his “inner transformation” has led him to become the founder of the social movement Wikihappiness. This successful former administrator now gives conferences for administrators, at which he speaks of triumph and failure.

“When you don’t know who you are or what you want, you are a slave to your own low self-esteem and insecurity. This lack of confidence leads you to think and do what others think and do. Authentic people are free, consistent, and honest with themselves. When we are very young other people fill our heads with preconceived notions about how we should live our lives. They condition us to triumph at all costs, to take that route into the temple of happiness. But it is a big lie. I have lived in that place and it’s empty. Happiness doesn’t depend on what we possess, but rather on what we are and our ability to live in accord with ourselves. Often the race to possess becomes an obstacle in the path to being.”