What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the phrase "pain and suffering"? Google that, and you are likely to find 760,000 ads for injury attorneys, ready to fight for you and get you the compensation you deserve from some kind of accident you might have had.
The truth is, this phrase is all too common this day and age; we seem to be surrounded by the pain and suffering of others and I am sure we all have a healthy dose of pain and suffering in our own lives as well. Some research suggests that a staggering 90-95% of the news we consume is negative, and we tend to gravitate toward negative news rather than positive news. We seem to have been accustomed to expect bad news when trying to catch up with what is going on in the world, and this has only been compounded by the rise of social media. Pain and suffering can be found everywhere we look.
As an ACT counselor (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), one of the foundations of this approach is the idea that life is full of pain. What a strange place to start counseling from! To help you conceptualize the premise of ACT, imagine for a minute that you are cooking in the kitchen along to your favorite song. The mood is light and whimsical, and after a fancy dance move, you steady yourself with your left hand on an open stove burner top, that so happens to be set to 8. I imagine for a split second that you might have felt the pain of seared flesh, and your first instinct was likely to pull away! Everything stops in that moment, you might angrily throw down the cooking utensil you were carrying, and you begin to tend to your hand. Pain is very often understood physically, however it is probably easy for many of us to think of an emotionally painful incident in our lives. The death of a loved one. A divorce. The loss of a dream. A broken relationship. Betrayal by someone close to us. As you read those examples, I bet at least one stood out to you, and you felt it somewhere in your body. Emotionally, it makes complete sense that we would want to pull away from these kinds of feelings. We call that 'avoidance' in the business, and it's not really a bad coping skill, but should be used with some caution. Avoidance of painful emotions in some cases can actually cause suffering, which is a different, miserable experience from pain.
Allow me to offer another analogy for emotional pain and suffering through physical pain again. I play basketball as a coping skill, and as any sports player knows, injury is not a matter of if you get injured, but when you get injured. I have rolled my ankle plenty of times, resulting in the inability to make basketball moves necessary to compete well. The wait time to recover from an ankle injury can be anywhere from 3-6 weeks, depending on how bad you roll the ankle. The pain of the situation is very easily identified; it is the strained muscle and ligaments of the ankle from the injury. This pain will be there regardless of what I do, and the only way to heal is through time and inactivity. The suffering however, comes from thinking about all the time that I am missing out with my friends that are playing ball, or being frustrated at the situation. This suffering may even be amplified if I have an important role on my team, and can't contribute to a playoff game, or if I am going to miss out on a yearly tournament. The pain from the ankle seems interconnected with the suffering that comes from the focus on missing playing time...but does it have to be? What if I learned to accept the timeline in front of me about having to heal from my injury? What if instead, I decided to set my sights toward the joy I will have again to return to the court when it heals? What if I remind myself that this is a temporary situation, and not a permanent one? These types of thoughts have a high chance to impact my mood for the better, and more importantly, reduce my suffering. The pain of the injured ankle does not have to correlate to suffering! I want to point out that I can understand how we can suffer though, and it is a human quality to gravitate toward the negative in a situation, so suffering should not be looked at like a moral failure or weakness.
When I apply this concept to emotional pain, I hope to make the connection that emotional pain may be unavoidable (like the unexpected death of a loved one), but the suffering that can come from emotional pain is a bit more in your control than you might think. Emotional pain can look like a lot of other things as well; perhaps I am freaked out about the inevitability of getting older, aging, and losing some of my youth or functionality. A quarter life or a midlife crisis might be conceptualized by the avoidance of some of these painful realizations, and so we might engage in behaviors or attitudes to help distract us from these realizations, in order to soothe our suffering.
In some ways, suffering can be thought of as attempting to avoid that which cannot be avoided.
Gentle acceptance of some of the reality of life can help reduce the suffering in our lives. Acceptance is a tough concept for many people that I counsel, and this is very likely the subject of another blog for another time. Often times, the beginning of our journey of acceptance starts with the understanding that pain and suffering are not always linked! We will have painful experiences in life, and some of these painful experiences cannot be avoided, but suffering can be reduced, managed or coped with. We usually use these words interchangeably, but I hope that being able to separate these concepts has been helpful for you to see the relationship between pain and suffering, and ultimately empower you to make changes in your life! How much better would life be if we could reduce our suffering?!
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