Pain, Suffering, and Difficulties

Over the past little while I have been thinking a lot about the difficulties of life and how they cause so much pain and suffering. Far too often we avoid acknowledging our pain and it never goes away. The further we push it away the bigger it gets and the more tangled it becomes in all of our other shadows. Carl Jung once said that “Humans need Difficulties; they are necessary for Health”. Here are a few things that this Quote brings up for me that I hope you may also find helpful to ponder.

Without pain and suffering we would not grow and we would stay in the same place our whole life. Some people need a lot of pain to get them to move. After all change is hard, uncomfortable, and terrifying to the ego. We often think of difficulties as negative, but if they are necessary to get us to grow and change, then maybe they are not good or bad, they just are. If we can approach our difficulties with an awareness mind, it will not make the suffering go away, but it may lessen it or stop you from being distracted by it. Often when we start to focus on the pain and suffering we forget what the goal was in the first place and we stop taking action towards it. If we don’t become attached to the suffering, we can keep making progress and get through it quicker.

o   Can you think of a time when difficulties motivated you?

o   Have new challenges ever made a project feel more like a game or puzzle you needed to solve?

Often when we come across extreme difficulties we can close ourselves off to others and go into a depressive state. Getting yourself out of the pit of despair is always challenging. One way that might help is to be in service of others. Don’t think of grand services but micro services, like returning a smile and making eye contact with a stranger, holding the door open for a co-worker, buying coffee for the person behind you in line. These small services can help you stay connected to the good things in life and prevent you from drowning in your own pain.

o   Can you think of a time when you were miserable and an interaction with a stranger or a fluffy animal brought you a bit of happiness? (The Happiness Lab has a podcast episode on this, aired Oct 7, 2019. #4 “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude”). Spotify link

Sometimes the difficulties and struggles we have to go through to reach our goal actually make it taste sweeter. If you think about climbing a mountain, it can be a lot of hard work, even dangerous at times. But once you get the top, all the hard work seems like it was worth it. If you took a gondola to the top of the same mountain you would not value the view as much because you didn’t have to work hard to get there. The same goes for other things in your life, if they are just given to you, you will not value or respect them as much as if you had to work and suffer to get them.

o   Do you remember the first thing big thing you saved up for and purchased as a kid?

o   How hard did you work to save up that money and how much did you love/cherish that thing? 

·         On the other side of this coin, working harder does not always mean better results. If we look at the same mountain example, there is usually a path to get to the top of the mountain. You can plot your own path and its going to be a lot more work and by the time you get to the top you will be too exhausted to enjoy the view. Now depending on where you are in life, maybe you need to carve you own way forward or maybe you need to take the gondola to get to the top. This is all about your personal journey and what your struggle looks like to you.

o    Do you judge yourself against others success or do you know what success looks and feeling like for you? 

Like all feelings and emotions, pain and suffering can be projected. We can take on someone else’s pain or project our pain and difficulties onto another person. One of the things I am working through is separating my suffering from those around me. Recently I became aware of how I was triggered when a loved one was projecting their fear and pain onto me. I was so focused (through conditioning) on alleviating their pain that I could not see their projection for what it was and I just took it on. This is called shadow entanglement and can be difficult to tease apart. I am slowly learning to recognize what difficulties are mine that only I can fix and what difficulties are someone else’s that only they can fix. This is a really tough when it comes to people that we love. No one likes seeing a loved one in pain and we want to help the best we can, but there is such a thing as over helping. The intrusive helper is just as dysfunctional as the person who is unwilling to take responsibility for them self!

o   Where do you fall on this spectrum? Do you take responsibility for your pain? Do you mask your pain by over helping? Do you ignore your pain to makes others more comfortable?   

Additional Journal prompts around difficulties and suffering:

·         What past experiences appeared negative at first but turned out to be a huge blessing?

·         Can you drop the judgement around your difficulties and see them as a necessity, not good or bad? How does this shift the situation? Are you able to see a way forward?

·         Where is your balance between not working hard enough and over working?

·         What signs does your body give you when you are over working?

·         Do you ever force yourself to suffer more because you don’t think you are worthy? If so dig into the why. Often it is easier to say “I’m unworthy” than to uncover the root fear that is keeping you limited. This is a very tough question! So be gentile with yourself, while at the same time holding yourself accountable. Please reach out to friends or a support group if you are having trouble with this type of question.

Thank you for doing this work

Love

Nikki