The Three Ways We Deal (or Not) with Suffering

Suffering, painful events, and bad things happening to us as
human beings; this is something we all go through in life. We
are going to suffer. It’s inevitable. It’s part of the human
condition, and it’s just part of being alive. Sometimes bad
things happen to us, and we suffer.
Even now, some of us may be in the hospital because of an
illness. Others may be heartbroken because of the end of a
loving relationship. Or we may be suffering severe depression
because we haven’t been able to find work for several years.
We all have our own stories about suffering, and we all have
suffered.

In this blog, I want to look at “How can we deal with
suffering? What are our options?” There are three options we
can choose: we can suppress our feelings, we can feel them,
or we can grow from them. Let me explain. The first option,
“We can suppress them,” is often the most tempting and
easiest option, and it therefore is what many, many people
choose to do. It’s one reason there is so much suffering in
the world, because when we suppress our suffering, it doesn’t
go away; it just gets put aside for a little bit, and then we
need to suppress it more and more. Let me use an example to
illustrate this. Have you ever gone to a movie or watched a
television show where someone breaks up with the love of
their life, and then they go off and get really drunk for two or
three days in a row, come out of it, and then they move on?
No, that’s not what happens. The drunken bender doesn’t
solve a thing. The suffering returns. All they have done is
suppress it. This is an amazingly common scenario. When
we suffer, we often turn to substances or sometimes to other
people. In other words, we turn to things outside of ourselves
to try to turn off the suffering. I once gave a talk to a group of
people about suffering, and a woman came up to me later and
said, “You’re exactly right, Dr. Puff. My husband died five
years ago and, within a year, I remarried. I didn’t want to face
the loss of my husband so I remarried thinking it would
resolve my suffering, and it hasn’t gone well.”
There are an infinite number of examples that I could give
about this way of dealing with suffering, because people
choose this suppress-the-feelings option all the time.
Suffering occurs. Instead of feeling it, we numb it. But that
doesn’t work for very long so we have to keep numbing it,
and so we turn to more and more addictions to help us not
feel our feelings. There are an infinite number of ways or
‘addictions’ that we can turn to so we won’t feel our feelings
--from food to prescription medications, to relationships, to
keeping super busy, and the list goes on and on. We all know
what they are because we’ve all done it. Instead of feeling
our feelings, we try to distract ourselves. We turn to these
addictions because they work; they do shut off the pain,
temporarily . The problem is that, over time, what starts with
us eating a box of cookies because we’re sad, ends up with us
being 300 pounds overweight; now we’re really depressed and
so we continue to turn to our addiction for food.
The second option we can take when dealing with suffering is
that we can feel our pain. Some call it “owning” our pain. If
we feel our pain, it is challenging to us. Going back to the
example of losing a loved one, we do suffer when we feel that
loss. It can be very sad; it can be tragic; there can be a lot of
tears; there can be anger that flows from that loss. However,
what happens is that feeling or owning the pain helps us get
better. Our suffering heals, and then we move on.
If we choose this second option of dealing with our pain and
suffering, then the third option occurs. We can grow from our
feelings of suffering. We can learn from our experience, our
suffering, and adapt that experience into our lives because the
pain is healed. We have then put ourselves in a position to
use these experiences of suffering as learning tools for making
good choices throughout the rest of our lives.
Now let’s take this talk about suffering to a deeper level,
about how life is ultimately fair in regards to suffering. Fair?
Did I say suffering is fair in life? Yes, I did. That statement
may ruffle a few feathers, but I want you to hang in there and
let me explain what I mean. If you don’t mind, I’m also going
to use God in this analogy , just to help us understand how
the universe, or in this case God, is ultimately gracious and
kind in regards to human suffering.
What most people do when they experience suffering is they
choose the first option I talked about – they numb it. And,
guess what, the numbing really works! It doesn’t totally take
it away, but it does work. It’s very unhealthy for us in the
long run, but it works and it’s an option that we take as we
go through life and we just keep numbing our feelings. That’s
why addictions or numbing our feelings work so well, because
they take the feelings away. It’s only a temporary fix, of
course, and we have to keep returning to our addictions to
continue numbing the pain, but addictions do work and this is
the choice most people make. In the long run, it’s not very
good for us, but it does take away our pain.