Denial of Pain
With the idea that it is useless to fight against fate, some philosophers tried to fight pain by developing a doctrine focused on the sufferer’s attitude. Their big question was: What can we do so that what happens to us causes us less harm? The famous Stoic response said: “If I voluntarily accept my fate (which I cannot change) nothing bad can happen to me. That is to say, I am free, because I have accepted from the beginning that I will take whatever happens to me.” Stoicism looked for a way out of the problem of suffering through the path of denial, the repression or lack of expression of pain. So, Epictetus taught his disciples to fight pain by repeating the following sentence: “Pain, you are nothing but a word.”6 But his own followers soon discovered that the theory of apathy (impassibility) proposed by the master of Stoicism doesn’t tend to work in practice. Harsh reality imposes itself on this philosophy and at times pain is so violent that not even the most stoic individuals can accept it. The only course left to them is suicide, a final act of the assertion of freedom and the suppression of pain.
A similar response is found in various Eastern traditions, with practices that tend to fight suffering through the elimination of desire. Buddha says: “This is, my brothers, the truth about suffering: Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha...”7 In a word, the origin of suffering is the desire for happiness, the desire for existence. With the premise that suffering comes from frustration, the proposed solution is the renunciation of individual will, the annulment of self, and the struggle for the abandonment of all desire.
There is a lot that is positive about some self-control techniques. However, while some serenity practices can relieve certain kinds of pain, mostly physical pain, it doesn’t always work for emotional suffering, others’ or our own. Denying its existence does not eliminate it. Some practices of “diversion of attention” remind me of the case of a smoker that a doctor friend of mine told me about: He was so terrified about what he had read in a newspaper article about the harmful effects of tobacco, that from that day on he stopped reading the newspaper…. And one asks oneself if, long-term, it is beneficial for the human being to become insensitive, particularly to the suffering of others.
Resignation to Fate
Various traditions teach their followers not to rebel against misfortune. They believe that it is always a result of personal faults or divine will. As an example, they often use individuals affected by sexually transmitted diseases due to lifestyle choices. For them, suffering is a direct result of specific transgressions, although the guilty person may not be aware of them. In a way, it is the fatalistic idea of Insha’Allah, which in many cultures is rooted in a religious education of blame. If a child falls trying to reach a jar of jam in the kitchen cupboard, there are parents who will say: “It is God’s punishment. You have disobeyed your mother and that is your punishment. You deserve it.” And so the child ends up believing that every form of suffering comes from direct—and divine—sanction of their faults.
Rebellion
But the idea that human suffering is due to divine punishment makes us rebel. As a neighbor of mine once said: “They say that God makes those who He loves the most suffer, but I’d rather He left me alone. What could I have done to Him so that He would give me such a difficult daughter?”
In my pastoral ministry, I have heard many reactions to painful situations:
“How can God allow my baby to suffer?”
“What wrong have I done to have cancer? I’ve always attended church…. I don’t think I’m any worse than my friends, but everything is going well for them.”
“Why does God allow children to die in wars?”
“How am I going to have an operation to remove this tumor if maybe God sent it to me?”
In secular societies, loss of faith, trust in medicine as the solution for everything, and the utopian dream of a world in which science one day eradicates pain, have led many people to stop looking for answers in philosophy and religion to the problem of suffering. Most end up ignoring the enigmatic dimension of the issue and look elsewhere.
Emotional Suffering
From the point of view of bioethics, pain is usually distinguished—with reason—from suffering. If pain can be fought at all costs, suffering does not have the same possibilities for therapeutic treatment because the circumstances that produce it cannot be modified with concrete formulas. The doctor may not know the suffering that a given situation causes for a particular patient and may limit the treatments to merely symptomatic ones. And the patient may make incorrect personal decisions that counter the effects of any therapy.
Given the complexity of the task, medicine continues to seek out new resources for fighting or relieving different kinds of pain. Among other things, it has been found that a number of physical ailments proceed, at least in part, from unhealthy attitudes about life and, in particular, from unresolved emotional problems. Unlike physical pain, mental suffering does not come from accidents or disease states. It arises, most of the time, from the conflict between our desires and reality: the death of a loved one; the loss of a job; reduced faculties due to an illness, accident or decrepitude; emotional wounds due to a divorce or a breakup; etc. This kind of suffering is caused by our physical limitations (we find ourselves deformed, diminished, or elderly), our social disadvantages (we feel excluded because of our gender, race, nationality, marital status…
), our financial difficulties (debts or troubles), our emotional problems (a betrayal or rejection), and so on.
This anxiety grows when we are faced with barriers, sometimes insurmountable, that are between us and our hopes and dreams. As John Lennon used to sing in Beautiful Boy, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Emotional suffering emerges from painful situations for which we cannot find a solution: guilt from wrongs that cannot be righted; unrequited love; feeling hopeless because it is too late to change a fault; feeling powerless at the death of a loved one; feeling despair at the proximity of one’s own death; etc.
Emotional suffering is inevitable in an unjust world. And deeply human. We could almost say that it is sane and positive to feel it, because it comes from some of the best abilities of a person: sensitivity and compassion. It is part of our humanity. It would be inhuman to remain insensitive to injustices or misfortunes, whether they are others’ or ours own.
Anxiety, stress, and depression
A classic example of how difficult it is to separate pain from suffering is provided by anxiety, stress, and depression. According to statistical estimates, in the year 2000, there were already hundreds of millions of individuals suffering from depression, two times the number in 1950, mostly in the West. In 2009, between 7% and 10% of the world’s population suffered from some form of depression, mostly in the countries with a Western lifestyle.8 The causes behind this growing problem are very complex, as its physiological components are difficult to separate from its psychological factors, and include genetic predisposition, lifestyle, the impact of environment, family tensions, and personal problems.
According