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