Suffering Taught Me Who I Am
Suffering taught me who I am. It has helped me learn things about myself that I had never noticed before or that I never wanted to accept. I always thought that hopefully nothing bad would happen in my life, but I realized that this was an impossible wish.
We have all suffered. We have experienced various circumstances that have left their mark on us. Events that we would rather not have experienced, but which we know is impossible. Life is not always rosy for anyone, even if some events are less harmful to some than others. That’s the key.
Instead of focusing on a life without suffering, we should learn to experience suffering in a different way. Learn to use it to grow and rebuild yourself, and this often requires developing different skills in the safe environment of therapy.
It’s not about avoiding suffering, but about learning how to integrate it into your life story as just another chapter that led you to exactly this point in your life.
Therapy as a safe place
Psychological therapy should be seen as a safe place for everyone who goes there. In therapy you are not judged, there are no absolute truths and everything you say remains private. This promise can only be broken if the patient wishes to harm himself or others or through a court order.
In addition , therapy is a place to build a secure foundation that gives you stability, even if your life has been very difficult. To achieve this, psychologists – together with the patient/client – try to build a therapeutic alliance as a secure connection as the basis for the therapy.
This unique connection, when properly built, creates a climate of trust. This climate makes it easier to deal with all the fears and suffering that lies within them, because before we acquire the skills needed to deal with these problems, we must have the confidence to talk about our problems without fear. .
Giving suffering a name
Naming the pain and suffering does not mean using diagnostic labels. Often times we can’t even use one of these labels because there simply isn’t a name for our particular experience. Sometimes the cause of our suffering is so unique or mundane that it has no name and we have to come up with a name for it ourselves.
That name may only have meaning for the namesake and that is enough. It might be my dark side, my nerves, my shadow, or maybe whatever you want it to be. It is a name that will be used in the therapeutic setting to define something that is so unique to you, and so it is something so individual that, even if it bears a common name, it will have a unique meaning.
Naming the suffering helps to define the problem that lies at the heart of our affliction and thus helps to change or integrate it.
Once named, suffering will take on a new meaning. It will no longer be an entity, a feeling, but something more obvious. Something that has taken on a form and thus can be explained and understood by both the psychologist and the patient. As such, it is something that can already be changed or integrated.
Integrating the experience into your new self
When the cause of the suffering is something that happened in the past and cannot be changed, it is best to overcome it by integrating it into your life story.
And to integrate it, we have to accept it. We have to accept that no matter what happened, feeling guilty isn’t going to change anything. It is also not helpful to blame others, for the past is the past and cannot be returned. The work that integration requires, that acceptance of suffering, is extensive. But we have to let the bad happen and accept it naturally in order to build a new ‘me’.
Rebuilding yourself is a big step, but one that leads to acceptance of the dark side of yourself. You will no longer feel a void full of pain or fight against your inner demons. You will have to rebuild yourself and you will have to learn that what happened has shaped you into who you are today.
