13 Sep If you were suffering and someone offered you a free trip anywhere in the world, or the galaxy for that matter, would you take it?… (LOU MARINOFF)
DEALING WITH SUFFERING
There are several ways to deal with suffering: keep it to yourself, escape from it, pass it on to someone else, end it in yourself, or transform it into something helpful.
Let’s look at each in turn, illustrated with case studies.
KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. A popular (yet far from ideal) strategy is to keep your suffering to yourself – to “suffer in silence.” You may have been taught this is somehow noble, but it’s actually needless.
It deprives you, unnecessarily, of enjoyment and fulfillment. Or perhaps you believe that your suffering is a necessary preparation for your happiness in the next world. Or perhaps you harbor false beliefs about yourself, implanted by others, which prevent your authentic person from flourishing.
Beliefs are not determined by our genes; they are acquired by cultural transmission. A belief that causes you sorrow can be replaced by a belief that causes you joy, but it’s up to you to make the change. Alternative beliefs of all kinds are available to you; the world is teeming with them. But it’s up to you to find beliefs that are helpful to you, rather than harmful. And while suffering can be a kind of education itself at times (like anything else in life), once you’ve learned its lessons you’re allowed to graduate – and you deserve to.
The moral: Keeping suffering to yourself, however nobly, is not the answer. Rooting out its causes, no matter how long that takes, is the best approach.
ESCAPE FROM IT. This sounds tempting, and also has a heroic ring to it. It is not a coincidence that the theme of escape is perennially popular in Hollywood. Audi- ences love escape movies, presumably because so many people identify with them.
The kind of suffering that we’re talking about, however, is not produced by the pain of physical captivity in drastic surroundings but rather by ordinary situations in life, from which people unwittingly, unconsciously, or unerringly fashion their own prisons and then seek to escape.
Those who are responsible for their own sufferings cannot escape them except by confronting them, understanding their true causes, and removing them. Attempts to escape from self-induced suffering not only fail, but often worsen the suffering itself.
Fight or flight is one of the oldest biological instincts in humans, and since suffering is a kind of threat to one’s well-being, there is a natural inclination to fight or flee this threat.
But when the suffering is self-induced, we cannot fight it except by confronting it, and we cannot flee it at all. If you were suffering and someone offered you a free trip anywhere in the world, or the galaxy for that matter, would you take it? You might do so for distraction, or temporary escape, but you know full well that your suffering would accompany you wherever you went, as surely as your shadow.
Yet people will naturally attempt to escape – through alcohol, drugs, relationships, cults – whatever medium seems to take them away from themselves, to put time or space or altered states of consciousness between them and their suffering.
Yet escape is only temporary.
People who wish not to suffer must find a way to face and overcome their suffering.
SPREAD IT AROUND. Another very common strategy is to try to pass your suffering on to someone else. In the short run, this looks like the human equivalent of the barnyard pecking order:
Your boss yells at you; you yell at your kid; your kid kicks the dog.
Unfortunately, suffering is not like a football: You can’t just hand it off to someone else and thereby disown it. If you try, you’ll find it has a multiplier effect. That is, you can’t get rid of suffering it by spreading it around. That just increases its presence in the world. People who seek out others just to implicate them in their suffering are actually suffering twice over: first from whatever’s really bothering them at source, and second from the delusion that implicating others will alleviate their own problems.
END IT IN YOURSELF. If you are suffering from a disease, this disease is in your body, and must be extinguished there.
Why should disease be any different?
But it seems to be much more difficult for people to “own” their disease because they have to accept responsibility for their mental contents in order to end it in themselves.
It is much easier, at least in the short run, to blame others: “He’s making me unhappy,” or “She’s not appreciating me,” or “Society is treating me unfairly.”
It’s much harder to admit that some of your beliefs or expectations are working against your better interests, and harder still to puzzle out what to do about it.
In the long run, however, the only way to end your suffering is to disown it. But in order to do that, you have to admit to owning it in the first place.
The Big Questions: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life
Lou Marinoff
