Pain Is Inevitable;
Suffering Is Optional
We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Marcel Proust
PAIN AND LIFE are one. There is the pain of childbirth and the pain of learning that you cannot protect your child from pain. Later comes the pain of growing old, dying, and leaving your children behind. And this is the best-case scenario. How we deal with life’s pain is a reflection of the depth of our inner world, our resilience, and a core element of our character.
After being traumatized by his first encounters with sickness, aging, and death, Buddha grew despondent and left his home in search of a teacher. He had become convinced that life was suffering and searched for a path to liberation. What he discovered two millennia ago is now being rediscovered by modern science—while pain is inevitable, suffering is a product of the mind. This means that we can use our minds to change how we experience our lives. In my words, we can use our minds to change our brains.
Not many of us are on our way to becoming enlightened beings. I’m certainly not about to give up my flat-screen TV and ice cream to search for truth. However, there are aspects of Buddha’s teachings that can benefit us in the comfort of our privileged lives. From my perspective, the most important is that while pain is inevitable, it is also transitory. We can grin, bear it, and wait it out. I remember watching the World Trade Center burning and wondering if my oldest friend was trapped in his top-floor office. But I also knew, even as I was being traumatized by what I was seeing, even as I imagined my friend choking on smoke and trying to help others stay calm, that life would go on, that people would forget, and that a new generation would come along, who never had the twin towers as fixtures on their daily horizon.
What Buddha taught us is that long after our pain has subsided, suffering can become a habit of the brain and program of the mind. We are capable of becoming attached to our losses, grudges, and slights, and we turn transitory pain into a lifetime of hurt. This is an insight that has to be discovered again and again by each generation of therapists across all theoretical perspectives. So while it is clear that life contains much pain, it doesn’t have to lead to unending suffering. I have personal proof of this because, while my childhood was characterized by considerable suffering, my adult life is not—even though there has been plenty of pain.
Niagara Falls
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
As a small boy during the 1960s, I noticed that my grandparents never took vacations together. I asked my grandmother why, and she said that my grandfather hadn’t asked her to vacation with him since World War II, when she had said something that hurt his feelings. That made me curious, because my grandpa was as tough as they came, drove a big truck, and carried iron bathtubs up flights of stairs—I couldn’t imagine my sweet little grandmother hurting his feelings. Here is the story as it was told to me.
As a teenager during the 1920s, my grandmother went to a vaudeville show with her girlfriends and heard a joke that she found quite funny. One person asked another, “Would you like to go to Niagara Falls for the weekend?” and the other responded, “Is that place still running?” Despite the fact that my grandmother was not the joke-telling type, she found this one particularly funny, and it lodged in some corner of her brain for future use.
Fast forward a decade or two—my grandparents and their children (my father among them) are sitting at the dinner table. My grandfather spent his days cleaning and repairing ships returning from combat in the North Atlantic. I can only imagine how little money they had, how grueling and difficult his work was, and how much of a stretch it must have been for him to pop the question to her: “Would you like to go to Niagara Falls for a little vacation?”—a wonderful gesture on his part.
The words “Niagara Falls” triggered the memory of this joke in my grandmother’s mind, and she responded to my grandfather with the punch line, “Is that place still running?” I suspect she said it in the same sarcastic and offhanded way the seasoned comedian had said it all those years ago. My grandmother’s expectation was to get a good laugh and then discuss the trip—she would have loved to go. To her surprise, my grandfather’s response was to feel belittled and ashamed. He got up from the table and went to bed. Neither of them ever brought it up again, nor did they ever go on that or any other vacation. They possessed neither the courage to confront their feelings nor the skills to discuss them.
So what does this sad little story from my family’s past have to do with pain and suffering? I think it is an excellent example of how a moment of pain can become a lifetime of suffering. My grandfather’s momentary pain was converted by both of their brains and minds into a lifetime of distance within their relationship. Had the pain been expressed, my grandmother’s statement explained, apologies been exchanged, they could have had a nice vacation and a better relationship. But because both of their brains triggered fear and withdrawal, nothing was discussed, and their minds were left with constructing the other person’s intentions based on their respective histories of loss and rejection. I suspect all relationships have minor disasters like this that decrease intimacy and joy.
Getting Back on the Horse That Threw You
You yourself, as much as anyone in the universe, deserve your love and affection.
Buddha
When I was growing up, “getting back on the horse that threw you” was shorthand for facing fears and not letting them guide and limit your life. All these years later, I read that a powerful correlate of therapeutic success is the reduction of approach anxiety—same thing. The way not to be controlled by fear is to approach what you are afraid of in order to retrain your amygdala and sympathetic nervous system not to get activated in the face of what they have paired with danger. In a parallel process, the best way to combat pain is through a combination of anger and vulnerability, the two things that shame drives us to avoid.
The way to minimize suffering is to approach pain and create a way of understanding and sharing it with others. If you avoid the challenges you are afraid of and survive another day, the fears become more deeply ingrained in your nervous system. Put in another way, withdrawal gets reinforced within our brains as an overarching survival strategy. This is the essence of exposure therapy. This is why clients do better when they are able to approach what makes them anxious and afraid. These experiments in courage, both in and out of therapy, are a central mechanism of brain change.
So what could my grandparents have done during World War II to avert half a century of hard feelings? My grandfather could have said that he was excited about the trip and expected her to be excited and happy as well. He also could have said that the unexpected joke hurt his feelings. My grandmother could have apologized, told the story from her girlhood, poked him on the top of his head (as she always did), and said that she would love to go on a trip to Niagara Falls. Of course, they both lacked a language for their feelings, and negative emotions only triggered stronger defenses, attacks, or more dramatic withdrawals.
In contrast, when pain is met by emotional numbing, it generalizes across all emotions and makes life far less enjoyable. When the pain is numbed, all feelings are numbed and you are left with a dead relationship and a dead life, so the applications of Buddha’s message to therapy are clear:
1. Reframe your avoidance of anxiety and fear into curiosity. Be an emotion detective and figure out what is beneath the fear. If we go down a layer or two, below the anger, resentment, and shame, sooner or later we all get to a fear of abandonment. Realize that our brains feed all sorts of information to our minds—a good deal of which is misinformation. It is up to us to learn to tell the good from the bad. But remember, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
2. Move toward the broken places. Embrace pain sooner rather than later; move toward it, let it wash over you, feel grief, wail, scream, and say what’s on your mind. Get really good at approaching pain and learn as early in life as possible that you will survive. I realize this may seem counterintuitive, but our intuitions, like our thoughts, are fallible.
3. Get enraged! Allow yourself to become as angry as you are able at your brain for feeding you misinformation. If you have a brain and mind that constantly tell you that you are inferior, worthless, and unlovable, tell them to get lost. Learn the ways in which your brain converts pain into suffering and insist that it stop. If your brain and mind are not your friends, stop taking their advice.
4. Share your feelings in as respectful a way as you are able. If your feelings involve other people and they are still alive, there is an opportunity to salvage or build a relationship. Start opening up. It will be hard, of course, and you will not do it perfectly. There is no perfection to be attained and no final resting point. Relationships are an endless river of energy moving toward an invisible sea.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
Stan walked into our first meeting ready to go. As he sat down, he began, “Hey Doc, do you remember the one about the frog and the pot of boiling water?” Before I could reply, Stan continued, “If you drop a frog into boiling water, it panics and jumps out—smart frog! But if you put a frog in cool water and raise the temperature slowly, you have dinner—if you like frog. I guess you could say that because the frog doesn’t notice the small changes, he wakes up dead.” A big smile spread across his broad face.
I had talked with Stan a week earlier, when he had complained of feeling lost. He was careful to distinguish it from depression, which he had experienced early in life. At 60, he was married with three children, had a successful financial consulting practice, and “on paper” (as he put it) had a good life. There was no particular thing he could point to as the cause of his unease—he loved his wife; his kids were doing well; he had a few good friends he saw on a regular basis—but for some reason, none of it seemed to matter anymore. “I think I’m the frog. I have a sense that I forgot to pay attention to something important, and then I forgot to remember. I’m going through the motions of my life, but the spark is gone.”
We sat in silence together as I let what he had said wash over me. I began to get a physical sense of his “lostness” that grew into an emptiness in my chest, a feeling of deflation, followed by sadness—I felt as if I could melt into my chair. Stan looked at my face, saw my sadness, and went deeper. “I feel guilty about saying this, but with everything I have, I still feel like there is something missing: I don’t feel ungrateful, just lost.” I now said my first words: “Have you ever had this kind of feeling before?” I could tell from his eyes that he had mentally left the room and was watching a scene from his past.
Stan seemed to suddenly become aware of my presence and embarrassed for having left me alone. He began to describe his journey. “When you asked me about having this feeling before, I was snapped back to a time when my father left us when I was seven. I was standing next to a bookcase and listening to my mother yell at him over the phone. I didn’t exactly understand what was happening or what it meant, but I do remember feeling as if I was floating in space. I know it sounds crazy, but I think I felt like we were all going to die. I felt like I was falling into a dream.”
It didn’t seem like Stan needed to be rescued, so I sat with him and watched the waves of emotion cross his face. I stayed grounded in the feelings; I wanted him to know I was going on this journey with him and that he didn’t have to worry about taking care of me. As I sat there, I reflected on Stan’s feeling that his mother and siblings would die as a consequence of his father’s absence. Stan didn’t realize that while his family probably wasn’t at risk, for most of human prehistory, abandonment by the father would mean death to his wife and children. I wondered whether all young primates retain this memory within the primitive regions of our brains.
“A memory from 50 years ago still has power over me,” he reflected. “But how could that have anything to do with what I’m feeling now? Isn’t it just a coincidence?” “Possibly,” I said. “Time will tell. Let’s see if you have any other memories or associations to this feeling of lostness. Just allow yourself to have whatever thoughts come to mind and share them with me when you are ready.” As we sat together, I could tell Stan was searching his mind for memories when his body jolted. “Another time was when I broke up with my girlfriend before I left for the East Coast to do my MBA. I knew we weren’t a good fit, and I certainly didn’t want to have a long-distance relationship, but I remember driving across the country, feeling like I was driving off the edge of the earth with that same empty feeling.”
“Both of the experiences you describe involve abandonment and loss. In the first one, your father left you. In the second you left a girlfriend. How long had you been together?” “Six years, three months, and seventeen days—I still remember.” Stan added proudly, “I also remember that even though I broke up with her, I felt betrayed when I left for school, like she had broken up with me. I guess I wanted her to fight for the relationship and not let me go. Instead, she said she understood and wished me luck.” I reflected for a while and eventually said, “Maybe it doesn’t matter who leaves whom; the child in us always feels abandoned when attachments are broken.”
A few sessions later, he came in with a discovery he was anxious to share. He had experienced a strong bout of the lost feeling again. He had been sitting alone in his chair at midnight watching TV when the image of driving off the edge of the earth returned to him. “I asked myself again and again, why now, why now, why am I having this feeling again—and then it dawned on me.” Stan had spent the day helping his youngest daughter get ready to leave for college—helping her pack, looking at maps to help plan her drive, finding rest stops along the way of her 400-mile journey up the California coast. This was the last of his three children to leave home—his 30-year role of being a day-to-day father would soon be over.
Stan seemed sad to realize the source of his emptiness. “I never thought that it would be related to Crissie leaving for college. I was fine when her two older brothers left for school and I feel proud of her for going to a great college. It’s a completely natural thing. What a messed-up brain I have!” I reassured him that there was nothing messed up with his mind except the fact that in addition to having been traumatized by being abandoned by his father, his brain was reacting naturally to loss. I told him, “Even though separations make sense to our rational minds, our primitive brains are still hurt—this is not sickness; it’s just how we’re wired.”
“In addition to this, you are transitioning out of a role that you have been in every day for the last three decades. Your kids have been your emotional ground zero for half of your adult life. You have to expect to have a reaction.” “There is more to it than that,” Stan said. “As my wife and I focused more and more on the kids, we let our relationship fade away. I’m not even sure we know or like each other anymore, and I’m afraid that once Crissie leaves, she won’t have any reason to stay with me anymore.” The first phase of therapy ended, and the second one was about to begin.
Finite and Infinite
Remember your dreams and fight for them.
Paulo Coelho
Psychotherapy isn’t rocket science—it is far more complex. Rocket scientists enjoy the benefits of shutting off input from their bodies, turning off their feelings, and forgetting about their personal pasts. They have the luxury of focusing on singular processes using linear logic. They don’t have to worry about their emotions biasing the principles of physics and mathematics. These parameters define both the achievements and limitations of purely scientific explorations and explanations.
Good-enough psychotherapy requires that we reach inside and become open to the limitations of our knowledge and try to account for the naturally occurring distortions of our minds and brains. We use science, but it is one of many frames of reference that therapists have to employ each hour.
We can’t protect each other from the pain of life. There are so many times in life when there are no words—sitting in hospitals, at funerals, and even coffee shops when we are confronted with the darkness of sickness, aging, and death. Sometimes we find ourselves in these lands of deep and difficult emotions, where we enter terra incognita, where the standard statement and clichés sound hollow, where the streets have no names.
And when I go there, I go there with you. It’s all I can do.
U2