Growing Through Suffering - Part One

I am excited to share with you how we can grow through suffering. Woohoo! That sounds like fun, right?

Sometimes in order to grow emotionally, physically, or spiritually, we need to make a sacrifice…we need to suffer.

Please allow me to explain. When we want something in our life to change, we may need to choose to encounter a period of suffering to better ourselves or a situation. This week we are going to define some of the terms involved in this process. We will then continue to delve deeper into the whole process over the next few weeks.

If we think about suffering to gain something good, on a very elementary level, we could give the example that if you want to lose weight, you need to change your eating habits.

In my upcoming novel, Under the Roof, the main character, Aggie, nicknames one of her neighbors Richard Gere. She names him Richard Gere because he is a very good-looking middle-aged man with an enticing, sculpted body. Richard is also known for wearing tight-fitting clothes.

How did Richard get so buff? He chooses to suffer through regimented exercise. He elects to get up early and push himself at the gym. He also chooses to eat healthy foods.  Rather than eating cheesesteaks dripping with grease and yummy cheese, he eats fish and vegetables. There’s the definition of suffering! Choosing to routinely work out and have healthy eating habits. Ouch. That hurts. But, oh the results!

In the weeks ahead, I will give more examples wherein we will look not only at suffering to gain something physically rewarding but also at suffering emotionally to gain positive thoughts and behaviors.

I’d like to begin by defining some of the words we are going to be using over the next few weeks.

Let’s look at the difference between pain and suffering, two words that always seem to be used together, yet have very different definitions.

Pain is a physical sensation or signal that something is wrong in the body. Pain can include an actual unpleasant sensory or emotional experience. Emotional pain could include disappointment, anger, grief, boredom, or anxiety. 

Examples of physical pain are when you are cooking on the stove and you touch the hot burner, or you are walking across the floor and you step on something.

Emotional pain could be when someone treats you unkindly.

Pain forces you to take action. Pain tells you to take a different action…stop touching the stove.

Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Suffering is the interpretation of that event through thoughts, beliefs, or judgments. 

Suffering is how we interpret a painful experience and our resulting thoughts and actions.

When we touch the hot stove, we choose not to suffer and that influences our resulting action of not touching the stove again.

I look in the mirror and it pains me to see how large my belly has gotten, so I decide to suffer and do intermittent fasting each morning.

Sacrifice: giving up something valued for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy.

Pain is what we feel. Suffering is how we choose to interpret that experience. We may have to take that experience and give up something valued to gain something more important.

You got it! Join me next week and I’ll give more examples of growing through suffering, and eventually, we’ll be exploring Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Whoa, that sounds like it will make me smarter!

 And don’t forget, suffering equips us and allows us to gain experience.