Change your view of Pain and Suffering

Differentiating Pain from Suffering

Let us examine a painful experience to differentiate pain from suffering.  

What does pain from hardship look like?  
Pain from a change or hardship is an intense physical or emotional sensation that you feel immediately at the time the hardship is revealed.  Later it passes.   In the midst of this hardship you can have thoughts come and go:  “This is terrible. This is unbearable.  This hurts. I can’t stand it any longer.  These are anticipatory thoughts about your future.  These thoughts are normal, appropriate responses to life events that hurt.  But none of these thoughts is “the pain”.  The way you see the pain and how you react to it will determines the degree of suffering you will experience. 

What does suffering look like?  
When you experience the hardship, you can allow yourself to feel like a victim and allow an inner dialogue to take over: “This is terrible. This hurts. Is this going to last forever?   Why is this happening to me?  Why isn’t this over already? How long will this go on?” Suffering is this mental “why me” and “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” story that plays over and over and over in your mind.   You can relive the suffering story so often, that eventually your every thought or action becomes a response to that pain and your relationships are guided by the pattern of your suffering.  That kind of suffering can shrouds who you are at your best and you lose sight of your self-worth. 

When you stop the negative story, you can stop the suffering.   Pain may be unavoidable, but it does not have to rule your life.  Suffering is your choice.  You do it to yourself. 

Pain may be unavoidable, but it does not have to rule your life. 
If you stand back from it and cast a critical eye over your life, you will find that painful events - thankfully - do not occur that frequently.  When you do experience a hardship, you can change your view of pain and suffering to adopt more positive perspective.   There is no event or situation you cannot handle as long as you learn not to react by continuous suffering through toxic inner commentary.   

Yes, you will have negative emotions.  Acknowledge that the hardship ocurred and it is normal for you to experience an emotional response.  At the same time, it is equally critical that you not dwell on these emotions or beat yourself day after day for feeling them.  

Think about the people you know or have heard about who were dying of cancer or survived a painful accident to end up bound to a wheel chair or were traumatized by a life-altering event and are completely happy.  Instead of dwelling in the “story of suffering”  they did not allow events to keep them from loving life or having a deep belief that life is meaningful!  

You do not need to experience positive emotions all day everyday to reap their benefits.  Fleeting moments of positive emotions can be the ones that make hard work and struggling in life worthwhile.   Just a few here and there can put you in a magical state of mind where little things feed your well-being and happiness.  

6 Ways to Nourish Positive Emotions and Adopt a More Positive Perspective

1.  Become more self-reflective. Ask yourself thought-provoking questions to figure out your perspective on life and how you might challenge your assumptions about yourself and others to improve yourself and your relationships.  Refer to our list of thought-provoking questions. 

Refer to our list of thought-provoking questions.

2.  Share an example of something good that happened to you today.  Identify the character strengths that you used that contributed to the good feelings. 

3.  Define three good things.  Every evening, write down ‘three good things’ that happen during that day. 

4.  Make a day beautiful.  Design a day that you will spend in a very pleasant way.

5.  Share your positivity through your actions by making time to demonstrate kindness,
compassion, gratitude or encouragement to others.  People can become so busy focusing on the negative events in their life they fail to notice the negative events going on in the lives of others. Be a guardian angel by helping others in positive ways.

6, Read books, listen to podcasts, find inspiring stories of people who have made incredible strides and done something great by overcoming hardships.

7.  Frame your perspective with positivity more frequently.  When you feel poorly or things are tough, monitor your thoughts and inner dialogue to eliminate negative self-talk.  Offset negative emotions by focusing on what matters to you, what you are grateful for, and what you can control.  Difficult does not mean impossible. Negative emotions are also a normal part of life and they do not necessarily cause your demise. Acknowledge them, but don't chastise ourself.  Instead, single out what you can learn from the situation, and know that you can always find something for which to be grateful. 

Minimizing the frequency of your story of suffering doesn’t dismiss or take the pain away.  The pain in your past is always going to be part of your life story.   As long as you are living you will experience pain or hardship.  But, it’s up to you to determine the role pain will play in your future.  

Our first instinct is to shrink from pain because we think of it as a bad thing.  In fact, pain may actually add incredible value to your life.  When you hear the life story of any influential person you find several instances of pain.  You also learn how they embraced their pain and did something great because of it.  They found a point to all of it.  

Feel the pain.  Don't be afraid of it.  Then step back from it.   You have the power to choose to embrace the pain and view it as a necessary part of your destiny.