According to some experts, stress plays a much larger role in a person's life than is commonly believed. Obviously, stress is a negative phenomenon that prevents us from enjoying life, doing our work and generally makes us suffer. But, according to a number of studies, many people become dependent on negative feelings and can no longer live without them - like without cigarettes, the need for sweets, or, in the worst scenarios, without alcohol or drugs. We decided to look into this issue and tell you why you like to suffer so much and how to recover from this addiction.
Looking for a dose of hormones
Our psychology is designed in such a way that often troubles and suffering can cause us positive emotions, against the backdrop of which addiction arises. This is connected not only with the psyche, so you shouldn’t look for deviations in yourself, but you shouldn’t exclude a physiological factor. The thing is that stress is a biological process that the body needs in order to survive difficult situations. Hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol begin to be actively released and fight the attacks of the outside world. Thanks to them, we can cope with anxiety before an important event, and also achieve success if we have a high goal. The presence of these substances in the blood activates muscle and brain activity, which is not associated with feelings, but directly works to make troubles allies of the body and psyche.
This state can be compared to being in the euphoria that any other addictive substance brings. Cigarettes, drugs, alcohol - all this works in the same way as stress to make muscles contract. But unlike drugs or other physical addictions, the effects of stress and the effects of adrenaline and cortisol continue to affect us for much longer. Instead of simply calming down, we continue to feel tired, irritable and tense as chronic stress causes hormones to continue to be released. The next stage of such an attraction is quite expected: problems with hair, skin, weight, heart and digestive system. In other words, we need our own hormones, but since it is impossible to promote their release, we seek out stressful situations, subconsciously or not. Psychologist and author of Stress Addiction Debbie Mandel says:
You begin to need to constantly deal with stress, like a drug addict. To cope with everyday challenges like deadlines or work boredom, you continue to look for sources of adrenaline, completely unaware that your body has not yet recovered from the previous “dose”. This also includes the phenomenon of “workaholism,” which forces people to constantly burden themselves with a large number of stressful situations in order to get another shake-up of hormones.
Why is suffering a habit? And what you should pay attention to
Suffering as an immutable truth.
Our whole life is a set of certain habits, following them, each of us has what he has.
If there is a habit, it means that it is needed for something and helps in life, in any case, it maintains the fragile balance of the contour of being given from birth.
The eternally dissatisfied, unhappy and suffering can be found everywhere.
But have you ever met a person with the habit of being happy?
Always happy... A person’s dream in which he himself does not believe. Why?
It's simple, I'll list a few reasons.
One of them is that Life is complicated.
Buddha said, “Birth is suffering, life is suffering, death is suffering,” and all his life he was looking for nirvana.
And yet, God endured and commanded us...
Is it possible to be happy with such a basis?
Suffering does not even need to have a cause; it is simply the way of life of the common man. You can suffer for any reason or without it.
But if you’re still tired of it, pictures with happy stories don’t give you peace - they make your teeth hurt, what kind of suffering they cause, then it’s worth drawing some conclusion.
Conclusion - if this is so, then in this case begin to doubt generally accepted truths and stop using them, eliminate them from your vocabulary and replace them with more suitable ones.
What should you say thank you to your parents for?
Another way to instill a habit is through involuntary or unconscious learning.
This happens in the family and we learn from adults who are significant to us, most often our parents.
A parent is an adult that has not only survived to puberty, but has also reproduced. That is, by definition, it does everything right in order to survive - this is the law of evolution and self-preservation in a hostile environment. Children perceive their behavior uncritically, as a given, as the only correct reaction to the current situation. This happens throughout the animal world and we are no exception.
This is why we, as children, take tracings—photos of our parents’ behavior. They taught the cub what they themselves knew how to do. It follows from this that you are doing the same thing that your parents did, and they are doing what their parents did - a certain behavioral script is being passed on from generation to generation.
By understanding this method, you will better understand the reasons for the behavior of your parents, friends and acquaintances, and yourself. And also make predictions for the future of your children.
Read: Do we really own our destiny?
Conclusion. If you want to see your children happy, learn to be happy yourself, change the script written by your ancestors.
Environmental phenomenon
The next method is operant conditioning.
This is learning where the rules of behavior are set by the group, setting conditions and rewards for its members.
We ourselves choose to suffer or not, this can already be seen in children.
In childhood
For example, a child plays a game that is exciting for him, stumbles and falls on the floor. There are no injuries, but he is in pain. Events in this case can develop in different ways:
1. if an adult, seeing this situation, ignored the fall and reacted to it calmly, then the child will react to his fall calmly, whimpering a couple of times, rub the bruised area and continue with his exciting game. And next time, he won’t even whine, but will continue to play;
2. if an adult gets scared and rushes to the child, begins to console him, kiss him and show behavior associated with the manifestation of love, thereby showing the importance of suffering and a way to attract attention to himself. The child will forget about the game and will cry even more to receive even more love. In subsequent times, in order to attract attention to himself, the child will increasingly begin to involuntarily (unconsciously) injure himself; this may become a more important matter than interest (play).
In this case, the adult sets the rules for the child’s behavior in response to his acceptance and the appearance of love, encouraging trauma (illness) and suffering.
But such behavior can develop not only in childhood. Since we live among people, acceptance is one of the basic needs in life.
… and not only
Who are these people? - friends and relatives, kindergartens, schools, colleges and universities, professional groups. It’s not for nothing that they say: whoever you get along with, you’ll get the hang of it.
Remember yourself - the more compassionately and sincerely you complained about something, the more attention you received, the more indulgence you received, and the more people might love you for the suffering you suffered.
I tried to share my success, and here you are: condemnation, talking behind your back, gossip, envy. And your friends are no longer friends, and you begin to feel like an outcast, and there’s nothing to talk about with you...
That is, the more suffering and unhappy you look, the safer it is. Mom was right when she said, “Don’t brag, they’ll envy you.”
The rules are determined by the reference group, that is, if you want to be accepted, follow the rules.
Conclusion - carefully choose friends and topics for communication with relatives and colleagues, as well as the corporate culture of the company. Learn to say no and move the topic of conversation in another direction. Limit communication with toxic people.
Pleasure and sublimation
But it’s not only hormones that force us to step on the same rake. The fact that society tends to discuss problems with each other and strive for a more active lifestyle causes us to experience stress, so often that we begin to believe that this is where our happiness lies. To the question “How are you?” You will often hear responses such as “I'm very busy”, “I've had a crazy day”, “I'm going crazy with my job” and so on. Thus, the degree of busyness becomes an indicator of success and self-importance, and the constant use of devices only enhances such an “active” life, preventing you from relaxing and taking a break from problems even during your lunch break or after work. It seems crazy to say no to things like this: “What if I miss something?”, “This is a good opportunity,” “I need to be in touch,” “I feel good, I’m so happy. We need to check if anyone has written.” Stress! We need him like air. Spin constantly, like a squirrel in a wheel, just so as not to experience this withdrawal from free time.
Well, the cherry on the cake is, of course, money, the constant need for which forces us to work above the norm established by the body.
The fear of working with ourselves on a deeper and more complex level than everyday problems makes us avoid free time. Constantly working, organizing meetings and getting things done are not only ingredients for success, but also a great excuse for not dealing with yourself.
In 2014, scientists conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to spend time alone. As a result, most of the participants experienced unpleasant feelings due to the fact that they had to be left alone with their thoughts for more than 6-15 minutes.
If we move fast enough, then we will not have time to think, understand, and most importantly, admit that there is something in our life that no longer suits us. Many of the dissatisfactions reach a level too complex to simply resolve, so we resort to such sublimation, hiding behind an endless stream of responsibilities and tasks. In the same way, drug addicts or alcoholics hide their problems in their addiction. But this is an escape from happiness.
The right to grief and joy
Human nature is such that it requires the manifestation of the entire palette of emotions - then we can talk about a healthy psyche.
Life is varied, there is a lot of joy in it, we just forgot about it, and joy cannot be understood without grief.
Grief requires a reason, but suffering does not. Suffering turns the palette of emotions into gray, nondescript, dull chewing gum, so joy is also not experienced, it merges with the grayness of suffering. Grief demands its payment only once.
There are not so many reasons for grief, and the hardest is the death of loved ones; everything else is fixable. It takes time to get over this grief.
All religions of the world have rituals designed to help a person survive the death of a loved one and accept it. Therefore, if you are a believer, contact a priest and perform the necessary rituals. If you’re not a believer, do it anyway. This is a sign of respect for both the deceased and the living.
But in order to move on in life and not fall into suffering and self-pity, consult a psychologist.
The rest can be fixed
Everything else is fixable, but sometimes it seems like you are in a hopeless situation. This is not so, there is a way out and you know it, but you don’t like it. If the situation seems so difficult that it is impossible to bear, surrender to it: cry out loud, scream, growl, swear, hit a pillow or punching bag - let it go through aggression that is safe for others - usually 15-20 minutes is enough (it’s better to survive the pain now, rather than trying to drown it out and squeeze it out drop by drop).
Then powerlessness will come, and then enlightenment in the brain. As a result, a search and enumeration of options for solving the current situation begins, and there is no shame in asking for help.
Just don’t fall into despondency, whining and whining - they are followed by dullness, indifference and depression. Getting out of a depressive binge is difficult and time-consuming. Life will pass, you won’t catch up with it and won’t bring it back... Only regrets and dissatisfaction will remain.
The conclusion is this - allow yourself the right to express mental pain and distinguish it from whining for any reason.
How to stop suffering and become happier?
Habituation to stress arises from many unresolved problems within ourselves. But while we are hiding behind a whole host of important matters, our body desperately needs rest, receiving only a new charge of hormones from us. No matter how strange it may sound, the panacea for such a destructive lifestyle is very simple - rest. If this seems funny to you, then pay attention to exactly how you spend your days. Behind the popularity of a healthy lifestyle are not only trends and seductive photos on Instagram, but also common sense - when you are tired, you need to rest; If you are confused, you need to figure it out and not try to get distracted by work. If everything was as simple as it sounds, then everyone would walk around healthy and happy, but relaxation is just as difficult to bring into your life as it is to give up bad habits. Here are some tips on what you can do:
Stop complaining
Photo: Pixabay.com
If you suspect you are a victim, the first thing you should do is start crawling away from the edge of this funnel that is sucking you in. You became a victim by choice, it is your choice, and this means that it is also within your power to stop being one. To begin with, forbid yourself to complain, remember once and for all that everyone can’t stand those who endlessly whine.
If you are not happy with something in your life - your other half or your job, know that if you start complaining about it, even those closest to you will not say anything other than: “Quit and find another person.” Or maybe it’s worth understanding yourself? What if your loved one is annoyed by your always sour face, and at work you are not respected because you are always unhappy with everything?
Turn off gadgets at least in the evening
Try not to use gadgets in the evenings. At least in order not to get involved in working or reviewing everything that is in your news feed. Better turn on the series and just relax. Do not allow yourself to answer business letters or solve any other important matters after sunset - everything important will wait until the morning, and you need to restore your strength. If giving up your phone for the whole evening is even more stressful for you, then try giving yourself at least 20 minutes of complete absence from the virtual world.
Beats means he loves. Or why do women suffer in relationships?
Some people have a distorted understanding of love. When they are loved with “normal”, healthy love, i.e. through warmth, care, support, positive attention, tenderness - they do not believe that they are loved. But when violence is used against them, when they are ignored, rejected, not taken into account - somewhere in the depths of their souls they feel that they are important and that they are truly loved.
Or they think that they love another person only when this love brings them torment and severe mental pain. And if this tearing pain is not there, they consider it indifference.
And they also believe that they themselves are valuable to a person only when he suffers because of his feelings for them, suffers. Because of them he cannot live and sleep peacefully. And he is ready for anything, for any humiliation and actions because of his feelings.
It turns out that when a person suffers and suffers in a relationship, makes serious sacrifices “in the name of love” for them, is ready to commit suicide out of “love” - then for them this is an indicator of sincere feelings.
And on the contrary, if the partner is not prone to self-destruction, takes care of himself and does not suffer because of love. But at the same time he feels sincere warmth and sympathy and is really ready to love - this does not make them feel loved and significant.
People with similar unconscious ideas about love, that love is pain, torment and sacrifice. And also that violence, scandals, rejection, ignorance and lack of care are true love. More than others, they run the risk of “getting caught up” in traumatic relationships and becoming “victims” of love.
We usually develop such a distorted idea of love in childhood.
For example, when parents beat and punished a child, and at the same time inspired him that in this way they were taking care of him.
Or when adults in front of a child called real love such situations when a person was tormented by his love. Or they called it love when people argued to the point of fighting and hurting each other.
Or when parents often practiced not very good actions towards their child. For example, they criticized him for every step, left him alone for a long time, and said that he was an “unwanted child.” Or that it is his fault that his parent was not fulfilled in life.
It is easier for any child to believe that his mom and dad are good and love him. Than that he is not loved by his parents.
And then similar illusions that helped him protect himself from difficult feelings in childhood. Already affecting him in adulthood. And they contribute to the fact that he agrees to continue an unhealthy love relationship.
Give up difficult friends
People who are commonly called “toxic” today are not a myth, but a very real scenario. What previously seemed to you as difficulties in communication, differences in character, may now be one of the reasons why you constantly experience stress. Such people have the peculiarity of attracting us, since subconsciously we strive to defeat them, correct them, or at least overcome the difficulties that fate has thrown up.
But if you look at it rationally, an evening that you can spend at home, in peace and quiet, is much more productive than communicating with a person who can throw off your balance. Such friends should be replaced with people who can support you if your reality has cracked, who will always listen and give an adequate assessment of what is happening, and will not become a catalyst for another nervous breakdown.
WHO ARE THE PEOPLE VICTIMS?
Individuals falling under this classification are divided into two groups. There are real victims who are bullied and humiliated by others, taking advantage of their defenselessness and weak character. At the stage of growing up and later, no one explained to such people how to protect themselves, and they do not have the internal potential to defend their boundaries. They can only endure... This is a special class of victims - they need the support of friends, and sometimes law enforcement agencies.
But there are victims of a completely different type - directors of their own humiliation. We'll talk about them today. Such individuals subconsciously create a triangle around themselves, consisting of themselves, the person who humiliates them, and the savior - the one to whom the victim runs to complain about the offender.
The meaning of this behavior is the pleasure that the director receives during the psychological play. The victim herself provokes her moral rapist to attack her, knows all his weak points and pulls the strings that will force him to start terrorizing her again, so that there is an opportunity to cry into the vest of the third participant in the play.
The roles in this production are usually played by the victim's relatives, as well as her friends and colleagues. The victims are unappreciated people who expected a lot and received little. They would like to be at the top, but it didn’t work out for them, so they had to become marginalized from the other side. “I may not be the best, but you will still notice me!” - this is the credo of such people.
Exercise
Sport is the best way to combat stress, as regular muscle exercise relieves tension and keeps you in good shape. This is also a great way to throw out aggression and call on endorphins to help, which will show stress hormones who is boss. But if you are in an extremely stressful state, then psychologists advise staying indoors, since focusing on your mood can cause an accident, like an accident while you decided to go for a run and completely forgot that there are cars driving around you.
Suffering
There is only one path to greatness, and that path is through suffering.
Albert Einstein
No matter how outstanding a person has a mind, no matter how many smart books he has read and no matter what education he has, he will never be able to fully understand a suffering person if he himself has not experienced at least approximately similar feelings in life. Because suffering has such an abundance of difficult mental sensations that it cannot be explained by the mind alone. You need to be in the shoes of a suffering person to have a full understanding of this feeling. It is a rare person who has such a good ability to empathize with other people that he can feel someone else's pain in its entirety without comparing it to any pain he has ever experienced. Most of us do not have such sensitivity, so we can fully understand such experiences only after having had a similar experience. That is why it is so important to know everything in this life, both good and bad. For the maturity of the mind, it is useful to experience not only joyful and happy moments, but also very painful ones that cause severe suffering. Such an experience is never wasted. Having experienced persistent mental pain, we will come to an understanding of life that we would not be able to have if we had not experienced the painful sensations associated with it. And such understanding is worth a lot. We will talk about this and other important aspects of human suffering in this article.
What is suffering
Let's start, as always, by defining what we are talking about. Suffering is painful, painful, excruciating sensations associated with mental or physical pain. These sensations create persistent discomfort, because of which a person cannot find peace, he constantly experiences torment and stress, uncertainty and insecurity reign in his head, and sometimes strong fear for his well-being. By suffering I mean continuous and prolonged mental pain, as well as a feeling of confusion and chaos in the mind, when you cannot collect your thoughts and decide how to live. Or it could be prolonged physical pain, if we are talking about physical suffering. Although often mental and physical pain are related to each other.
Suffering keeps a person in constant tension, mental, physical and psychological. Someone in this state experiences panic, not understanding how to get rid of the undying pain. In this state, people often make mistakes that only complicate their situation. Mental pain is always painful; when you experience it, it is very difficult to understand what to do, how to help yourself to make it easier. Therefore, a person rushes from side to side, goes through different options of actions in order to find his salvation, to find something that will calm him down, help him relax at least a little.
The fear that a person experiences during suffering turns out to be false in most cases. A person is afraid of what he cannot understand, he feels that he is losing something valuable or has already lost it and does not know whether it is good or bad. He does not understand where his life is going or has come, and this uncertainty frightens him greatly. However, what he considers a loss often turns out to be a gain, because in place of a destroyed life it is possible and necessary to build a new, better life. I will not say that this is always the case, but often the fear that people experience during suffering turns out to be meaningless, at least in my experience it is so. I myself, when I was suffering, was afraid of what I shouldn’t have been afraid of, but due to strong negative emotions I did not understand this. Therefore, people in such situations require outside help to normalize their state of mind.
Causes of suffering
The causes of suffering can be either external, when such events occur in people’s lives because of which they experience pain and discomfort, or they can be internal, when a person just thinks that everything in his life is either too bad or not the way he needs and because of this it hurts him, he suffers. In general, in both cases, suffering arises in our heads. Our condition depends on how we relate to something. Even if a person begins to be tortured, causing him physical pain, ultimately the sensations of this pain will form in his brain, the body will only transmit to him information about the damage being caused. That is why, theoretically, it is possible to eliminate any suffering with the power of thought. Even if your leg is cut off, you may not feel it if, with the help of the power of thought, you react to the signals of the nerve endings the way you want, and not the way it usually happens. But this is difficult to achieve. That's not what's important to us. It is important for us to understand that our state of mind largely depends on our thoughts, and not on the events occurring in our lives.
It is our thoughts that are the cause of much of our suffering. The events themselves that happen in our lives have a much lesser impact on our state of mind. Because many of them are bad for us only from our point of view. Therefore, if you learn to control your thoughts, suffering will become much less. But many people don’t know how to do this; after all, it’s quite difficult to think the way you want, and not the way circumstances force you to do it. Therefore, people suffer every time events in the outside world do not coincide with their expectations and their desires.
What is it about the outside world that most often upsets us? According to my observation, the main source of our suffering is other people. It is with them that something may not work out the way we want, as a result of which we feel very bad. People are the main cause of our suffering. Diseases, disasters, cataclysms, other external forces, perhaps even all taken together, do not cause a person as much harm and pain as other people. Most of our negative feelings are related to other people. Do you agree? Pay attention to your life experiences, remember all the times you suffered and look for the cause of this suffering in other people. Or rather, see if this suffering is somehow connected with other people. I'm sure you will find such a connection, in most cases.
Let's now think about what bad things do people do to us, that in the end they force us to suffer? We can formulate it this way: they don’t give us something or deprive us of something. It all comes down to this, right? We, as social beings, all depend on each other in some way, so we all need something from other people. When we get what we need, we feel good, and when we don’t, we feel bad. And we also feel bad when other people deprive us of something, including themselves, their attention, their care, their help. That’s why it’s so important to be able to understand people, to be able to communicate with them and interact competently. Success in these matters will significantly reduce the amount of suffering in a person’s life, one way or another connected with people. But it is impossible to live completely without suffering. They are an integral part of our lives, therefore they are useful. Let's see what it is.
Benefit from suffering
The benefit of any pain, first of all, is that it draws a person’s attention to some problem. For example, physical pain can draw our attention to problems with our health or damage to the body. For example, if your tooth hurts, it means there are problems with it that need to be solved. If this is not done, the consequences can be severe. Or, let’s say, you touch something very hot with your hand and immediately feel pain because damage is being done to your body and you need to stop it so that you don’t get too seriously damaged. Therefore, reflexively, you pull your hand back. Just imagine what would happen to us if we did not feel pain; in this case, we simply would not be able to protect ourselves from many things that are dangerous to us. The situation with mental pain is similar; we need it to solve various problems. If we don't experience it, we won't be able to make important decisions in our lives and we won't be able to grow.
There are several important things that we can achieve through suffering. Let's look at them.
Understanding
The first thing suffering leads us to is understanding. By turning our attention to what forces us to suffer, we begin to study this cause of our suffering, learning a lot of new things about ourselves, about life, about its laws. We are forced to do this to stop suffering. And it expands our understanding of the world, allowing us to make smarter decisions. Different people have different levels of understanding of life, the people around them and themselves. Some of us may think about the consequences of certain of our decisions and actions, we may assume what will happen under this or that set of circumstances and take this into account in our plans for life. But others are not accustomed to such analysis and forecasting; they evaluate an event only after it has already happened, so they often make mistakes that cost them dearly. And through suffering we learn to think about something we have already done or are about to do in order to understand how right and good it is for us.
You see, pain makes our brain work, makes us strain our memory so as not to make the same mistakes over and over again, makes us think about the consequences of our behavior. Thanks to pain, we can behave more intelligently. In addition, any traumatic event, as a rule, is well remembered, which is important so that a person does not repeat his mistakes in the future. True, such events are usually deposited in the subconscious if a person’s psyche is weak, and then through feelings they remind of themselves, forcing them to fear something that a person cannot understand. This creates various psychological problems that have to be solved by bringing these traumatic memories to a conscious level. If a person’s psyche is strong, he always remembers the suffering that he experienced, remembers the reason for its occurrence and all the other important details that were associated with this suffering. He realizes their meaning and pattern, and they serve as a valuable lesson for him. So, as you can see, pain, one might say, resets our brains, forcing us to behave more thoughtfully.
Life, God, whatever you want to call it, by whose laws we are forced to live in this world, cannot teach us only something good and kind, the same love. And not always and not everything we are able to understand with our minds. Sometimes a person receives so many good things in life, but does not appreciate it at all, because he does not understand this good thing, does not understand how lucky he is to have this good thing. For example, good health, good friends, a good husband or wife and so on. That's why people often lose what they have. And that is why people can understand some things only through negative sensations. For how else to understand the good if not to compare it with the bad?
So, some people can be reached through love and kindness, because they are able to understand and accept these values, and reciprocate them. It is possible to reach others through the voice of conscience, when our inner voice, someone considers it the voice of God, tells us what is right and what is wrong, in order to reason with us. He points out our wrongness and makes us think about it. Well, to someone who does not understand well and who has no conscience, the necessary thoughts reach only through suffering and pain. Life, God, beats a person until he thinks about some important things, in particular about his behavior and makes the necessary changes in his life. Moreover, each of us may find ourselves in the place of those who understand only pain and suffering at a certain period of time. After all, we all forget ourselves from time to time, flare our nostrils, begin to consider ourselves better than others, ignore people dear to us, stop appreciating what we have and cause pain to others, believing that we have the right to it. All these abominations of human behavior need to be pacified. And suffering helps people with this. They bring us down from heaven to earth, knock us down from arrogance, sober us up, admonish us, and guide us on a more reasonable path. Thanks to them, we come to understand that we were wrong in our actions and decisions.
Enlightenment
Enlightenment is a more perfect state of mind. This is an even deeper form of understanding and sense of reality. In my understanding, enlightenment is increased vigilance and sensitivity, when a person notices much of what surrounds him and what happens to him, which is ignored in the usual, one might say, sleepy state of mind. The brain of an enlightened person is not overloaded with thoughts that distract him from the present reality; he is focused on the main thing and is attentive to everything that happens. He is vigilant. Most people live like robots, they do a lot automatically, out of habit, reflexively, their brain works in a simplified, one might say, in the background mode, such people live as if in a dream. And the mind of an enlightened person is a waking mind that analyzes everything around it as if it were happening for the first time. Such a mind observes reality very carefully in order to notice all its subtleties, all the patterns, all the details, and does not substitute old templates for surrounding events in order to quickly explain them. This is the state of mind of an enlightened person, from my point of view.
And suffering leads to such enlightenment, they help to think about the important things in life, increase awareness - attention to everything that happens, to oneself, to one’s own thoughts, they cleanse a person’s soul of his primitive desires, which force him to behave instinctively and not thoughtfully . In general, pain as such always sobers up a person, forces him to pay attention to the main thing that exists in the present moment, and not in his fantasies, it awakens him from sleep, from the automatism to which he is accustomed, doing most of his business according to habit. Thanks to suffering, a person becomes mature, reasonable, and attentive, if, of course, there are enough of them in his life and they do not break his psyche.
Ingoda, such progress in personality development can be very slow if there is little suffering in a person’s life and he is immune to it. But long and persistent pain brings its fruits over time; it can also pacify a person’s ego, forcing him to look at himself more objectively and destroy all his destructive beliefs, because of which he misunderstood life. Some people, however, break down; their psyche is too weak and cannot withstand the test of suffering. Such people need help from outside. But for nature, they are simply non-viable genetic material that has not undergone natural selection, it does not spare them, it does not need them, just as it does not need everything weak and non-viable. According to the laws of nature, a person either moves to a new level of development thanks to suffering and the trials with which these sufferings are associated, or, if no one helps him, he dies, either first as a person, or then physically. Therefore, people need to be helped, rescued when they themselves cannot cope with the trials that befall them. But to help correctly, not by making their life easier, but by helping them cope with the difficulties that arise in it. Then these people will come to a new understanding of life for them, they will be enlightened in many ways and will live in a new way. Their behavior and reasoning will become wiser, so they will make smart decisions more often and make fewer mistakes.
Values
The values we adhere to play a particularly important role in our lives. They determine our life path. This is the basic support of a person. What we live for determines how we live. The true system of values, eternal values, is determined largely through suffering, when a person feels in his own skin what it means to have or not have certain things in life. For example, the same love, which is quite difficult to find, create and preserve, but very easy to abandon or lose. Some people realize that they loved only after they lose their love and experience great pain because of this loss. In the same way, people come to realize the importance of someone else's love for them, because it is even more rare for a person to realize how important it is to be loved, and not to be loved. Even very beautiful and popular people are very mistaken when they think that many people love them, so they can afford to choose whose love they accept and whose they do not. In fact, only a few, or even just one person, can truly love them, whose love is difficult to distinguish against the background of the false love of other people, if you did not happen to go through a certain series of sufferings that teach you to distinguish true love from false.
The same goes for other valuables. One must be wise enough to notice and stick to them. Suffering leads us to such wisdom, it teaches us to appreciate what really matters, and not all the shiny tinsel, of which there is a lot in our lives in the form of superficially attractive things, which in fact are garbage that can only evoke superficial emotions in us. This applies to both physical things and imaginary values, such as, for example, false love, in which there is nothing useful.
Empathy
And suffering also leads a person to acquire such a valuable quality as empathy, that is, the ability to empathize, the ability to feel and understand the pain of others. It is impossible to overestimate this quality; it is this quality that helps you understand the people around you and find a common language with all of them. Thanks to empathy, you can help people solve their psychological problems, which is especially important for psychologists and other specialists who work with people. I believe that it is very important for any specialist in this field to be able to empathize with those whom he helps, with whom he works, this can give much more valuable information about a person and choose for him the most necessary words and techniques that will cure his soul than a good education . No amount of knowledge can replace the ability to feel other people.
Empathy is the same great feeling as love; moreover, it is thanks to it that a person is able to experience true, bright and pure love. And we come to this feeling thanks to suffering, when not only with our minds, but with our whole body we understand what it means to be in a certain state in which another person can be. A well-fed, carefree life full of joy and fun will not give a person such a feeling. When people are doing well, they just float through life, they don’t care about anyone, they don’t think about a lot and don’t pay attention to a lot. And only when they are in great pain do they begin to wake up and think about things that they would never have thought about in a good and carefree life. In particular, they develop attention to other people. And when you see that another person finds himself in the same or similar situation that you once were in, the necessary range of feelings associated with this situation emerges in your memory, and you begin to understand what he feels and what he needs. I believe that a specialist in working with people will never become a true professional in his field if he has not suffered enough in his life. Enough to show genuine interest in other people.
Upbringing
Suffering also plays an important role in raising children. Without them, success in this matter cannot be achieved. Although many parents strive to protect their children from any suffering and pain, this suffering will still exist, only it will come from the external, harsh world, and not from the parents, who can put their child through a series of necessary sufferings in a more humane way. All people should suffer, but in moderation. And children are no exception. Placing a child in greenhouse conditions means depriving him of the opportunity to prepare for life in the real world, in which suffering is inevitable, caused by various difficulties, struggles, unfulfilled desires and many other things. Therefore, you need to psychologically prepare for a harsh, but in many ways fair reality from childhood. Pain must be known as well as joy.
Some things that are important for life are simply impossible to explain to children, as well as to infantile people, in words. It is useless to do this, because in children and infantile people the sensory sphere of understanding life prevails over the conceptual one. They do not associate words with the images and experiences necessary for their understanding, so they do not perceive them. Such people need to gain their own experience, they need to personally experience certain situations, including very painful ones, in order to understand some important things in life. For example, what can a child understand about making money and managing it wisely when he is driven by pure desires and is incapable of adequate calculations and planning, which he is simply not accustomed to? Not every adult knows how to manage resources wisely enough, which is why many people periodically experience financial difficulties that force them to suffer. There is nothing to say about children. You can’t explain such things to them in words. Or rather, words alone will not be enough. We also need clear examples of what it’s like when something in life is missing because you couldn’t manage it wisely when you had it. This is why suffering is needed, for clarity, for the fullness of sensations and the depth of understanding of the essence of the issue.
There is no need to try to protect children from suffering, parents will only harm them by doing this. It is necessary to simply dose out this suffering, accustoming children to deprivation, difficulties, losses, and unfulfilled desires. Because this is exactly what happens in life, where reality does not always correspond to our expectations.
Motivation
Suffering often stimulates and motivates us to develop and change. They are also called a “kick in the butt,” without which some people simply will not move. Pain is generally an ideal motivator. It is impossible not to react to it. Desires, as a motivator, are not as strong as pain. Desires can be abandoned, but pain is much more difficult to ignore. When a person is doing well, it is difficult to shake him up. Yes, we always want it to be better, but we don’t like to put too much effort into it. A person is too lazy to actively realize all his desires. Most often, he waits for a miracle, when everything will come into his life on its own or when other people will appear in it who will realize all his desires. A naive approach to life, but a common one.
But when we feel bad, painful, hard, we are forced to move and as a result of such movement we often come to a much better life, thanks to self-improvement. Many changes happen for the better, the only question is who becomes the initiator of these changes, the person himself, because he wants a better life for himself, or life itself, which forces a person to change something, becoming difficult or completely unbearable for him. The experience of many people shows that most often we do something forcedly, and not by choice. Therefore, suffering is the best motivation for us.
How to deal with suffering
A person needs to learn to accept suffering without trying to avoid it and without immersing himself in it too much so as not to lose interest in life. To do this, you need to understand one idea, the most important: suffering is necessary and inevitable, it is an integral part of our lives. I repeat: suffering is necessary! But this does not mean that a person must suffer all the time, it means that he will suffer from time to time in order to change something in his life. Whether he wants it or not doesn't matter. This will happen to him. Pain, as mentioned above, is a good motivation. Therefore, if life forces you to suffer, do not ask why you need this suffering, ask what it is for. Suffering and pain strengthen the spirit, they help us search for the truth, which makes us stronger and helps us navigate life better. If you are in unbearable pain, just believe, with all your might, believe in the good intentions of higher powers who are interested in your development, and not in destroying you, and you will survive, you will come to your happiness.
We go through trials and suffering in order to better understand life. This understanding helps us treat it correctly, gratefully accepting the gifts it gives us and pacifying some of our reckless desires. After all, without suffering it is very difficult to appreciate what you have, it is difficult to see many of the joys of life, which clearly manifest themselves only against the backdrop of a negative mental state, deprivation and pain. I think that’s why there are contrasts in life and nothing is perfect, otherwise we simply wouldn’t be able to distinguish good from bad and everything would seem monotonous, gray and meaningless to us. Therefore, there is good in this life, and there is bad, and this is often mixed together in such a way that it is simply impossible for us to be in only one state all the time. Every life, even the best one, will have its sufferings, and even a very bad life has its joys. Understanding this allows us to accept everything that life gives us. Not everything that happens to us benefits us. But we should never rush to conclusions as to whether something happened to us for the better or for the worse. More often than not, life shows that it is for the better.
Relief from suffering
Although I am constantly engaged in helping people get rid of suffering and pain, making their lives as happy as possible, I still believe that it is useful for a person to live through suffering for some time, without trying to immediately get rid of it, so that it will help him increase your level of awareness. Therefore, the first thing I can recommend to those who want to rid themselves of suffering is to accept it and try to find meaning and benefit in it. If suffering has come into your life, it means that it is needed for something or something led to it, some mistakes on your part or inattention to something important. In other words, you should not immediately seek help from “painkillers” to make it feel better. Pain is needed to draw our attention to something important. Now, think about what your pain draws your attention to.
In everything that happens to us, we first need to look for the benefit. It exists, but it is not always easy to find, understand, much less use. But the main thing is to remember this so as not to try to immediately run away from the pain as soon as it appears. Give her time to explain and show you something. It’s like with physical pain, you don’t always need to get rid of it quickly, because it, like mental pain, tells us about some problems or processes occurring in our body. Until this information is assimilated, its source cannot be blocked.
But despite all the benefits of suffering, it is worth recognizing that we do not need some of it to feel it for a long time. Some of them may be completely out of place, when they nail us tightly to the ground and force us to give up, or they are simply meaningless, because we invented them for ourselves out of the blue. We often suffer because we look at life from the wrong angle, which is solely our problem. Therefore, the next thing I advise those who want to get rid of suffering is to understand the cause of its occurrence. It is possible that you invented them for yourself, seeing bad in neutral or even good. A person is designed in such a way that in life he wants to experience the whole gamut of feelings. Therefore, people often screw themselves up, invent problems, tragedies, dramas for themselves in order to play on the subtle notes of their soul. The problem arises when people do not realize this, that they themselves are the cause of their suffering, that they invented this suffering for themselves and believed in it. Therefore, we need to think about this reason and then the necessary awareness will come, and the game of suffering will end.
You can also initiate some suffering yourself in order to avoid other, more severe suffering in the future that cannot be corrected. The simplest example is diet. A person goes on a diet, deprives himself of the pleasure of food, especially tasty food, to which he is accustomed and suffers for some time, in order to get rid of excess weight and various problems associated with it. Then in the future he will not have health problems that will lead him to even greater suffering. Thus, a choice is made in favor of the lesser evil. Or, if we talk about relationships between people, then you can choose a partner in the person of a person who loves you, but not the one you love, instead of going crazy over some narcissist, with whom a normal life is, in principle, impossible. For some time a person will suffer from the lack of love for the one who is next to him, but then, if he is intelligent enough to appreciate the good attitude towards himself, his suffering will end, he will also begin to experience feelings for the person. Otherwise, if you get together with some egoist who is attractive at first, in the future you can experience severe pain from his betrayal. Again, the lesser evil is chosen to avoid severe suffering and negative consequences. Since suffering is inevitable, it is better to decide for yourself which of them to experience in order to avoid other, more powerful and destructive suffering.
Problem solving is another very obvious way to get rid of suffering. Actually, this is what various specialists do when they help people get rid of suffering - they look for a solution to the problems that caused this suffering. I wrote above that pain is a signal informing us about the presence of some problem. This means we need to understand what this problem is, why it arose and think about how to solve it. Here it is important not to fight the signal itself, that is, with pain, but with its cause. Many people want to quickly get rid of the pain they are suffering from, be it physical or mental pain. But they don’t think about what led to it, what combination of circumstances, what reasons are hidden behind it. And if they do, it’s not good enough. And we need to think about this a lot and first of all. If a person suffers, it means that something in his life is wrong, and this wrong most often has a much longer chain of cause-and-effect relationships than the one that the person himself sees. That's why people have to seek help from specialists to help them find the cause of their suffering at a basic level. Or you yourself should delve deeply into the pattern of your condition.
Personally, I am quite tolerant of suffering. Throughout my life, I have been convinced many times that they make us better, if only we listen to them. The worst thing a person can do is run away from suffering, pain, problems, difficulties. This is the behavior of a weak person, which is not rewarded in this life, but what is punished. We must accept suffering as tests necessary for our development. We are talking about, first of all, spiritual development, in which a person moves away from a primitive way of life to a sublime one. The quality of such a life is appropriate.
Ideally, we should all live in harmony with reality, be wise enough to correctly understand ourselves and life, and enjoy it, and not fight with it, being forever dissatisfied with everything. To this ideal, in my opinion, there is only one way - through suffering. Therefore, if a person suffers, and not through his own fault, not because of his mistakes, which he makes time after time, being unable to learn important life lessons, but for objective reasons, it means Life, God and other higher powers, in which you personally believe, have prepared a great destiny for him and have high hopes for him, leading him to something very significant. Seeing this and believing this, I personally look at the suffering that life periodically sends me as useful tests, after passing which I will come to something great and more significant than what I now have. And until now, that’s exactly how it was for me. According to my observations, many other people with whom I have worked have lives that are exactly the same. It gets better for them, just like they themselves, every time after they go through the next stage of suffering.
Don't be afraid of difficulties and pain, we need them. Understand, a person must suffer, he must! Suffering ennobles people, makes them more humane, reasonable, attentive to each other, it makes them appreciate the most important thing we all have - life. It is difficult to imagine what people would be like if they never suffered at all. They would then live their whole lives in a dream, doing everything automatically, not paying attention to anything or anyone except their loved ones. A very good life spoils people. She spoils them not only for others, but also for themselves. A person cannot be in bliss all the time, he cannot! Otherwise, it will begin to degrade. And thanks to suffering, people grow above themselves, develop, reveal their human potential, going through all kinds of trials that life regularly sends them. Just imagine what life would be like without suffering, what it would do to us. We would go crazy with boredom.
Relationship trauma
Any psychological trauma that we have, strive for healing. And the way our psyche tries to do this is to recreate a similar situation in which we were injured.
And often we act out the traumas we received in relationships in childhood again and again in our relationships as adults.
For example, as a child, Larisa was often controlled by her parents and limited her freedom. Then, when she grew up, she found a husband who controlled her every move, tapped her phones, hacked her social networks. And he forbade her to go anywhere without him. So she again experiences her childhood trauma in the relationship.
There are three main ways we repeat our “relationship trauma” in our relationships with our partners:
- Choose a man who is prone to behave in the same traumatic way as his parents did. For example, a woman had a cold and rejecting mother. And she falls in love with an equally inaccessible and cold man.
- Unconsciously provoke a partner so that he begins to behave the same way our parents behaved with us. For example, a woman was physically punished as a child. And she begins to live with a man who is not prone to violence. But she begins to humiliate and insult him more and more every day. And at some point the man hits her emotionally.
- Give the situation a painful meaning. That is, a situation that actually does not look much like a traumatic one is interpreted in such a way that it becomes truly traumatic. For example, a girl experienced betrayal in the past. And then, when her current boyfriend did not answer the call, she decided that he was cheating on her at that moment. And she was traumatized by this thought. But her boyfriend didn’t actually cheat on her, but she still felt like a betrayal at that moment.
If you want to stop suffering and learn how to build healthy relationships, then contact me for personal therapy.
