Suffering Has Taught Me Who I Am

Suffering taught me who I am. It allowed me to get to know parts of myself that I hadn’t seen before or didn’t want to take on. I always wished that nothing bad had happened in my life, but I understood that wishing this is wanting the impossible.

We all suffer in some way. We went through several circumstances that marked us. Circumstances that we wish we had not lived through, but we must understand that this is impossible. Life is not rosy for anyone, even if for some, under the same circumstances, it may be more pleasant than for others. That’s the key.

Instead of focusing on trying to live life without suffering, we should learn to live suffering differently. Learning to use it to grow and rebuild and for that, it is often necessary to develop different skills in the safe space of therapy.

It’s not about avoiding suffering, but about learning to incorporate it into your life story as one more chapter that took you exactly where you are.

Therapy as a safe space

Psychological therapy needs to be understood as a safe space for everyone who uses it. In therapy there is no judgment, no absolute truths, and everything that is said remains under professional secrecy. This secret can only be broken if the patient is in the process of causing harm to himself, others or by court order.

Also, therapy is a place where you establish a secure foundation that brings stability even if your life has been difficult. For this, psychologists – together with the patient – ​​seek to build a therapeutic alliance as a secure bond on which to base therapy.

This unique bond, if well established, allows for the consolidation of a climate of trust. This climate makes it easy for all the fears and suffering that lurk in it to be dealt with. Because, before acquiring the coping skills that allow us to take the steps to address what causes suffering, we need to be confident enough to be able to talk about it without fear.

naming suffering

Naming suffering is not about using diagnostic labels. It is often not even possible to use one of these labels because there is no match. Sometimes the cause of our sufferings is so unique or so mundane that it doesn’t have a name, but it must be given one.

This name may have meant only to the one who gave it, and that is enough. It could be my dark side, it could be nervousness, it could be the shadow, or it could be whatever you want. It is a name that will be used in the therapeutic space to define something of its own, and therefore something so individual that, even if it has a common name, it will have a unique meaning.

Once it has a name, this suffering will take on a new meaning. It will go from a feeling to a clearer thing. A thing that has taken shape and thus can be explained and understood by both the psychologist and the patient. So it’s something that can be changed or incorporated.

Incorporate the experience into a new self

When the cause of suffering is something that happened in the past and cannot be changed, the best way to overcome it is to incorporate it into your life story. This is not a simple thing, but it is not impossible either.

To embody something, you have to accept it. You have to accept that no  matter what happened, feeling guilty now doesn’t do any good. It’s also not good to blame others because the past is past and you can’t change it. The work that this integration requires, this acceptance of suffering, is very great. But it is necessary to let what is bad flow and accept it naturally in order to build a new self.

Rebuilding yourself is a big step, but a step that leads to acceptance of that dark side that emerges from within you. You will no longer feel an emptiness filled with pain or fight your inner demon. You will have rebuilt yourself and learned that what happened made you who you are now.