Chapter 7 – Suffering

Mardy was dark, overweight and scarred.  After years of therapy, she was ready to delve deeper into her past.  Maybe confronting the details of her sexual and ritual abuse would help reconnect all those parts of her fractured personality.  She could hardly get through a day without dissociating.  Her dreams were twisted horrors that woke her sweating in the night. 

For three years we struggled with her demons, dredged up unthinkable and disgusting ‘memories’.  Her wrists still hurt from being tied up thirty years earlier.  She could still feel the dizziness and confusion from the drugs, taste the repulsive things thrust into her mouth.

I almost lost my bearings; the gale force wind of her suffering threatened to sweep me off my feet.  Fascinated and sickened, I dreamed of her experiences before she told me, knew what it was like to be ‘multiple.’  Her indomitable spirit kept pushing us onward, and I learned to keep up.  Gradually, as the deep infection in her psychic wounds was purged, she began to reconnect with the split off parts of herself.  Her healing healed my doubts: human beings can become whole even in the face of overwhelming suffering.

Mardy’s experience is extreme.  For the most part our suffering is more mundane.  We have losses, miseries, and insecurities—ordinary dis-eases of body and soul that drag us down.  We become confused in the face of daily trials that drain our resilience and inner strength.  Sometimes we move through darker periods toward an increased wholeness and contentment.  Other times we seem to slide inexorably into more misery and disturbance. 

What makes the difference?  Why are we at one time mobilized by pain and at another mired in suffering?  Pain itself is a loud non-specific signal that tells us something is wrong somewhere in our being.  Whether we respond proactively or helplessly depends on a fundamental perception: do we believe that the painful experience does something. 

You have a splinter lodged in your flesh, inflamed and festering.  Every time you brush against that place, there is a spike of agony.  Compare that with the more acute pain of that same splinter as it is removed.  Each is excruciating, but the pain of a stuck splinter leads to a cycle of suffering that goes nowhere, except to more suffering.  The pain of removal is different—it is purposeful, time limited and easier to bear.  It is the pain of healing. 

Isabel Duffy, a warm and wise Jungian therapist, puts the distinction succinctly.  There are two kinds of suffering: meaningful and meaningless, useful and useless.  Meaningful suffering has purpose and direction; it moves us towards some future way of being that is more complete.  Meaningless suffering grinds us down; it is circular, pointless and severs us from communion with the universe and ourselves.

We have to learn to recognize the difference.  Often what seems useless and senseless has later benefits of which we are unaware.  At other times, to accept and suffer is misguided and even dangerous; to not treat an illness when something can be done is foolhardy.  Wisdom is recognizing that difference between useless and useful suffering.  This is the heart of “The Serenity Prayer” of Alcoholics Anonymous.

My first big life lesson in suffering happened as an adolescent.  I was sixteen, living in a tiny, leaky trailer on a derelict site in Dungarvan, Ireland, alone with my mother.  She was drinking and smoking heavily.  Constantly unwell, her belly was distending from the pressure of an undiagnosed cancerous tumor.  We had little money.  I would collect the weekly ‘dole’ and wander the muddy strand at low tide picking winkles—small, black, snail-like whelks that were sold to consumers in France.  Alienated from the rest of the family and avoiding the townspeople, I felt isolated and embarrassed.  The worst of it was that I could not imagine it ever ending. 

I wrote a note to myself from the depth of misery: “Death would be welcome” and tucked the morbid message away, to be opened at a later date.  Not wanting to actively kill myself, I wondered if I would still agree with that statement in some unimagined future.  I never found the note again; an unexpected shift of events whirled me away.

Looking back at my adolescent turmoil, I see that at the heart of my suffering were disunities that kept me distant from myself.  I was trapped in an inexorable cycle of depressive thoughts and feelings, sundered from myself and those I loved.  An understanding listener could have helped release me from most of the useless distress.  Yet some part of the suffering was absolutely necessary; it became a teacher for my future profession.

A psychiatrist would have diagnosed me as suffering from an Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood or some such categorization.  That label belittles my experience.  It says nothing of the inexorable inner pressure that ground me down each day or my undirected anger and tortured humiliation at being seen hauling water by the girls in the neighboring convent.  It ignores my own attempts to understand myself, the constant questioning about God and how to make sense of being alive.  What is worse, it strips my suffering of meaning.

From the perspective of the medical establishment, suffering is bad.  Physicians assume that difficult experiences are ‘diseases’ to be controlled—some noxious entity has invaded the psyche and needs to be expelled or destroyed.  This ignores the basic fact that human beings, like all living things, are designed to heal and grow—discomfort often accompanies that healing.  Our ability to self-heal has to be nurtured and supported, not commandeered.  When self-healing does not happen, when the suffering cycles endlessly, then we know something is wrong.  Suffering itself is not the problem.  The problem is the uselessness of that suffering, the fact that it goes nowhere and does nothing.

Human beings can tolerate amazing amounts of affliction.  The Book of Job is a perfect illustration.  But even the smallest discomfort quickly becomes intolerable if it keeps repeating.  “Hell goes round and round”—so agree both Flann O’Brien a writer of bizarre Irish stories, and Dante Alighieri, author of the medieval classic, The Divine Comedy.  Dante’s pilgrim visits the nine circles of Hell’s Inferno.  In each, the souls are isolated, subjected to the same torture in the same way, without respite for eternity.  Each torture exactly fits the nature of their sin.

In traditional Catholic belief, Hellish torment is not simply pain; it arises also from two soul-wrenching realizations.  First, the damned know they are separated from God, and second, they know that their suffering and separation will be everlasting.  Our own personal Hell has just those qualities: alienation from that which is whole in us and a seemingly endless paralysis.  These aspects of useless suffering are what I call disconnection and stuckness

In psychotherapy, when clients asks me, “How can I ever feel better?” they are asking me to help them with their suffering—to help them distinguish difficult experiences that have purpose and meaning from those which are useless and obstructing.  Often we have to revisit past anguish.  The work is not only to heal pain but also to discover its meaningfulness.  I ask myself, “What is the possible positive intent and consequence of those experiences?  In the largest scheme of our understanding, what are they for?  If there is no purpose, no direction, then the suffering is meaningless; something has become disconnected, and stuck in that disconnection.

Disconnection

We are born umbilically connected to our mothers.  As that physical cord is cut, a psychic connection is already in place.  There is no rift for the newborn between self, world and mother.  Infants are replete with the Life Force, knowing how to love and be loved, reaching out to be touched and held.  In a perfect world, each of us would be encouraged to explore our innate curiosity, vitality and natural wisdom, inspired to connect ever more fully with ourselves and everything.  We would grow through each new contact and each new experience.  Unfortunately, life is not so simple. 

The forces for disconnection are powerful and ever present.  Ancestral inheritance, family disturbance, natural and unnatural disasters and even the demands of living create and reinforce our vulnerabilities.  Each vulnerability is a different kind of disconnection—estranging us from our ability to heal, from our inner nature and from communion with the Greater process.  Without realizing, we become a collection of parts separated from the wholeness we crave. 

Look at your own or others children.  Already by the age of three a little girl holds her body just like her mother, will unconsciously mimic family mannerisms and speech patterns.  Children adopt the attitudes of parents and siblings long before they know their meaning; violence, racism, sexism and intolerance are learned in the bosom of the family and through endless hours in front of the TV.  Many four-year-olds already echo unthinking beliefs: “Bad guys should be locked up and killed; girls are stupid; I hate Black people.”  Before we arrive at kindergarten, the schisms of family and society are mirrored in our souls.

Children not only imitate but also internalize the disunities of their parents.  The screaming rows, the heavy tension between Mom and Dad are replayed in our inner world.  If you listen carefully you may still hear and feel them battling.  Parents tell you how to manipulate yourself, how to fit in: “Don’t cry, don’t get mad, don’t make a fuss, pay attention, sit still, follow the rules, work harder.”  Constant messages direct us to discard part of our needs, wishes, feelings and vitality.  Before long we do not need the outer voice and there is a tyrant inside directing our every action. 

School and work further reinforce the fractures, demanding that we relegate parts of who we are to the basement of our being.  Do you remember sitting in a boring classroom, listening to an equally boring teacher?  Naturally, when nothing stimulating is going on, your attention slips into the world of fantasies.  You look out the window, imagining being out in the sunshine.  Suddenly you are jerked back to the classroom, “Hey you!  Pay attention and stop daydreaming!”  The teacher is shouting at you and all eyes turn your way.  A breeze of giggles wafts through the room and you flush with embarrassment.  This is no place to let down your guard.  Learn quickly if you want to avoid further humiliation—it is not safe to imagine.

Imposed and learned disconnections become rooted deep in our adult personality.  Every society decides which experiences and behaviors are relevant, necessary and valued.  We figure out those parts of our selves that are acceptable to family and culture—and discard the rest.  Before long, we are unable to notice what has gone missing.  Like a pruned tree, the lopped limbs whither and die.

Divorce of the Body

Human nature is amazingly malleable.  Unlike other organisms, very little of what we feel, think and do is innately programmed—we can choose.  Yet we are so easily trapped by the unconscious assumptions of inherited belief systems—more oppressive than any instinct.  In this culture, for three hundred and fifty years, the human mind and human body have been conceptually split, disconnected.  So deeply ingrained is this Cartesian divide that we hardly notice, yet it permeates all our experience.  For all the fact that we have conquered diseases and extended life, we suffer from a deeper sickness; we are estranged from our own physical nature.

In modern life the body is a thing an ‘It’, to be managed and controlled.  Media portray only the perfect, the attractive and the young.  Many struggle to make their bodies live up to unrealistic expectations—to remain beautiful, fit, healthy and undemanding.  Dieting and exercise become compulsive, even life threatening.  We fill our bodies with unneeded food and chemicals, and then feel betrayed when it mutinies.  So we take it to a physician to be fixed, ignoring what it screams to us about our lives.  The worst betrayals, of course, are aging, sickness and death.  The modern maxim seems to be: Bodies are meant to take abuse and stay young and beautiful eternally.

I have noticed patterns of connection between illness and blocked process.  These are not the simplistic explanations found in popular books: asthma means repressed anger; ulcers are caused by stress; cancer means something is eating at you.  Human beings are too complex and unique for simple explanations of any disease.  When something interferes with our healing ability, there is both an individual and a general pattern of disconnection involved.

Certain neurological and autoimmune disorders seem to attack people who drive themselves beyond their natural capacity.  The fierceness of this drivenness turns fight/flight hormones full on, undermining the integrity of the immune system.  The natural need for calm relaxation is ignored and eventually the nervous system collapses.  These individuals are often not fully embodied.  They live just a little forward of their physical selves as if dragging it along like a heavy sack.  The subtle warning signals of disunion between body and psyche are ignored until they reach a point of no return.

Still the outcome is far from predictable.  I have seen one woman die of Multiple Sclerosis within two years of her diagnosis; I have seen another recover completely in the same time period.  A terminal diagnosis of cancer may spell death for one and renewed life for another.  What makes the difference?  Working with different people, I often sense who has the possibility to heal their illness against all odds.  I think of it as the ability to fully accept and look the illness in the face while at the same time not giving in—no denial and no self-pity.  The individual must be willing to become whole, to connect fully with the deeper process and its healing ability. 

Trauma and prolonged distress disrupt that connection.  The majority of clients with severe psychological difficulties also have physical ailments.  Gynecological problems and fibromyalgia are prevalent in women who have been sexually abused.  Abuse leaves a scar, not only in the psyche but also on the way the body is connected to the energetic process of the whole person.  When vitality is withdrawn from some part of our corporeal self, that part begins to wither and die.

Working in trance with a young woman who had chronic painful fibromyalgia around her shoulder, a spontaneous memory came: her father’s prelude to the molestation was to gently stroke her back.  Without moving a muscle, she tried to get away from his hand and its sickening touch.  Like a dried raisin she shriveled up inside, smaller and smaller, desperate to erase her body’s sensations.  As she put it, “I had to get out of that part of my body.”

In the worst cases there is damage, not only to the ability to heal but also the will to live.  Life threatening diseases are often found in those whose survival instinct has been compromised through overwhelming life events.  Natural healing and the urge to stay alive can be broken.  When I work with someone with severe illness, the first thing is to discover is if the will to live is intact.  If that has been disconnected, the essential spark of life will fade away.

The first time I saw Gary he was completely distraught.  Over the years, he had noticed and ignored the growing numbness and weakness in his hands and arms until it became nearly impossible to pick up a cup of coffee.  When Gary had gone back after his check up, the doctor seemed really pleased with himself—he had diagnosed a rare deteriorating neurological disorder that causes death by choking. 

Gary was devastated.  He now believed the future held only paralysis and a horrible end.  Almost immediately his condition started to get worse; his body was obeying what the doctor commanded.  He toyed with killing himself, but it was not an option.  Earlier in his life, comatose from a serious suicide attempt, he had experienced the living hell of the self-murderer; he felt blessed to have been given a second chance.

We worked together on his depression and hopelessness.  Years later, Gary is still living an independent life.  He has lost some abilities, but always his ingenuity has found a way through.  More important, he no longer sees death as a monster looming just around the corner.  He knows that his body will do the best it can to keep alive.  If not for his spiritual experiences, Gary would have killed himself.  Without help to rid himself of the toxic suggestions of the doctor, he may have given up.

Physical illness is not all psychological, but at the deepest level there is no separation between mind and body.  Every experience is a neurological pattern—a physical event.  Every choice we make resonates throughout our whole being, material and immaterial.  Physical processes are part of who we are, and our body requires that we remember. If we treat our body as a disconnected thing, we are courting illness and suffering.  To be a human in this world is to be embodied, to be fully connected to ourselves and our lives.

Disconnections of the Self

Matthew was very depressed when he first came to see me.  Tall and thin, with a permanent lean, like a tree caught in a high wind, he told a story of misery and emptiness.  The high forehead and sad bespectacled eyes hid a penetrating, critical mind that never stopped.  He hated his job entering data into a computer in a tiny cubicle.  He hated going home to his silent apartment and took a sort of twisted amusement in mentally devising different ways to kill himself.  Thankfully none were satisfactory to his critical mind. 

Early on in therapy he told me a dream: A man dressed in battle fatigues jumps to catch a rope swinging over a pool of water.  He misses, falls and breaks his neck.  Lying helpless, the back of his body is darkly immersed in the muddy water, the front of his body still clean.

The dream tells us of Matthew’s brokenness.  His conscious self is split from the rest of his being; there is a chasm between the darker hidden side and his bright critical mind.  The battle for his life is almost lost—he cannot stop himself from falling.  This disconnection between head and body, above and below paralyses him and keeps him immobile. 

Western culture is not comfortable with the messiness of bodily functions and the non-rationality of the deeper process living in the body.  Dreams, intuitions and unconscious ways of knowing are downgraded or relegated to the weird world of artists, psychics and psychoanalysts.  Everyone dreams, but how often do we pay attention to these deeper urgings?  At every moment our unconscious is working away, just below awareness, keeping everything going.  Yet we seldom remember, seldom extend a feeling of gratitude or acceptance towards that essential part of ourselves.  We keep it secret and separate—disconnected.  No wonder it sometimes rebels.

Matthew was not only divided from his natural self, he also suffered from that most common male disconnection—the split between feeling heart and thinking mind.  Boys learn early not to be ‘wimps’, not to cry or express the softer emotions; these are discounted and ignored.  In the West only the strong and dominating expression of anger is OK; it is powerful and manly. 

For women, on the other hand, it is power and purpose that often becomes suppressed, leaving a feeling of emptiness and inadequacy.  Many creative women are entrapped by their unconscious assumptions, never realizing their own strength and courage.

Every inner disconnection manifests in outer experience.  When a man is out of touch with his feelings, he will be unable to enter into intimate and satisfying relationships.  If a woman cannot find her power, how can she be effective and influential in the world?  Connection with the world and those around us reflects our connection with ourselves.  The ability to be joined, intimate and engaged requires a whole being.  If we are estranged from ourselves, how can we connect?

When we are not internally harmonious, not aware of ourselves as a whole being, our experience of the Greater process is elusive.  Regardless of a professed belief in God, regardless of attendance at places of worship, regardless of whether we think we know spirituality, without direct contact, the Greater process is a myth, a phantasm.  Spirituality is immediate experience of something greater, profound and beyond our ideas and expectations.  The Greater process provides meaning and purpose to our existence.  To be disconnected from that universal power is to be lost.

By adulthood, for many, the springs of childhood exuberance have seeped away.  ‘Realistic’ cynicism takes its place; life becomes a wasteland.  If you take stock, can you truly say that you are in your own life deeply enough?  What parts of your being are discordant, unsettling you with a furtive sense of disquietude? 

Minor ailments, compulsive behaviors and troublesome relationships are familiar, ordinary and unquestioned; they form the un-noticed background of our everyday life.  Do we listen to these messages telling us that something is amiss?

Only when suffering becomes bad enough do we seek help.  The internal voice that tells us to persevere, to be strong and self-reliant often serves us well; it is misguided when we are broken.  We must face the reality of our own incompleteness before we can begin to heal.

Disconnected Relationship

A common scenario: I get into a row with my life partner.  It all started when I came through the door after a horrible day at work and she was less than sympathetic—actually abrupt and dismissive of my exhaustion.  She didn’t even notice my sighs and heavy footsteps.  I try to listen to her catalog of hassles with the children and shopping but the house and everything is a mess.  We start sniping at each other about inconsequentials, though the underlying theme is, “I had a harder day than you and I need attention.”  Soon the kids are fighting and upset and we all sit in a heavy silence at the dinner table.  This can’t be good for digestion but how are we to undo it all without looking foolish or vulnerable?  I’m not going to be the first to say I’m sorry.

What happened?  I brought my disconnection home.  Then at that most sensitive time as we meet again after a separation, our partnership failed to reunite.  Soon that disconnection spread through the family, spilling over into the children and the whole evening.  Old hurts were reactivated, reinforcing the resistance to reconciliation.  Unwilling to open to each other we could easily remain stuck in separate camps, the rift never closing; eventually the family would disintegrate.  From such small beginnings are divorces made.

Without awareness and compassion, we inflict our disconnections on those around us.  My unhealed wounds are not an issue if they do not affect anyone else—but that’s impossible.  I am my family, community, society and the wider world; my disturbance is disturbance for all.  Internal splits and deadening are not simply the causes of our personal misery.  As they adulterate wider and wider relationships, those splits become tendrils of evil.

When I hear that as a child, Dawn was locked in a dog pen with a snarling German Shepherd as a baby-sitter and randomly beaten, I cannot be convinced that “all is well in the best of all possible worlds.”  The damage inflicted by a mother’s uncontrolled rages is not useful or meaningful to a child.  Dawn’s mother obviously had her own pain from the unhealed chasms in her being.  Her ‘sin’ is her unwillingness to recognize, own and bear it; she heaped her torment onto her daughter.  To give another your own suffering is to compound the pain.  To create more pain, more disconnections in the universe is to create un-life, to create evil.

Corruption is caused by things out of place, by disconnections and constrictions in the Life Force.  If something is not in its right place, if it has become separated from the benign constraints of the whole, then it is in danger of becoming toxic.  If the discomfort and hurt we inflict on others has no positive meaning, does not lead to some greater good, then it is wrong. 

The extreme example of disconnected relationship is the sociopathic personality’—a person who has no sense of community with other human beings.  He does not belong, does not feel empathy.  Without social and emotional connection, all behaviors are possible.  What does he care for others; all that matters is whether they are of use or not?  Sociopathic behavior spreads disturbance, so inevitably, society responds with harsh punitive measures, further disconnecting that individual—and so the cycle continues.

We all have sociopathic tendencies; we all try to get our own way at the expense of others.  When another driver cuts you off or takes your parking space it is easy to make them bad and inhuman in your mind.  Then you turn on your righteous indignation and feel superior.  You are lifted up and they are degraded in your eyes.  But you have fallen into the sin of disconnection.  Whenever we turn another person, another race, another nation into something less than human in our minds, we tear the fabric of humanity.  Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher calls this the “I-It” relationship, the root of all manipulation and abuse.

It is impossible to harm what we are part of or what is a part of us.  When I was an adolescent, I burnt a design into the skin of my forearm.  I remember vividly, not the pain but the extreme resistance of my body to harming itself.  It rebelled with all its strength.  I cannot do you harm if you are me and I am you and we are part of the whole.

Disconnection creates disturbance throughout our being and out into our lives—and from there into the lives of others.  How we are with our loved ones, and even more so with those we do not really care for, is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves.  When our feelings are blocked—our hearts hardened—relationships decay, conflict erupts around us and there is no harmony.  Conflict breeds conflict, disconnection creates disunity spreading in ever widening ripples over the face of our world.

I have a friend who translated from Russian to English at the nuclear disarmament talks during the 1970’s.  He would return from those talks despairing as he could see no common ground, no basis of trust or cooperation.  His job was to scrutinize the other side’s translation for any mistake, just as they watched him for every incorrect nuance of meaning.  Everything was suspect and nuclear war was just an unthinking insult away.

Have you been in a meeting in which there is no commonality?  Each person has his own agenda with no compromise; disagreements and arguments become more and more heated and entrenched.  These meetings do not produce anything creative and usually end in disorder as the disturbance becomes intolerable.  This is what happens with all systemic disturbances.  This is what is happening in our culture.

Only a society divorced from itself and the natural world can rape the earth of its bountiful resources.  Only when a country decides that the ‘enemy’ is less human, more evil and deserving of punishment can it send its planes, missiles and armies to butcher men, women and children.  Every war requires propaganda to create alienation from, and hatred for, the other side.  Otherwise a feeling, thinking human being, just like you and me is the person we destroy.

We blame others for the suffering we impose.  We delude ourselves that this suffering is for a purpose; it is necessary.  Yet it is easy to tell if that is true.  All I have to ask myself is, “Am I acting from a place of alienation and fear—or caring and compassion?”  If I am disconnected from that person or people, if I am entrenched and invested in that disconnection, I am choosing to spread useless suffering into the world. 

Gandhi expressed this point beautifully, “Experience convinces me that permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence.”  Only actions that are engendered by love, by a sense of connection and belonging, can be healing.

Stuckness

Cycles of connecting and disconnecting are part of the natural flow of life.  When we sleep, we are disconnected for a period from our own consciousness.  Sometimes we want to be with people; sometimes we need solitude.  Relationship becomes impossibly tedious if we have to be with the same person every moment of every day; even a usually loving contact can feel oppressive if it never changes.  There is a flowing rhythm to healthy relationship.

These natural cycles feel different from disconnections imposed on us.  Unexpected injury inflicted on our physical, emotional and social being threatens our coherence.  If we suddenly get sick, break a bone, someone dies or our relationship becomes a minefield of conflict, we suffer pain.  More often than not, we find the strength to physically heal, to forgive and let go of hurt and resentment, to grieve and say goodbye to those who are gone.  The disconnection mends and we are whole again.

Our human system is remarkably resilient.  It constantly finds ways to heal and reconnect.  When it cannot, something is wrong.  The difference between a disconnection that is a passing phase and one that causes meaningless suffering is the quality of stuckness.

What do I mean by stuckness?  Let me give a common example of normal psychological healing and how it gets obstructed.  Someone you love dies.  You feel disoriented, wake in the night thinking about him, and find yourself tired and despondent most days.  It is worse two to three weeks after the death when the funeral and fuss die down.  Now there is the emptiness to face.  You regret not having been there at the death, wish that you could have said certain unspoken words.  You sense a subtle irrational irritation with him for dying just then, in that way.  Mostly it is sad. 

After a few months, you wake some days feeling out of sorts but do not consciously associate it with the death.  The anniversary of the death, however, hits you hard.  Grief gets easier with time, in a rhythmic wave of misery that decreases in depth and power the further it travels from the loss.  After a couple of years, you visit your memories of that person with a poignant sadness that is rich and easy.  Your natural bereavement has healed the disconnections. 

But what if it gets stuck?  Then the sadness and anger transform into a debilitating grayness that never shifts.  Thoughts of the loved-one become endless ruminations that recycle with no relief.  In the worst situations, a kind of frozen shrine to the dead becomes entombed in the self.  Desperate clinging to photographs and belongings mark that shrine. 

I have seen a bedroom of a dead child in perfect order, awaiting his return from school after six years.  He died suddenly in a traffic accident but his mother refused to let him go.  Her life is still on hold and will stay so until she dies.  Her inability to allow reality to be as it is, keeps her insolubly stuck in grief.

Disconnected stuckness is like a cancer.  Cancer cells duplicate without limit, without regard for the whole body, their growth mechanism stuck full on.  It is as if those cells do not listen, do not respond to messages from the rest of the body; they just keep growing.  Useless suffering is similar: it just keeps growing, doing nothing for our being.  In contrast, when we catch a cold or flu our immune system creates a range of uncomfortable symptoms—fevers, runny nose, aches and pains.  As uncomfortable as these may be, the suffering does something.  It is fundamental to the healing.

Fear and Healing

How do experiences heal?  As children, we rely on our relationship with caregivers to support inner healing.  We run to a loving parent for comfort and care when we are hurt or afraid and the painful experience mends naturally.  As we get older, aspects of these early relationships are internalized as templates of healing.  An inner environment is created that allows disturbance to resolve naturally.  But just as the outer environment was imperfect and often unsupportive, the inner environment reflects that imperfection.  Limiting beliefs, self-doubt, insecurities and dependence on the outer world undermine our resilience.

In its most universal aspect, we cannot connect with inner healing because we have become retracted in fear—fear that is not anxiety but a deeper sense of terror or angst, a quality of clinging on for dear life.  It is that clinging—what the Buddhists call tanha—that fuels repetitive vicious cycles.  The Buddha, in the Four Noble Truths tells us that the origin of suffering is attachment.  When tanha—attachment and clinging—ceases, suffering ceases.  Fear of the unknown, the uncontrollable, impels clinging.

Let me give an all-too-common example.  Alice has everything she needs materially—beautiful house, plenty of money, help around the home.  Her life is the image of the American Dream.  Beneath the facade she is miserable, trapped in a maze of depressed agitation.  Small hassles and trials spiral her emotions out of control.  Childless, because “that is what they agreed”, her life has no shape, no point, yet she will not face even the possibility of separation from her distant and critical husband who pays for it all. 

Alice remembers the optimism and excitement of college days, studying literature and writing.  Those days are long gone; now she never puts pen to paper—too busy, too stressed.  She wants me to take away the anxiety, to make it feel better.  But there is nothing to put in its place—only emptiness.  All attempts at change are thwarted by her fear.

The demands that life and her deeper self make are too much for Alice.  She needs to stay stuck to be safe.  Part of her knows it is a false security but she continues to block her ears to the quiet voice inside that says, “live”, even as it gets louder and more insistent.  Already the conflict expresses itself through anxiety and panic.  What if it speaks in the physical language of breast cancer or heart palpitations?  Maybe her only hope is for some crisis to stimulate her inner strength and get her moving again.

In clinging to the known, Alice manipulates her inner and outer reality to be what she wishes it would be, rather than what it is.  She wants her life to be different without it ever changing; she wants to feel better without looking at what causes her suffering.  Clinging creates more disconnection and more stuckness in an expanding spiral.

Stuckness is a whirlpool in the flow of a river.  Once formed, anything caught in that swirling eddy cycles endlessly, gets sucked in to perpetuate the stuckness.  The influence of the vortex extends ever outward, affecting more and more aspects of our being.

Stuckness in the Psyche

Alice suffered from depression and anxiety, both common examples of disconnected stuckness.  To put it simply: chronic anxiety is stuck fear; depression is stuck sadness/anger.  When fear or sadness does not shift and change with circumstance, then something is wrong.

I remember the harrowing distress I felt in my adolescence.  Functioning and looking fine on the outside, internally I was tortured.  The distress of depression is more than a passing mood or state, the cloud of misery hangs around interminably.  Like a bout of flu that does not completely disable, all inner reserves are depleted as depression drains vitality and awareness. 

So it is with chronic anxiety.  Every situation is experienced as an imminent disaster.  The person is harrowed by doubts and insecurities, not knowing how to relax and go with the flow.  The fight-flight endocrine response is stuck full on; the connection to human curiosity and courage goes missing

Most acute depressions and fears are responses to difficult life events.  Fred cannot concentrate at work or sleep at night since his wife left him.  Jane struggles to return to work after years of child rearing and is tortured by self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy.  Their distress is, in some sense, a natural response to the struggles of life and their own vulnerabilities.  It reflects the stuckness of some aspect of their lives.

Anxiety and depression are the obvious faces of stuckness.  But any aspect of our being that has a compulsive quality, that does not exhibit flexibility and creativity, is suspect.  Less obvious pathology disguises itself as culturally valued attributes such as competitiveness, drive, ambition and even nurturing.  The successful businessman, who takes his phone and fax to the pool when on vacation, is stuck without knowing it.  The son who sends his dirty laundry home from college and the mother who washes it are both stuck.  Affliction hides where we least notice.

Whenever we are unable to spontaneously think a thought, feel a feeling or complete an action, something is stuck.  Whenever we continue to think or feel or act when it is no longer necessary, something is stuck.  When we are unable to be present, aware and respond with compassion, something is stuck.  When we are lost to ourselves, overwhelmed by impulses and experiences that are uninvited, some part of our being cannot move on.  If we always respond to our partner in the same way, we are stuck.

Stuckness in thinking is prejudice—the inability to shift perspective or see the other person’s point of view.  Stuck feelings are those emotions that do not resolve—fears that refuse to change, sadness that becomes depressive, smoldering rage that never calms down.  Stuck behaviors are actions that are repetitive, sterile and indifferent to the needs of the moment.  All these are our habitual and insensitive reactions to everyday life.  We recognize them as lifeless and dull, as recurringly maladaptive.  If take time to notice, we realize we are stuck in the same old pattern again.

If that catalog is true, it seems that we are all stuck most of the time.  Maybe only those who are enlightened or dying are able to avoid the traps of life.  The important thing seems to be whether the stuckness is itself stuck.  I may have a writer’s block that lasts for months.  I am stuck, yet I know from experience that something will unexpectedly shift and the block will dissolve.  So the stuckness is not totally stuck.  It is not the same as a repetitive pattern that grips and never lets go.

An agoraphobic fears to leave her home.  Maybe something happened in the past—fainting or vomiting in the street—that fueled her apprehension.  Now she is frightened of some nameless, catastrophic humiliation, so she avoids leaving home.  What locks her behavior into place is a foreboding of the terror of going outside.  Not only can she not leave, she cannot think of leaving the house.  The noose gets tighter—fear of fear, avoidance of avoidance, stuck stuckness.

Many people have phobias, particularly fears of animals such as snakes, spiders and dogs.  A dog phobia is one of the simplest examples of stuckness.  The sight of a dog, no matter how innocuous, leads to fear and flight.  All dogs are treated as identical and the reaction to any particular dog is similar to every other one—compulsive anxiety and avoidance.  For the phobic, as the dog gets closer, fear escalates—apprehension turns to anxiety, to panic and finally to overwhelming terror.  The phobic person flees, bypassing any positive experience that might change the dread—and the vicious cycle closes.

Obsessions and compulsions are particularly virulent forms of stuckness.  Ruminating thoughts that go round and round are obsessions; actions that have an uncontrollable authority over the self are compulsions.  Compulsions include all addictions and all problems of impulse control.  Substance abuse and sex/relationship addictions are among the commonest problems seen by therapists.  But compulsions come in less obvious guise.  Habitual avoidance and procrastination, extreme competition and need for control of others, fanaticism, bigotry, and explosive anger—all are examples of some form of compulsive process.  If you are always late (or early) for appointments you are probably caught in a minor compulsion.

In its most disturbing form, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), compelling thoughts and actions take over the whole of a person’s waking life.  Most commonly, the person experiences powerful and inescapable impulses to check or clean.  The sufferer washes his or her hands until they are chapped and bleeding, vacuums the house endlessly or checks and rechecks the locked doors at night.

One of my first therapeutic failures was a young man diagnosed with classic OCD.  Like the majority of these sufferers, one of his parents was an obsessive cleaner and he had taken on the family pattern and amplified it out of control.  He could not go anywhere without simultaneously looking up and down—trying to dodge birds that might poop on him and sidestepping any dog excrement. 

His fears of pollution were so extreme that he took two or three baths a day, spent hours on the toilet, washed his hands constantly and walked in the street, off the sidewalk, his head swiveling up, down and around at every step.  The compulsion permeated every aspect of his life and personality.  I tried everything in my limited repertory with little success and eventually admitted defeat by referring him to a more experienced practitioner.

Recognizing Our Patterns

How are we to recognize our own obsessions, compulsions and minor phobias?  I have a personal maxim that helps me decide personally and in therapy whether a process is really stuck: If the same thing happens in the same (or very similar) way more than three times in a row, or for more than a month at a time, then it is problematic.  This is a simple reminder to recognize stuckness but not get it confused with the normal ups and downs of life.  A few days of sadness and melancholy is not depression.  A spike of anxiety before a flight is not a phobia of flying.  A fight with your partner does not mean divorce. 

It takes courage and dedication to look ourselves in the eye and see our shortcomings clearly.  There are layers of protection surrounding our deepest pain and disturbance.  I remind clients that therapy, learning about yourself, is often a rough road.  The rewards are incomparable—but it doesn’t always feel good.  Yet this suffering is important; it is worthwhile.

Recurring discomfort is our most useful guide to disconnection.  As we look to whatever is most uncomfortable, there we are likely to find our next task.  I lived in a shared household in my twenties and whenever a new roommate arrived, after about three weeks I found that person intolerably irritating.  The experience was so consistent I realized it could not be them—it had to be me.  With a shock I saw how blind I was to my own projections and how compelling was the impulse to make them wrong.  The irritation hid my unease at connecting intimately, my fear of being swallowed up in community.

What clued me in was that my irritation was cyclical and recurring.  Stuckness always creates the same form of experience.  So whenever we notice our discomfort, the next thing to notice is whether this has happened before and how often.  As the saying goes: dysfunction is the same damn thing again and again; health is one damn thing after another.  Beware of the same damn thing!

We have to be discriminating; it is not always clear whether something is the same of not.  If I always get stressed by driving, always feel miserable on Mondays, always feel distant from my wife after sex, there is clearly a stuck pattern.  But what if it only happens sometimes?  What if there is another factor that I haven’t noticed?  Say I only get stressed driving if I travel on a certain highway, and I usually avoid that one.  What if I only feel miserable on Mondays when I am feeling unappreciated by my manager?  Sex is usually tender and loving except when certain things my wife says subtly reminds me of my bossy sister. 

Our own avoidance strategies and the complexity of processes hide negative patterns right under our noses.  The limitation to our awareness and understanding makes it impossible to see the whole picture.  So how can I see the beam in my own eye, rather than the mote in yours?  The answer is both outside us and deeper within.

Transforming Suffering

Our very self is a battleground of competing forces: that is why we suffer.  On the one hand, the demands and trials of the world cause schisms in our being.  On the other hand, our deeper process seeks to create greater connectivity and coherence.  This is the fertile struggle between un-life and life that bids us keep striving and changing.  In this encounter we all get stuck, we all get lost sometimes.  We fall prey to the snares of ego and superficiality and try to stop the movement of life.  Then we suffer without purpose.  We lose contact with the flow of the Life Force. 

So how can we again enter into a healing flow?  We know that true healing is not under conscious control.  We cannot make even the smallest cut mend faster than it heals.  We cannot avoid grief when someone dies.  At times, the torment, hassles and disappointments of everyday life cause us to despair.  To transform suffering we must face and embrace the pain, recognize our stuckness and take steps to reconnect.  Only then can we begin to remedy that which is torn apart.

Imagine you are upset and angry with a good friend or lover.  You had a fight and his attitude seemed cruel and thoughtless.  He let you down, betrayed you.  Nothing is resolved.  Now his words and the words of your unspoken, perfect rejoinder go round and round in your head as you try to sleep.  You are stirred up, unsettled and ready to never see him again.  What should you do?

First, you have to accept the hurt and bitterness you feel.  Your natural impulse is to blame him—and he may be to blame.  But if you want this suffering to be useful, to stop recycling, you have to delve deeper into its meaning.  What is this pain trying to tell you?  In truth, you are probably clinging to a distorted reality.  You are holding some unconscious expectation of how you want him to be.  Is that expectation realistic or are you deceiving yourself?  Can you see and accept him as he is, rather than how you wish him to be?  If you loosen your attachment to how you think it should be, your experience will start to flow naturally again.

Now, you must decide on an appropriate action to reconnect your inner and outer worlds.  If it is right for you to part, then be decisive—cut the psychic ties cleanly and unquestionably.  If not, you may have to say you are sorry even though you think you did nothing wrong.  When we take on the suffering of a whole situation consciously, with open heart, we create more space for connection.

Meaningless suffering is lifeless and repetitive and yet we cannot make the pain disappear, cannot command ourselves to be different.  Only as we take the suffering on consciously and willingly, embrace it as part of the tasks and texture of life, does it change.  Then suffering becomes impregnated with meaning.  This is an ego sacrifice, a letting go of the wishes and desires of the small self in the service of something Greater.  Through grace and insight the pain becomes part of us and we move on. 

Why is it so hard to let go of useless suffering?  Is it because we hate to admit we are wrong, hate to face our stuckness and brokenness?  When confronted with our deficiencies, we often feel wounded in our sense of self and need to grieve a lost vision of who we thought we were.  It is easy to get lost in self-pity or self-loathing and thus invite another cycle of purposeless pain.

To end suffering, requires the ruthless integrity to recognize and accept our failings and then do something about them.  This is the acute agony of healing and wholeness and in the face of suffering, all we can do is surrender, allow ourselves to let go into and through the painful process of transformation.  In this process, our bodies, minds and spirits have hidden resources that are almost never fully tapped—and we will be helped.

To accept, recognize and grieve our disconnected parts invites the Life Force to revitalize our being.  Trusting in the movement of life, in the inherent purposefulness of everything, is like opening up to an unknown layer of support.  Once we connect with that ever-available underlying Greater process our experience becomes infused with meaning.  Through reconnection with ourselves and with the transcendent, suffering transforms beyond expectation.