Pain vs Suffering: Understanding the Critical Difference

Pain is inevitable in life but suffering is optional and largely self-created. Suffering occurs when we feel trapped in narratives about our pain, believing we're victims rather than recognizing our capacity to overcome challenges.
If you're finding yourself stuck in recurring patterns that feel too painful to address, please get help looking at them. What you're carrying is far worse than what you'll experience by processing it, and you're losing precious time that could be spent in joy.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Distinguishing Pain from Suffering
• 2:32 How Trauma Distorts Our Responses
• 4:06 Inner Child Work as Liberation
• 6:31 Trapped in Outcome Attachment
• 7:53 Embracing Pain Without Suffering

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:54

um pain and suffering. So pain is inevitable. We're all going to feel pain, but suffering is not. And does that mean suffering? Is it's a psychological thing that we do to ourselves? When we're in pain, though, are we also? Would you call that it? That doesn't have to be suffering, you just feel the pain. Suffering is when you make it last longer.

Speaker 2: 1:20

Suffering is the belief that the pain that I am experiencing and the story that I associate with it is overriding my capacity to overcome it, my belief and my ability to overcome it, and that I am somehow a victim of it. That's what suffering is feeling trapped in the narrative that the pain generates. So what happens is that the emotional body and the mind sync up, often trying to the mind tries to tether to body sensations in order to justify and make sense of experiences that we have, and quite often we'll be experiencing anxiety and some degree of pain and go looking for things to assign it to that actually have nothing to do with the circumstances. Or we've experienced some kind of trauma in the past and someone behaves in a similar kind of way, indirectly to the way that perhaps a perpetrator of something behaved towards us and it was completely innocent and, you know, no harm intended and yet our reaction towards them will be the same as it was to the person that was a violator of our of us. And they might cop it and they will look at you like you're nuts what the hell did you just go off at me? For I'm sure we can all relate to this in relationship dynamics. Yeah, so it's a common thing.

Speaker 2: 3:18

So suffering is just an inevitable phase in our spiritual development that serves as a really great instrument ultimately a crude one, but a great instrument in making the unsustainability of our ignorance intolerable, because we will ignore and ignore and ignore what we have to take responsibility for until we cannot ignore it anymore. It becomes so dark and heavy and inside that we just got to look at the situation and what we find is a way out. We always find a way out. We always find a way out. It's just that we become so entrenched in the story, and sometimes those stories are generated when we're children and children don't know how to find a way out, and so we carry the mentality of a child into our adulthood and the trauma and the beliefs and as an adult we find ourselves behaving like a child emotionally and we're trapped in it and we know we're doing it, but we don't know how to control it. Why? Because the little kid hasn't been taught how to deal with it. This is why, you know, child reintegration work and reparenting work as in self-reparenting, inner child work they refer to is like critical. We have to do it because we've all got something. We've all got something that we've got to work on and it is you know, it's a first port of call to tend to the little boy or girl inside and and embrace them and listen. You know, where were you not heard, where were you not seen? How are you hurt? What do you need? I'm here, I'm listening, and it becomes very effective because you're talking to yourself and this beautiful integration happens quite quickly and elegantly and then we can free ourselves of that suffering.

Speaker 2: 5:25

The suffering is because we can't. The little child inside is having a tantrum, doesn't know how to deal with this, and it just requires the adult being present, the child being present and going. Let's talk about it and it doesn't take much. Yeah, it's a very powerful process. Yeah, it's a very powerful process and that's generally, in my opinion, the root of suffering.

Speaker 2: 5:57

It's just the lack of integration of the child and the adult not being trained to be able to process grief. There's no context for processing grief, having a rigid attachment to certain outcomes because you weren't validated as a child, needing something to happen in order for people to start seeing you in the way you see yourself, believing that only through the fruition of that event or circumstances would people finally recognise my value and then it not happen. That's a big cause of suffering for people, a sense of failure and being entirely dependent on that thing happening in order for them to feel like they're worth something. That's a terrible trap to be in. So it's a tough cave to get out of, but any good, skilled therapist would be able to assist in that, and we all need a little bit of that support.

Speaker 2: 7:00

Yeah, and then you know, once we get good at that, we notice that we can still feel pain, but we're not suffering in it. It actually feels really good when we allow ourselves to feel it. That old adage you've got to feel it to heal it. If we're feeling pain and we're not concerned about the fact that I'm that we're feeling it overtaking us in any way and we're not identified with the story that used to be attached to that pain, then we don't feel any danger, and so we just continually open the heart and it continues to be released, resolved, and it's a relief.

Speaker 2: 7:41

Feeling pain is great, it's very important. We have to get very comfortable with those feelings, and if we notice that we're terrified to do it, it's because the adult hasn't been fully integrated with the child. So if there's stuff that's playing out in you reoccurring, that is just terrifying to look at and what feels like too painful, then get some help looking at it. There's nothing to be afraid of. What you're carrying around is so much worse than anything that you think might happen when you do actually look at it and feel it and process it. The misery that we cause ourselves carrying around things, terrified to actually confront it, it's just a terrible loss of precious time experiencing joy and appreciating the magnificence of our existence.