The Truth About Suffering and Growth.
Wake-Up Call #12
“I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”
These were the words shared recently by Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, to a packed house at Stanford.
He was making an argument against the expectation and desire for everything to be given to you, or to come easily. Greatness and growth, he argued, come from adversity. You need to have something to push against to build amazing new things, chief among them, your own character.
I don’t entirely disagree.
But something’s missing from the sentiment.
While pain and suffering can serve as building blocks for character, they can also just be, well, pain and suffering. They can straight up wreck you, with little or no benefit. They don’t just magically seed growth.
Pain and suffering have value only when bundled with the inner and outer resources needed to transform them into growth and possibility.
Think about it in the context of stimulus, response, and outcome.
When you’re poorly resourced:
Stimulus - Something goes wrong that leads to pain and suffering
Response - Reactivity, paralysis, denial, anxiety, chatter, or retreat set it. Sometimes, all the above. This most often deepens the pain. Self-esteem, self-trust, self-belief crater, self-advocacy, and growth go out the window, setting off a spin-cycle of negativity
Outcome - Instead of doing what’s necessary to fix the original source of pain, or accept whatever is non-resolvable, then do what’s necessary to move through it with as much ease as can be found, you pile on the added pain and suffering that comes from beating yourself up for not handling it better, which only makes you feel worse. Pain and suffering just become more pain and suffering.
When you’re well resourced:
Stimulus - Something goes wrong that leads to pain and suffering
Response - You feel it, acknowledge it, evaluate it. Respond with intention in a reasoned way, draw on you resources to work through options, stay in a place of greater agency, autonomy and action, process the struggle as an opportunity to grow and become stronger.
Outcome - Equipped with the capacity to more clearly address a hard reality, then do what’s needed to alchemize as much of the pain and suffering into fuel for growth, you recover faster, fix what’s fixable, learn what’s learnable, allow yourself to be changed by it, maybe create something even better that originally imagined, and are better equipped and more resilient for future challenges
Truth is, most people do not have the inner and outer resources to turn pain into possibility. And, of course, let’s all own the fact that not everything is fixable, something things are just hard. But even then, how we move through these moments is, in part, about the circumstance, and in bigger part, how we’re prepared to experience it.
Even if you do find some level of resources for these moments, the typical person’s toolbox is often way lighter than what’s needed to not just endure, but be transformed, left better even, by the experience. Especially if your unique life history has made access to the necessary tools and support harder.
Wishing everyone pain and suffering is like telling aspiring writers, painters, makers, founders, or artists that they need to experience profound hardship, loss or struggle in order to become good people and make great art.
Pain and suffering can serve as raw material for personal growth, creative expression, and the accumulation of wisdom, resilience, and character. But, it can also destroy you, unless you posses the capacity to turn it’s brutality into beauty.
For far too many, pain is just pain. Wishing more upon people, without also addressing the resourcing side of the equation, simply deepens the suffering.
Let’s stop telling the half-story of pain’s necessity in the cultivation of character, growth, and art. And begin telling the fuller story.
Pain, alone, doesn’t build us up, our capacity to transform it does.
Which begs the question, what does it mean to be well-resourced to transmute pain into growth?
There is no one-size-fits-all cure. The universe of ways to feel better resourced for adversity are myriad.
That said, I love a starter kit.
Here are 5 resources I’ve found to be incredibly helpful for me:
Mindfulness - Over time, this practice helps cultivate the ability to direct your attention to what matters, let go of negativity, self-flagellation, and doomsday spin, let you see reality more clearly, be less reactive, and respond with greater clarity and intentionality. It takes time, this is not an intervention, but rather a practice that leads to a capacity to breathe more easily into hard things over time. I’m a fan of guided meditations from
, Alex Elle, and Tara Brach.Breathing - Pain is a blend of physiology and psychology. Even when the pain starts in the purely psychological realm, it rapidly transmits itself into every nook and cranny of our physiology. Breathing exercises, especially practices like 4-7-8 breathing, can help rapidly regulate your nervous system and bring you back into a place of calm, clarity, and possibility.
People - Access to friends, family (or chosen family), mentors, champions, coaches, mental-health professionals, support circles, and community is key. We’re looking for who are truly there for you. Not just to celebrate, but to elevate, commiserate, provide accountability, insight, tools, and offer better models with which to navigate challenge. Important to note, it’s not a numbers game. The person with the most people doesn’t win. It’s about the depth and quality of the connection, the willingness to be there for you in a way that is truly supportive, and the wisdom and skill to give you what you need when you need it most. Love the wisdom of Mia Birdsong, Dr. Marisa Franco, and Dr. Joy Harden Bradford on this topic.
Chatter-busting - Being able to see the difference between the facts of your circumstance, and the story or, more often, the incessant, self-defeating mental chatter you’re repeating to yourself about it is critical. Then, of course, the question is, what do you do about it? How do you shift from overthink overwhelm to peaceful and powerful? I’m a huge fan of the “Mind Over Chatter” process developed by a dear friend, founder of The Flourishing Center, Emiliya Zhivotovskaya.
Journaling - Simply writing, without the intention of solving, but purely as a mechanism to pour what’s spinning, often mercilessly, in your head onto the page can help create more the internal space need to first come home to a more centered place, then do the work of learning what’s on offer, formulating the best possible response given the moment and resources available to you, and then exploring what learning has been delivered that you might integrate into future moments of adversity. For a more structured approach to journaling with stunning research behind it, check out James Pennebaker’s 4-day therapeutic journaling exercise.
These five resources can help you begin to build the skills, relationships and capacity needed to transform pain and suffering into growth and possibility.
In the end, how we response, is really all we have control over.
PS - I’ve heard the phrase “pain is mandatory, suffering is optional,” so many times. I get the sentiment behind it. It’s supposed to give us a sense of agency over our suffering. At the same time, I wonder if it does more harm than good.
Yes, we want to resource ourselves to handle hard things. Yes, when we learn how to manage our response to pain, it’s helps ameliorate some, and sometimes even, much of the suffering. But, I’ve yet to meet the human who proves the truth of the absolute nature of this trope.
We will all experience pain. Unless and until we’re fully extracted from the human experience, or have become enlightened, some level of suffering is going to come along with certain types of pain, especially the pain of loss. Holding people to a standard that says “suffering is entirely avoidable, and if you’re feeling it, that’s on you no matter the circumstance” introduces the potential for shame that only makes the suffering worse. So, maybe, let’s hold that personal development platitude a little more lightly, accept our humanity, and know that, at any given time, we’re doing the best we can.
Wake-Up Call #12
How well-resourced do you feel for the hard things in life?
Zero judgment. We all start in very different places, having moved through different experiences, with wildly varying levels of access to people, wisdom, and resources. What matters most is where you go from here.
Questions:
What resources are already in your “pain to possibility” toolbox?
How do you cultivate them, and when do you find yourself drawing upon them?
If you feel your toolbox is little light, what resource might you commit to learning more about and cultivating?
If you’re open to it, feel free to share in the comments…
My husband died in August of 2021 after living with incurable cancer for 3 years. He was 53, our son was 9. Thank you for validating that the grief process does not automatically lead to growth. As someone with lifelong anxiety and depression I was especially well resourced after years of cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, breathing techniques, medication, and writing. We had life insurance, so I was okay financially as well. Even with a full toolbox, it hasn’t been easy. Navigating grief in a death and grief averse society is challenging. Finding widow groups has helped tremendously, but it took me 2 years to let myself grieve my husband. I spent a lot of time distracting myself and trying to move forward, but that was impossible without acknowledging and feeling my loss. Find people who can sit with grief without trying to fix it or make it go away. I prefer the saying, “feel it to heal it” although I prefer healing ❤️🩹. I don’t think I’ll ever be healed, but healing is good enough for me.
Boy does this resonate! My sister is a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed bipolar disorder. She just has pain & no resources. I am much more fortunate & practice the “5” to help with my painful episodes. If one is sick, one does not see the 5 as helpful or desirable, & the spiral goes down. This post is such a helpful reminder for those who can use tools to alleviate suffering.