There is no why to suffering, only a how.
How did it affect you? How did it change your outlook, your character, your purpose? What did it do your plans and your incentive to go on? Did it tarnish your spirit? Psychotherapy, in its attempt to address one’s personal distress, often works with the victim to move away from asking the proverbial question of trauma. And many seek treatment because they know they ought to cease asking it, but can’t.
Acknowledging the near complete uncertainty of one’s life entails relinquishing the delusion of control, the belief that he can predict and control the various calamities waiting behind the door of possibility. In his understanding, much of his suffering is personal, engendered by those who wish to harm him and a cruel universe having him atop its hit-list. So, if he does find himself sitting in an inconsequential room with an equally inconsequential clinician, he learns just how meager many of his preemptions and schemes are, and that he is but another vector of chance.
I often illustrate a story from my childhood to my patients, about a bully. This bully spent much of his time harassing a shorter kid, yet fostered and sustained a long-term friendship with another equally pint-sized child. And which of the victim’s attributes did he insult most? His height, of course. And the other kid? Was he just another minion? Nope; they were on equal hierarchical footing. No one thought too deeply of it, since we were kids and the obvious wasn’t clear enough to penetrate our feeble minds. Therefore, the bullying was personalized, where one short kid felt shame and the other didn’t. It was as random as random gets.
In a recent article recounting my childhood abandonment, I noted my father’s womanizing and inability to be responsible in order to explain how I was able to move past the belief that he left me. Fundamentally, I realized that he wouldn’t have been a father to any prospective seed, regardless of the individual it turned out to be. In asking why he left me, I was stuck in an endless loop with no satisfactory answers, akin to asking why the scorpion stings or the snake bites. I was merely a threat to his lifestyle and chronic emotional seclusion. Sure, I was affected and, yet, I didn’t deserve it. Just as Job didn’t somehow elicit Jehovah’s wrath. So, reframing my trauma and empathizing with him, his fears in particular, helped me place myself outside of his field of vision. The question of “Why didn’t he care about me?” evolved into “Why didn’t he care about anyone else?” Why was he so unable to love?
Most of us struggle with understanding how we can be the recipients of cruelty sans the personal elements. In order to preempt and correct, our minds ask, “Why did I deserve this?” Considering the world as a system of rewards and punishments, we fail to distinguish between blame and responsibility. Whereas the former tends to elicit responses intended to influence our future choices, the latter simply helps us explore our contributions. And, more often than not, those factors are minor. A friend of mine, with a history of being on the receiving end of sexual abuse, realized that her outfits hardly mattered as she was groped multiple times by multiple men while dressed in different variations of layers. Being a woman, a minor element as the world is full of them, was enough for a predator. So many of our conversations focused on the question of “Why me?” only to cease with her insistence to completely discard it. At once, she felt absolved and feeble, the most repugnant medicine.
In On Consolation, Michael Ignatieff writes, “Some of my failures have been private, others very public. In the stages of recovery that follow, you begin with self-pity, until it dawns on you that there are many worse things in life. In the next stage, you tell yourself that you gave it your best, though it remains painful to admit that your best wasn’t nearly good enough. Then you try to let it all go, only to discover that there isn’t a day when you don’t wish you had been less naive and self-deceiving. But at the end of this journey, you finally understand, as Havel did, that you have to take ownership of the entire person you once were, take some pride in what you tried to do, and take responsibility only for those portions of your failure that were yours alone. In this slow, circuitous, barely conscious way, you come to be consoled. You can even learn to be grateful for what failure has taught you about yourself.” In essence, life’s consolation entails a reckoning with your infirmity; it follows only after admitting how little you matter.
Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams notes that the masochist, who punishes himself and suffers for love, contains an eternal hope, and accompanying conviction, that the depressive doesn’t. Yet, he suffers as much, or even more, because his spotlight is scorching. Existentially, we aren’t equipped to handle that degree of responsibility; we suffer enough from our actual, limited freedom. The only genuine form of enlightenment is comprised of the wisdom that, yes, while it’s true that you don’t, in any meaningful way, deserve many of your rewards and privileges, neither are the punishments fitting.
Check out our episode with Michael below:
Leon's Existential Cafe 