Suffering is Such a Pain

One of my big revelations in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone happens after my own
therapist, Wendell, interrupts my obsessing about my ex-boyfriend by standing up,
walking across his office, and lightly kicking my foot with his long leg.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Well, you seem like you’re enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I’d help you
out with that.”

He wisely explained that there’s a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is beyond
our control—it’s part of being a person in the world. We’re all going to experience pain
at times, but we don’t have to suffer so much. “You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re
choosing the suffering,” Wendell said.

He was right. I was creating my own suffering by telling the story of Boyfriend over
and over, by Googling him and making up stories about what I’d found—stories that
inevitably provided evidence for a bigger story: I wasn’t lovable enough.

Our pain holds important clues about what’s not working in our lives and what we
might start to change. Nobody likes to feel it, though, so we push it away
any way we can. We gloss over painful feelings or we lash out at
others because of it. More often, we turn those feelings inward
and berate ourselves. All of this serves to take
the pain, which may have been initially helpful,
and twist it into something more like suffering.

So how do you shift out of suffering?

Here’s where reading between the lines can help.

By examining a few pain points in your stories,
you begin to see what that pain is telling you and
where you’re creating suffering. Consider this exercise
our workbook’s version of Wendell’s kick.

©2021 Lori Gottlieb | Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: The Workbook | All rights reserved.
 Picking Apart Pain
Start by noticing any painful feelings that came up as you developed your life sentence. It might have been
a sense of unworthiness or insecurity. Maybe you recognized how often you feel used or undervalued.
Perhaps something you’d like to do has been left undone.

After identifying my life sentence…

It’s painful knowing that I  .

For me, the most common source of painful feelings is  .

The pain I’ve been feeling the longest in my life has been  .

I notice new painful feelings caused by  .

What other pain points came up as you summarized your life in this moment?

That’s the pain, but where’s the gain? Think for a moment about each of your responses, and really consider
how those painful feelings might be serving you in some way. Even misery can have a function in our life.
For example, pain about a relationship that broke up might be keeping you connected to that person, even
if you’re no longer speaking. Pain about not writing your novel could be the thorn you hope will remind
you to sit down and get to work. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer. Simply write whatever surfaces as
you consider how certain emotions play a part in your story.

Feeling pain about serves me by  .

Feeling pain about serves me by  .

Feeling pain about serves me by  .

Feeling pain about serves me by  .

©2021 Lori Gottlieb | Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: The Workbook | All rights reserved.