Suffering is a drug?
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
I don't know how to write this so it will land at the nuanced position I'd like. I'm sure there's lots I'm missing or not understanding, this is a fairly new phenomenon to my way of processing the world and this is my first attempt at organizing my thoughts.
I think I've been raised and trained through Buddhism to relate to painful incidents with a CBT like attitude. Turning lemons into lemonade, using humor and other methods to reframe events into something more positive.
I've been hearing more and more talk that puts that sort of work into a negative light and puts forward a model of connection with others to lessen the pain. At least this is my understanding, to be honest its kind of a foreign concept.
Anyway I'm currently doing some work for someone who I think fits into the second mold. She's very nice and pleasant to talk and work with. But its like I'll mention something I find irrelevant like explaining why progress on one thing is slow. To me its just a factual explanation that I'm working around, no big deal, no pain or suffering. She told me she was sorry and expressed sympathy. Like I said she's nice and pleasant, I've felt supported by her in more difficult circumstance, like when my back went out just before Colorado vacation. But in this case it had the effect of causing me to reframe this no big deal situation into a mildly suffering inducing one, like should I be upset that things aren't going perfectly smoothly? Another example, I got back from vacation and would have been happy to talk about it, all she wanted to ask about was how my back was, something that was fine by day two of vacation and something that didn't take up any space in my head. Or how on camping I chopped a bunch of jalepenos without gloves and later when I went to take a shower some of the oil must have washed off in the shampoo and it stung my eyes just a tiny bit. I told this story to my family and we all got a good laugh, it was something that produced joy. I retold her the story thinking it was funny and she expressed sympathy again (a kind thing) but again it produced a feeling in me that this funny, joyful incident was sad and painful.
What I'm thinking is happening is some sort of conflict of processing painful experiences. I want to reframe them and she wants to connect. I can't really relate to where she's coming from but from my perspective the degree to which she seeks to empathize is mostly creating more suffering in the sense of the second arrow.
So regarding the title, my alien perspective is that expressing compassion and connecting feels good and that is what is being attempted and that model of psychological help is being promoted by some in the culture at large. From my perspective it seems like looking for suffering even when it really isn't there to get a hit of feel good brain chemicals. It doesn't feel like the way to me.
I imagine there is a balance to be found and probably something for me to learn and try to integrate.
Comments
I think different methods work for different people, and we should all do our own thing.
You can work it out by Fractions or by simple Rule of Three,
But the way of Tweedle-dum is not the way of Tweedle-dee.
You can twist it, you can turn it, you can plait it till you drop,
But the way of Pilly Winky's not the way of Winkie Pop!
It’s a drug a lot of people are hooked on. There’s 2 ladies in my social group who love a crisis. Theirs or yours, doesn’t matter , haha. No matter how small and they always say “oh, I’m so sorry that happened to you” and want updates long after I’ve forgotten about it or hell, solved the problem already and they have to tell a novel with dramatics and all about the most tiniest of inconvenience about the everyday….I know they’re trying to show compassion and connect, but it doesn’t land for me. It does for others. Some of the others also seem hooked on the petting of them. Soothing them. And I tend to believe it reinforces all the negative shit. Everyone has different ways of looking at it. … I don’t think you have anything to learn.
By the sounds of it.. I have the same perspective as you.
The last few days I have been revisiting the feelings I have around my stepfathers death. It was one of the most difficult things I have done, coming downstairs in our shared house early in the morning to make coffee and listening to his laboured breathing as he lay in bed on morphine slowly dying in the annexe to the living room. In a way that was suffering for me, he was one of my closest and longest friends and I loved him for being such a good partner to my mother, even though the Alzheimer’s made him into someone new also.
That experience has been working its way through my soul, it has been harrowing but has also revealed new depths, and in a way it has made me conclude that suffering is just part of the human condition, something that is meant to impart wisdom and empathy and understanding. I don’t think that after an experience like that you can look at death and loss in the same way.
In the way of coping with little bits of suffering, my usual attitude is to ignore it. Generally a little suffering just makes you mentally more robust, and anything that causes a lot of suffering should be avoided or just experienced. I think reframing things generally interferes with clear vision, and clarity of understanding is one of the greatest gifts.
I'm under the impression this 'balance' (aka Middle Way way between over-compensating and under-compensating) is not something one learns to integrate, it's a thing which develops naturally as part and parcel of one's ongoing Dharma practice...
We suffer because we crave & cling... clinging & craving is a drug.
Something from long ago that stuck with me. When my niece was about 2 (she's 19 now) we were watching a big freight ship come into harbor. It blew its horn and it was very loud, startling us all. I was back a bit while my sister held her daughter, I saw her face (I don't think anyone else did) begin to react with a cry. But all us adults laughed at the startle, she saw our reaction and began to laugh as well.
I've thought about this small episode in regards to how it may have shaped her life. What if we all would have been upset and she learned to be afraid and hurt by being startled like that. If she would have cried anyway in spite of our reaction I'm certain my sister would have comforted her. But its like which reaction to something like that do you want to encourage and attempt to instill? What will create mentally healthier and happier people? Comforting the hurt or learning to not be hurt in the first place?
I wouldn't want to encourage an attitude of denying someone's pain or simply telling them to suck it up. But going forward if by comforting without encouraging resilience are you also rewarding and reinforcing the painful emotions?
I was on a beginners Buddhist meditation retreat. The teacher had completed 8 years of solitary meditation @person.
At the start of their retreat, the temple was undergoing major noisy building repairs. They asked their teacher how could disturbance to their 'peaceful' meditation be accomplished.
It was as you mention in your post, all in the reaction…
https://www.mindful.org/even-loud-sounds-meditation-practice/
I have been thinking about how I handle suffering:
It’s a good thing to be able to be at ease. But one has to be able to ignore the discomfort that comes with exertion, you have to be a bit robust in how you handle suffering. Athletes learn this too about their bodies, there are pain barriers that you need to push through.
Suffering that comes with illness and injury, you kind of have to bear it, but it challenges the feelings of those around you. It calls forth empathy, friendship, love.
In a way this has made me realise that I no longer look for the Buddha’s solution to suffering, the idea of Nirvana and being free from it all. Some forms of suffering are indispensable parts of the process of human growth, I’ve come to realise.
This puts me all in mind of a farmers wisdom, that plowing the land is a process of harming and disturbing the earth, only to provide fertile soil for seeds to fall onto and a new growth. It’s funny I had no idea where this came from, I haven’t thought about these things since we were taught about farming in primary school.
I make a division between the worldly and the transcendent in my mind. For life in the world, I find the philosophy of Taoism speaks to me more. Things operate in a balance, moving from one state to the other, in dependence on one another. For a longer term (multiple lives, just in case) view Buddhism speaks more to me. Working on insight and seeing the workings of self and suffering to ultimately uproot its causes. Which also helps in the here and now.
Ah Ha!
Go with the Flow (page I created for one of our Citizens) much of it disintegrating...
https://peace.fandom.com/wiki/Freeflow
I wholeheartedly agree, insight is the key faculty one should develop. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates famously said. I find insight has a lot to do with seeing beyond the obvious, looking beyond the surface layer of things.
Following Thich Nhat Hanh for a while, watching his videos and his short talks, is really beneficial for this, you can learn a lot about looking deeply from Thay. With uprooting suffering one should go cautiously, it is possible to be too drastic about it.
These days, I am more in favour of providing insight as a way of watering the seeds of what will grow tomorrow, and taking a gardeners approach to bringing to a flourishing the plants that grow naturally, and gently pruning those areas which are in danger of overgrowth. Just to use a metaphor for the growing of the self.
The Four Noble Truths
There is unsatisfactoriness. (AKA Dukkha) There is the cause of unsatisfactoriness. (AKA Tanha) There is an end to unsatisfactoriness. The path that leads to the end of unsatisfactoriness.
In a nut shell ...One enter the Path because one are not satisfied with 'what is life', only to find that 'life is what it is' and is all there is...and as we gradually progress along the Path (the more we accept 'what is as it is' ) the more satisfied we become...
People are queer, they're always crowing, scrambling and rushing about
Why don't they stop someday, address themselves this way?
Why are we here? Where are we going? It's time that we found out
We're not here to stay; we're on a short holiday
Life is just a bowl of cherries
Don't be so serious; life's too mysterious
You work, you save, you worry so
But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go
So keep repeating it's the berries
The strongest oak must fall
The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned
So how can you lose what you've never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries
So live and laugh at it all