Suffering: The Series Intro
Back in 2015, 22 year old me chose the subject of pain as focal point for my senior thesis, entitled “ The Gain of Loss: The Benefits of Suffering.” Recently, I decided to dig up the 24 page analysis of the universal experience of pain from the archives of Google Drive to critique my navigation of the topic, which leaned very heavily on the works of Viktor Frankl and his insights within his book Man’s Search of Meaning.”
To be fair to my younger self, I was young, hadn’t even earned my degree in psychology yet and although I had endured my own share of pain and suffering throughout my life at that point, I still barely scratched the surface of what could possibly be a comprehensive understanding of how pain and suffering affects a person either positively or negatively.
In all honesty, considering what I recall to be my experience with the subject of pain, the thesis was somewhere close to the best I could have done at the time, with time constraints, limited resources and what little experience in the mental health field I had then. Still, reading it now, I view this 24 page document merely bullet points of a larger, far more vast topic that puzzles people of all educational levels and theories today.
Naturally, then, my therapist brain came to the conclusion that the only thing to do about this barely adequate thesis was to dive back in and see what more light I could shed on the subject, especially considering the state of mental health that has been created by the pandemic. Using “ The Gain of Loss: The Benefits of Suffering” as a springboard of sorts, I could expound on its main points of focus, namely “What is Suffering?” “What Makes Suffering Positive?” and “What Makes Suffering Negative?” and then provide even more light on the lesser known concepts of pain and suffering in a way that helped those reading to make sense of their own experiences in life and the pandemic as well.
So the question became, “Where do I start?” With the subject of pain being as vast and universal as the people of the human race who experience it, how do I start this open conversation with the people of the world, when, despite my advance in education and mental health experience, I still have not come to know all there is about pain and suffering?
And how do I present this in a way that doesn’t lose you, the reader, by the end of the first paragraph? After all, few people in this world enjoy anything related to pain and suffering, let alone reading about it.
Enter in Suffering: The Series.
Instead of publishing one, large document of 50+ pages filled with as much information on suffering I myself can find and analyze, I’ve decided to publish weekly “installments,” we’ll call them, of isolated subjects, so as to give an equal amount of time to each possible subject, and allow the topic to be an ongoing conversation (open for input, critiques, resource sharing, etc from you!) about this thing called pain which each of us is intimately and uniquely an expert on in our own ways.
Therefore, starting today, with this introduction, I will publish one thought, idea, concept or what have you, related to suffering which you, the reader, may remark on, critique, tear to shreds, share with your Facebook feed, or ignore completely. Ultimately, to me, the value here is the presence of this conversation in a world and society where suffering is taboo, despite the evidence that all have, are and will experience suffering at least once and more likely often throughout their lives.
“ It is one of the basic tenets of logotherapy that man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life. That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning.”
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning
