Suffering: The Series Part 10 ~The Roles We Choose

Allow me to make this even more personal.

I recently read an article on suffering by Luc Boltanski called Distant Suffering, an artful discussion on the ways suffering affects us from a distance. What I expected was an article on the ways suffering either calls us to action or convinces us it would cause us our own suffering to enter and therefore motivates us to an inhuman lack of action.

What awaited me was even more personal, more insightful, and more beautiful—and, more importantly, much more enlightening to the ways society has taught us to overlook the sufferings of others.

Let me break it down.

Boltanski opens with the question this blog has been scratching at this whole time: What does suffering do to a person, and more specifically, how does it affect all involved?

My answer: It either inspires action or lack of action, depending on where the person experiencing or witnessing it is coming from within their history and understating of it.

Boltanski doesn’t refute this—however, his answer is different.

To Boltanski, there are three ways a person responds to the suffering of others. The first is indignation, or a sort of justice response causing the viewer to feel anger toward the one generating that suffering. Within my answer, this response would likely influence action, as anger typically moves one to action, whether out of protectiveness or defensiveness.

However, the action this inspires may not be outward or even centered on the person experiencing suffering at all. There is a sort of circular process that happens internally with this response which goes something like this:

Distant suffering occurs —→ I see that suffering —→ I feel upset because it happened —→ I jump to action to satisfy that anger —→The response I get or don’t get causes a secondary anger —> I continue to respond in action or anger as long as the response either encourages my anger or fails to satisfy it.

And so on and so forth. And, hear me out. I am not saying it is wrong or conceited to feel anger in this situation and want to do something about it. A cycle of actual protective anger will include a desire to fix the situation which caused the suffering to begin with and have a selfless element to it, to varying degrees. What I am highlighting is that once I feel something like anger, my actions as a human being tend to shift to the self-protective. Not exclusively, but typically, and that can be enough of a distraction that my anger response doesn’t actual help the person who is suffering.

I could ramble on more about this, but the point I am trying to make is that, in this perfectly reasonable response, the action tends to still point away from the sufferer, which doesn’t actually help. The challenge here? Notice your anger, validate it, and then ask, “What can I do with my anger that would actually connect me to the sufferer in a way that heals them?”

On we go.

The second reaction is that of tender-heartedness. This is simply the response of feeling moved and ultimately wanting to help out of compassion. Like the anger response, this is fundamentally good. Where this goes awry is a similar fork in the road that the anger response has. The minute my actions become about trying to satisfy my feelings it ceases to be something truly geared toward the other person, which again misses the opportunity for real, healing connection.

“But wait just a second, Alicia. Isn’t that just humans being human?”

Yes, imaginary person reading this and asking this question, yes. This is humanity at its finest and most honest. I actually cannot experience a total ignorance of who I am and what I feel. I am simply not designed to do that without harming myself. Moreover, my goodness and response of goodness to another will always involve me as a participant, and therefore I cannot not act in my own interest even in the tiniest of ways.

The reason? We are creatures of community. Whether you believe in God or not, the fact is there are 8 billion of us bopping around this planet, and all of us would not be able to thrive let alone survive without another human being around to make life worth living

(Don’t believe me"? Watch any of a dozen Twilight Zone episodes where the main character wishes to be alone or for everyone to be gone. The plot is fictional, but the response of the person is psychologically and philosophically accurate.)

So, to summarize this part, yes. The response of the tender-hearted is good, and helpful, and human in a beautiful way, as is the anger response. Both imply empathy, which is the glue of human connection. And, as with the anger response, it can be easily misguided to be more self-satisfying than helpful to the sufferer. Can I judge anyone in these cases? No, not even a little bit. My challenge remains the same, however. Notice, validate, ask. We don’t impact the problem unless we face it directly.

Still with me? Good. Onward.

The third and final response is more of a role and is a little bit complex, so I will try to break it down for you.

Boltanski introduces the idea of what he calls the aesthetic response. This is the response which views suffering as something more artistic, something you see in a painting as a viewer or spectator. More simply put, this is the response of engaged indifference. That is not to say that the view does not care, but rather that there is something causing the view to redirect or reassign their care as immaterial as there is nothing for them to do with it.

This is the person who feels but does not act either because it is too sublime or surreal to process and therefore is categorized as an exhibit, a portrait, something both present and past tense, frozen in time and actively occurring, which is meant to be experienced and then walked away from.

Again. No judgment here. There are things that are simply too much for a human to bear, and suffering is certainly one of those things. We are not made to imagine suffering to great degrees could actually happen to us, and when it does or we are faced with it in someone else’s life, we freeze, we fight or we flee.

When we don’t know what we are facing, the worldview we have developed from our past experiences is challenged and turned on its head, and the unknown raises questions about our ability to handle the reality of life and still thrive and see ourselves the same as before.

So, this response, again, fits perfectly within the humanity of humanity. I don’t want to face something that challenges what I think about myself and the world because I need what I think about the world to remain unchanged so I can carry on with confidence. And since I cannot change what is in front of me, I will place distance between me and it so I can keep both my own worldview and this reality and not need to face change or myself ultimately.

I say this with love and compassion. We all have this tendency; I cannot begin to try and point fingers. And yet, if you have read the rest of this post, you know I am going to challenge something to change about this response. There is a 100% guarantee that a soul in suffering will continue suffering in the same way if this is my response. And so, at the risk of being repetitive, I will present to same challenge. Notice. Validate. Ask.

And another thing.

Let yourself feel it. If I could write a letter to the world, this would be a bullet point. Feel.

We try so very hard to not feel things that get in our way. We try so very hard to not feel things that challenge what we think about ourselves and the world.

We try so very hard not to feel. But that is why we are where we are now.

Boltanski writes a bit more about this subject, and I encourage you to read it further. But for the sake of this post, and my own mission to change the dialogue about suffering, I will offer yet another role, one not mentioned in Distant Suffering: The Knowledgeable Giver.

This is the person who sees, feels, and acts, both as someone knowledgeable of their own emotions and reactions, and of the suffering of the other in a way that utilizes the first for the second, in connection with the second. This person sees the suffering and doesn’t look away, because they know the person suffering didn’t have that as an option, and is simply looking for another human to show them it can be carried without being the reason human connection is elusive or held back from being too sublime.

This is a person we all can be. I don’t say this as a therapist with an impossibly high standard. I say this as a person who has seen humanity let each other down, when the answer to healing lies in pursuit of normal, attainable human connection. The kind that says, “I may not understand this, and it may scare me, but I couldn’t imagine carrying this alone, so I will stay and sit with you.”

This isn’t something exclusive to therapists; This is something innate in all of us. And it’s time we gave it proper attention and let it lead us.