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The Transformative Power of Suffering
- mapcars 8y agoThere are things which pain helps to discover and understand, so it is with any other experience. But coming from a yogic background I see his understanding as quite limited. Especially that he tries to "glorify" pain as a "true teacher". Maybe it worked for him like this, but it doesn't have to be so, joy and happiness can do the same if properly handled.
- amelius 8y agoYes, especially mental disorders (which can cause quite a bit of pain), can send one into darker and darker places, ruin relationships and cause further trouble such as personality disorders. Of course, the survivor bias stories may tell things like "depression made me a better person", etc., but most people are not so lucky.
- Xcelerate 8y agoI admire his attitude toward pain and wish I could have that same attitude as well. Like the author, I have a herniated disc (more specifically a disc protrusion) caused by a sudden weight lifting injury 4 years ago when I was 23 that damaged L5-S1. There's not really any hope of it healing on its own, and surgery is far too risky. It's just constant pain pretty much all day every day. Some days aren't too bad—other days are really bad. But the pain is always there, and I think that just knowing it's going to be there tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and every day after that for the next 50-60 years of my life is really the worst part of the injury. I closely follow the latest studies on disc regeneration, but unfortunately medical research is still in the dark ages in that field, and no significant breakthrough is likely to make it past clinical trials anytime in the next decade. So... sorry for the rant, but if there's some deep wisdom to be gained from suffering, I still haven't figured out what it is.
- onecooldev24 8y agoIf I may ask, which weight lifting exercise caused the problem?
- Xcelerate 8y agoRedacted (was just sharing for a few minutes)
- Hnrobert42 8y agoI am very sorry for your accident. Thank you for sharing though. I feel like it will make me a safer lifter.
- amelius 8y agoCould you repeat the information? It seems the original poster deleted it for some reason?
- foota 8y ago@amelius, while I understand the curiosity I think that would be an intrusion of the poster's privacy, when they specifically removed it.
- amelius 8y agoYeah, it's an awkward situation, I understand, but the user is scaring the crap out of people, then retracting part of the essential information. I'm still hoping they will post the information somewhere in an anonymized form, so the bodybuilding community can learn from this accident.
- Xcelerate 8y agoSorry, didn’t mean to scare anyone. I mainly removed it because it was kind of embarrassing. The injury was caused by trying to set a barbell down on the ground myself rather than calling for help when doing bench press. Not something that would happen to most weightlifters.
- Elrac 8y agoJust what we needed - a Jewish Mother Teresa. I'm empathetic to his suffering and applaud that he's managed to find a way to see a bright side. But when anyone goes from there to claiming that being in constant pain somehow makes you better, I see that as going overboard. It's that attitude - with a stronger religious slant and a good touch of stinginess - that led MfT to have her "hospitals" re-using dulled injection needles and not providing effective pain relievers. And blathering nonsense about the beauty of suffering. The idea that suffering is a good thing is pretty much the most perverted idea humans have come up with.
- dalbasal 8y agoI'm catholic, jewish & a hitch fan so I'll second that. We do not need a new theological motivation for suffering, deification of poverty or anything like that. I'm definitely not comfortable with "pain is the route of all blessings" talk. That said, there is an interesting, secular argument in here. We've been saying "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" for a while. Its not true. Some things make you weaker, but it's not all things. Psychological "post trauma" is almost defined as painful experiences leading to bad things. But, we can probably find the opposite too, if we look in to non pathological cases. Either direction count as transformation. Blathering nonsense about beauty (or worse, holiness) of suffering is a bad road. Understanding the non pathological (bad) results from suffering... that might be worthwhile. I agree though, lets not put clerics in charge of the language.
- zaarn 8y agoThe phrase "what does not kill me makes me strong" comes from Nietzsche in the book "Twilight of the Idols". A book in which he criticizes christianity, going as far as comparing it to alcohol as the great narcotic of Europe. Nietzsche, IMO, was the sort that believed that suffering was sort of part of human experience. But not necessarily suffering as in pain, just any form of hardship you might encounter. A lack of suffering would be exemplified by the last men, a group of humans that eliminated all suffering, hardship or negativity in their lives, who take no risks and only seek comfort. (It's a fictional society made up by Zarathustra, a fictional character in Nietzsche's books, as the most disgusting example of the goals of western civilization)
- bufferoverflow 8y agoI got very sick almost a year ago, a few times in the ER, spent months in bed. There's no silver lining to suffering. Your mind doesn't work. It's hard to concentrate. Sex isn't very enjoyable. It's next to impossible to exercise well. You're constantly irritated and lash out at the people around you. You don't get used to it. You adapt, sure, but it sucks big time. F##k suffering. (I'm getting better btw, doctors still don't know wtf happened to me).
- ataturk 8y agoBut do you appreciate simply feeling well after you got better? Are you still chasing idiotic status and material goods or are you more content with just being okay?
- nerdponx 8y agoI came here to say something similar to this. It's possible that you might learn some things about yourself and about the world through the experience, that you otherwise might not have learned. But if it goes on for too long (and/or it's too severe) it just ruins your life.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jm__87 8y agoYeah I'm with you. Suffering on its own is pointless. Learning how to live with pain can bring some interesting insights in to life I think, but it's obviously better to just never have to learn this in the first place.
- bena 8y agoThis is all trite fluff. I disagree with the premise that suffering confers upon anyone special knowledge. The same lessons, the same worldview, the same whatever, can be reached by people without the suffering. People like to say that everyone is different, let's not pretend that there's only one road to enlightenment then. The only thing specific situations can teach us is how to cope with specific situations. Having a broken leg can teach you how to handle crutches better, how to balance on one foot, how to a third thing because you are temporarily disabled. But it cannot teach you how to be a better person. Now, a person with a broken leg might require and receive help and notice that people are genuinely nice and helpful and that changes their perspective on the world. But there are plenty of people who feel that way with two perfectly fine legs. We deify struggle and suffering to such a degree it's kind of sad. There's no nobility in being in a shitty situation.
- triviatise 8y agoI have a completely different world view. Just like you build muscle strength through weight resistance, you build mental strength through overcoming (or just living with) adversity. You may not value that growth or may not feel it is worth the suffering, but that belief is not fact, just opinion.
- bena 8y agoThat's not true though. Given the exact same suffering, two people who have had similar lives will react in different ways. One may break down completely, one may soldier through. Suffering doesn't build character, it reveals it. You're doing the very thing I was saying we do too much of: glorifying suffering. You're also trying to dismiss me by saying what I'm saying is opinion while also trying to say that I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, then it's not technically an opinion I hold. It's just bad information. But you posit that you build mental strength through adversity without actually demonstrating that it's true. Then you claim my position is that I don't value the growth or feel it is worth suffering. That is not what I said. That is a deliberate misrepresentation of what I was saying. I was saying suffering does not teach anything special that cannot be learned elsewhere. I also like how you choose to engage me, rather than the people who shared personal anecdotes of suffering without being granted any special wisdom or knowledge, effectively saying what I said: suffering is not a teacher, suffering is just suffering.
- hprotagonist 8y agoif suffering has a transformative power, it’s that you are compelled to learn humility. With luck, from humility comes empathy and compassion. Unfortunately, you’re just as likely to get fear and despair. That doesn’t make suffering belong to any privileged ethical class— it still sucks!— merely that in responding to the normal fact that “time and chance happens to everyone”, we can extract the opportunity to grow and get something out of it other than pain and despair.
- vinceguidry 8y agoThis is a difficult topic to write and talk about. But rather than a religious approach, I think it's best to talk about this from a psychology of trauma approach. In In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness by Peter A. Levine, the author describes the mindset that exacerbates suffering and also the mindset that leads to faster healing. > trauma is neither a disease nor a disorder, but rather an injury caused by fright, helplessness and loss that can be healed by engaging our innate capacity to self-regulate high states of arousal and intense emotions. There's some kind of magic alchemy that suffering allows us to access that not just causes us to physically heal faster, but also allows us to better transform normal, everyday living. And the quoted text, "innate capacity to self-regulate high states of arousal and intense emotions," is precisely where that alchemy happens. High levels of arousal and intense emotion doesn't just happen when we're suffering, it also happens as a natural consequence of interpersonal relationships. But when we're suffering, the high levels of arousal and emotion don't go away, which allows us to experience them enough to learn how to regulate them. Then when the suffering is over, when things get heightened during daily life, the regulatory capacity that suffering built serves to make the feelings flow easier. That's the transformation described.
- agumonkey 8y agoSomething I experienced is that a form of anger toward life is good when you're in mental pain. Not destructive anger but more proactive anger. It refocus your mind out of whatever clogs it and release 'energy' (simplest sense, you're a lot more able to act) as you feel less pain too.
- todluv 8y agoCan't read the article yet (server is overloaded?), but I just came across a great video by MindSmash that addresses this subject very well. "There are no beautiful surfaces without terrible depths." - Friedrich Nietzsche https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DhZuBhX6Fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DhZuBhX6Fw