How to Make it Through Suffering

Everyone experiences pain. But sometimes that pain turns into suffering or even misery. For young people struggling with anxiety, depression, racial/oppression-based stress, or other challenges, it feels very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to tolerate pain. As a result, they may attempt to alleviate pain with strategies that ultimately transform that pain into suffering. When pain turns into suffering or misery, doing what is important to you, making connections, and caring for yourself becomes very, very difficult. 

Did you know that there is a difference between people that get stuck in suffering or misery and those who don’t? Although we can experience pain in infinite ways, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) offers four (4) approaches to handling painful problems… potentially interrupting the onset of suffering and misery.

 4 Things You Can Do When Painful Problems Arise

Solve the problem. Do you have a problem in your life? Can you do something about it? Write down all the different things you can do to solve the problem. The pros and cons skill or missing links analysis can be useful here. You can change the situation or leave it. Remember that we are a problem-solving culture in the U.S. … and not everything requires problem-solving.

Change how you feel. We recognize that you can’t just get rid of feelings. However, you can look at your situation and determine if it’s possible to shift your strong emotions or even add in some uplifting emotions. Try looking at the situation as if you aren’t the one in it…what would you say to a friend or loved one? Engage in emotion regulation skills such as opposite action, observing cognitive distortions, or checking the facts. 

Accept the problem. While pain is a part of life, radically accepting a problem keeps that pain from becoming suffering. Radical Acceptance fully accepts that we cannot change the present situation, even if we don’t like it. When we try to change things we have no control over, we experience more pain and suffering. Focusing on what we can control can be liberating and helps us to focus on ways we can cope or take care of ourselves. Practicing gratitude and mindfulness can assist your mind in taking a willing and accepting stance.

Stay miserable. Don’t do anything. Don’t make any changes. Don’t accept reality. Stay stuck in your unhelpful thinking. It’s a real choice. This choice, unfortunately, tends to lead to unhelpful urges (think sending a nasty text to a friend), increased loneliness, and greater hopelessness. 

Let’s go through an example together. Say your problem is that you’re feeling lonely today. 

1. You could solve the problem by changing the situation and put yourself in situations where socializing is more likely to occur. You could call an old friend, get in touch with a family member, join social groups, volunteer, or initiate conversations with co-workers, neighbors. 

2.  You decide you cannot change the actual problem, so you decide to change your feelings about it. You start to feel better about feeling lonely after reminding yourself that you have people in your life and they are all busy today. You also notice you can find joy in spending time on your own because you get to decide to do whatever you’d like! Using the opposite action skill, you decide to walk down the street and get an ice peach green tea and surprisingly have a really nice time. :) 

3.  Using mindfulness, you observe that you can’t solve the problem and can't get yourself to feel better, so you decide to radically, wildly accept that you feel lonely today - and that’s okay. You don’t have to hide from this feeling or try to push it away. You can reasonably connect to it. You remind yourself that you’re spending the day alone because you didn’t make plans ahead of time. You choose to practice gratitude for Hulu. A few episodes in, you already forgot that you were feeling lonely earlier. *Ding* You receive a text that a friend wants to hang out this weekend.

4.  You choose to stay miserable or decide to make the problem worse. You get so angry that you’re feeling lonely today that you throw your phone at the wall, and it breaks. Now you really can’t get in touch with anybody and have a broken phone. :/

I hope you can notice how the different ways we responded completely altered the experience!

For more guidance on working through suffering with the help of a therapist, reach out to us at hello@mindchicago.com. 

 Authored by Mind Chicago therapist Fatima Sakrani, LSW