The Value of Pain and Suffering

Carl Jung said that the beginning of mental illness lay in the avoidance of legitimate suffering. That being oh-so-sad-but-true, we are obviously a very mentally ill nation. Americans will go to almost any lengths to avoid any kind of suffering--just look at the proliferation of prescription drugs to alleviate depression, anxiety, pain, etc. A pill for every ill, indeed.

Pain, fear, guilt, anger, are all uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings to deal with. It's only natural to want to avoid suffering--the problem is that we can't. They are necessary to our growth as human beings and we avoid them at our peril. They are flashing red warning lights that something is wrong--in our bodies, our minds, our souls--and needs to be addressed. The intensity of the emotion indicates the urgency of addressing the problem.

We can avoid these emotions to a certain extent by using alcohol or drugs, but it's a short-term solution at best. Worse yet, chemically-assisted avoidance only brings with it another range of problems, which compounds the original problem and accelerates our ultimate self-destruction.

It's difficult to come to terms with such powerful, negative emotions precisely because they are powerful--they are primal forces in a modern world and they remind us that maybe, just maybe, we aren't so civilized after all. But we lock up so much of our creative and positive energy in trying to contain and deny these primitive, primal, uncomfortable emotions that we don't leave ourselves much that we can actually use to accomplish the great things we want to accomplish in our lives and our world.

It's also a matter of ego--we hate to admit that sometimes we hurt each other. We like to see ourselves as good people and we think that admitting the fact that sometimes we act spitefully would mean we aren't such good people after all. Why? What it wrong with admitting that we are human beings? Mortal, morally-fragile creatures who are driven as much by their emotions as by their minds?

I agree with Jung that avoiding legitimate suffering leads to mental illness. I have known a lot of people who are "mentally ill" and just about every one of them has some trauma in their life that they refuse to deal with. I understand why they do it--for some people, the pain or grief or anger or guilt is simply too powerful for them to come to terms with. But as hard as it is to face our suffering, to accept and even embrace it our negative emotions, it is absolutely necessary if we are ever going to be whole and healthy, either as individuals or a nation.

I think our nation is suffering from a collective case of PTSD, reeling from the shock of an attack that we did not see coming (although we would have, if we'd cared enough about anything outside our own narrow sphere of self-interest, but that's a topic for another day.) We need to stop paying mere lip-service to the suffering that began, for a lot of us, on 911 and actually start using those primal emotions as a motivation for action instead of an excuse for cowardice and inaction.