Facing Sufering
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In a myriad of forms—acute, violent, dull, excruciating, persistent—pain wears down the body and oppresses the spirit. It abounds in the life of the poor and ruins the life of the rich. It makes a child cry, disfigures a young person's body, marks an adult's face, and bows the shoulders of the elderly. From the cradle to the grave, our suffering is relentless. Work and pleasure, dependence and freedom, virtue and vice, love and hate, all can make us suffer. Pain is part of our human condition. You could say that we are no longer children when we learn that a mother's kiss cannot take away all of our sorrows.This book is intended to help the individual face suffering with dignity and realism, addressing some of the more practical aspects—psychological, social, philosophical, and theological. With an awareness of subject's complexity, the book presents a series of thoughts aimed at understanding the ultimate why behind pain and how to cope with it meaningfully. In addition, with the layman in mind, this book provides simple resources to face one's own pain calmly and that of others with compassion and tact. The objective is to help fight and endure the reality of pain as much as possible, with courage and hope…
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Dedicated to all those with whom pain has united me:
To those to whom I have caused pain,
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Moreover, as demonstrated by Dr. Sylvie Galland, there are many patients who repeat models of painful relationships that they experienced in childhood, which would often be inevitable. For example, the child of an alcoholic tends, more easily than someone else, to take on a painful role similar to the one her mother suffered because of her father’s problems, subconsciously predisposing her to put up with the behavior of a husband…preferably alcoholic! “Perhaps our competitive society has something to do with this. Honors and gratification belong only to those who succeed. But affection, compassion and general favor naturally go to those who suffer. As it is much easier to fail in life than to succeed and to be unhappy than to be happy, the tendency for some is to prefer the easy way.”19
To make matters worse, there are conditions that, for some patients, have a captivating, almost heroic aspect, whose intensity they would never find in the routine of their mediocre lives. An emergency physician friend told me about a homeless man who “had accidents” on a regular basis, to the point where the medical team believed that he did it on purpose, because he missed the excellent care that he received in the hospital each time that he was admitted for his recovery period. Obviously, this is an extreme case, but even to lesser degrees the nostalgia of suffering is not unusual. Some patients confine themselves to their problems as if they did not wish to leave a jail cell to which they had grown accustomed.
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