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To Choose Suffering
What if, while we cannot always choose our pain, we have some responsibility for what we do with our suffering?
This question isn't meant to minimize the fact that tragedy exists, or that someone might be experiencing more than one tragedy at a time. Rather, it asks something more difficult: How do we choose to show up in the face of what has happened to us?
In last week's conversation on EZC with Anu Verma, we discussed all things trauma, especially Anu's experience of sexual trauma at the age of three. What happened to her was tragic, unfair, and horrible. She did not choose it.
But the pain and agony continued into her life as she began associating sex with acceptance and punishment. She continued engaging in reckless behaviours, seeking to finally find an answer to her pain, yet suffering ensued.
Eventually, something shifted.
Anu finally took her healing seriously, not by escaping her pain, but by confronting it. She recognized that while she did not choose what happened to her, she could choose how she related to that experience and how much influence it would have over what happened next.
At a critical point in our conversation, Anu shared why forgiveness ultimately meant forgiving herself. She had to recognize that she was not some bad person who deserved to suffer.
Perhaps that is where part of the answer lies.
When we can't figure out why the same things keep happening over and over again, or why people seem to treat us the same way, sometimes the hardest thing to do is look in the mirror and ask:
"What role am I playing in this?"
It is not an easy task. Nor does taking responsibility mean accepting responsibility for what someone else has done to us. It means examining what remains within our control now.
That can begin a profound journey, but only if we choose to embark on it.
Reflecting on my conversation with Anu, I felt grateful to visit the mountains and contemplate in nature's quiet stillness. I sat with the small choices I am making every day, and I could easily see which ones align with my life's purpose and which ones may be leading me off the path.
I choose.
Even in moments when I feel at the mercy of circumstances, choices are still available to me.
This idea also surfaced in conversations with clients this past week. Some were focused on what their loved ones were doing, others on difficult colleagues, or even drivers on the road. While these situations are obviously different from the trauma Anu experienced, they reminded me of how easily our attention can become consumed by the behaviour of others.
We tend to take things personally and interpret other people's choices as though they are being made at us. But everyone is making choices. Some of those choices impact us directly, while others may have very little to do with us at all.
The work, then, becomes examining our relationship to what is happening: approaching it with curiosity, asking what remains within our control, and choosing how we want to show up.
That may seem reductive given life's complexity, but complexity does not change what is within our control.
Arguably, recognizing this gives us more power than sitting in the same cycle, hoping that something outside of us will change while we remain the same.
The choice is ours. Pain will inevitably find us through circumstances we cannot control. But we still have a say in what we do with that pain—and whether we allow it to determine the course of our lives.
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