"It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.” -Pema Chodron
While I am a great admirer of Pema Chodron, I would also add that it isn’t only what we say, but the degree we resist what is happening – with a litany of “that shouldn’t have happened…”.
We all have stories we tell ourselves about the events in our lives. Many of them are negative: My girlfriend/boyfriend left me because I’m not good enough. I didn’t get that job because people think I’m incompetent. My parents were too hard on me because they don’t really love me. Life is unfair. I never get a decent break. Blah, blah, blah...
We often give far more meaning to events than they actually had, allowing them to define us and our relationships, sometimes for years at a time. When I was nine (1964) my great-grandmother, with whom I was very close, died. My mother and grandmother decided that I shouldn’t go to the funeral home or funeral service – and shipped me off to my step-grandmothers house. I put up quite a fuss (you can only imagine how dramatic a nine year old can be when really pushed) and pretty soon they rethought and allowed me to attend. Years later I remember writing a poem that included a line, “death is for children, too”.
The story I made up to myself about all this was that my family didn’t love me, wasn’t “proud” of me – and didn’t want me at the funeral because of those things. My dad was a very critical person and instilled in me early that no matter what I did, I wasn’t OK. Years later I was talking with my mother and somehow the subject came up. She said, “we didn’t want you to go because we thought it would all be too traumatic for you, not because we didn’t love you.”
“Oh” I thought to myself. “Really?”
That event had defined my relationship with my family for years. I had moved thousands of miles away from them, and really, from that time – had felt an emotional distance that exists to this day. All because I interpreted whatever was happening through a set of filters that were inaccurate.
My former boss, used to like to say, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” I learned a lot from him and recognized the wisdom of separating out pain and suffering – pain being the immediate feeling of loss or discomfort triggered by a particular incident, and suffering being the ongoing feeling of loss, angst or discomfort, not actually triggered by the incident, but by the story we created about the incident.
There is so much suffering in the world. Suffering, which at some level, is caused not by the various and horrible things that happen to so many of us, but by the stories we create about how we are to blame, or how whatever happened shouldn’t have happened, or how things should have been different somehow.
But they weren’t. They didn’t. It wasn’t. What happened, happened. And we can go on and on to ourselves about all the “shoulds” of the situation, or we can create a story of empowerment and resiliency – about how whatever happened, happened – and about how we’re working tirelessly to overcome whatever hardship was created. And, like Charlie Sheen, we’re winning. Only in our case, really winning.
Your stories can either leave you feeling helpless or empowered. The choice is yours.
Some of us may like feeling helpless. It gives us an excuse to give up, to have lower expectations of ourselves. To limit ourselves from having to push our boundaries or step outside of our comfort zone. To make other people responsible for our well-being (or create the illusion for ourselves that they are).
Martin Seligman, who coined the term “positive psychology” suggests that we can learn optimism and change those stories using the ABC model. When an adversity (A) happens, we can identify beliefs (B) about whatever happened and the undesirable consequences (C) they create.
So if your girlfriend/boyfriend left you and you believe it’s because you’re not good enough, that will likely leave you feeling down on yourself, and as a consequence, shut down to joy and other people.
The alternative is to dispute that story to create a sense of possibility. Instead of believing that you’re not good enough, you can think, “This one relationship didn’t work out, and I can learn from this, but lots of people love me, just as I am, and many more will in the future if I keep putting myself out there.” What ever happens is whatever happens. We can’t change it, but we have total power to re-write our story about whatever happened. Because, ultimately, our response is entirely a creation of ourselves…we own our thinking process.
A revised story won’t completely take away the pain, but it will remind you that it’s temporary–and that you are not helpless. And, it may keep you from making suffering a career choice. There’s nothing more disempowering and draining than a chronic victim mentality.
We are never helpless unless we choose to be. Why would we consciously make that kind of choice?
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