By: Joshua Coleman
Terrible things can happen. You are diagnosed with an incurable disease. An accident changes your ability to do the activities that made life fun and meaningful. Your spouse decides that he wants someone else. Even if he is lucky enough to avoid major life-changing events, he will face disappointments, hurts, or humiliations that require him to make sense of the many ways in which existence can be painful.
The inevitability of suffering is written into every aspect of our shared past. He has worried philosophers such as Aristotle, Socrates, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Cynics. Religious leaders have instructed the faithful in the meaning of suffering since humans first conceived of spirits or gods. The belief that our interpretation of events determines our experience of pain was seen in the writings of the 7th-century Buddhist Dharmakīrti and the 11th-century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham. The universality of suffering is made palpable through works of art such as Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture, Rondanini’s Pietà (1552-64), or JS Bach’s Chaconne in D minor (c1710s-20s), to name just a few. .
Despite all that accumulated wisdom and perspective, I still don’t know what to say to some of my friends or clients who are suffering. There is no new body for the woman diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. There is no new spine for my friend who had a serious spinal cord injury from a skiing accident. There are also no easy solutions for parents whose adult children no longer want them in their lives, an area in which I have specialized for the last 15 of my 40 years as a psychologist. It is not uncommon for these people to wonder, “Will I die alone in a hospital bed with no children or grandchildren to comfort me?” Who will bury me? “Will my kids miss me once I’m gone?”
No one trained me for these questions, and I’m sure I answered clumsily and ineffectively in the early years when I started getting a lot of referrals after writing my first book on distancing, When Parents Hurt (2007). But after working with so many separated parents over the past 15 years and doing my own research through the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, summarized in my new book Rules of Estrangement (2021), I slowly discovered something important: the more we try to evade or avoid painful realities, the more we become entangled in the tentacles of their embrace.
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I found guidance in the research of psychologist , founder of dialectical behavioral therapy. “The way out of hell is through misery,” Linehan wrote. “By refusing to accept the misery that is part of leaving hell, you fall back into hell.” The way out of hell is through misery. What is that supposed to mean? It means you have to start by “radically accepting” where you are now. Radical acceptance means that you don’t fight what you feel right now. You feel sad? Feel sad. Don’t judge him, don’t reject him, don’t diminish him and don’t try to control his pace. Turn toward the feeling instead of away from it.
I learned this lesson the hard way. Part of my interest in estrangement began when my own daughter cut off contact with me for several years when she was in her early 20s. She had divorced her mother for some time, but I eventually remarried and had more children, an act that made her feel displaced in a way she hadn’t fully understood until she was an adult. During those terrible years of my estrangement, I found myself rehearsing every day all the parenting mistakes she had made. The tender memories that seemed insensitive to revision were filled with doubts and self-criticism. The moments when I knew I had been far from my best self as a parent were thrust into a tortuous spinning cycle of ‘If only I hadn’t said that, done that, written that.’ At some point, instead of continuing down this path, I thought, “Your daughter may never speak to you again. Forever. When was the last time you saw her? That could be the last time you see her. “You’re going to have to accept that.” It wasn’t a harsh or critical voice, rather sage advice from a censored part of me. And the tolerance of that sad reality was, paradoxically, comforting. It helped me stop fighting something that wasn’t changing. It freed me to be more open to facing the ways I would let her down, an act that led to our eventual, blessed reconciliation.
Radical acceptance emphasizes the importance of facing our current condition in all its terrible implications. Statements like “This isn’t fair,” “I don’t deserve this,” “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” no matter how true, only increase our suffering. To use a mundane example, consider getting stuck in traffic, a situation over which you have little control. It’s tempting to berate yourself for not leaving earlier, for living in a congested city, or for hating the person causing traffic because he didn’t check the gas gauge before leaving.
Of course, living in the present doesn’t necessarily mean more joy, or any joy, for that matter. If anything, focusing on the immediate present could intensify your feelings of sadness, fear, or anger. However, we can gain increasing control and awareness over how long and how intensely we experience painful realities by facing them in the present. We can reinterpret the meaning of painful events, take actions to lessen the pain, and reduce the distance it travels through other aspects of our lives. Facing our thoughts and feelings head on might also free us to appreciate the positive aspects of our lives, unrelated to the troubling event: those we love and those who love us.
An example of moving toward painful feelings is illustrated in the work of psychologist and neuroscientist, who advises people to delve into the “granularity” of their emotions. If there is something that makes you sad, try to go even deeper in your exploration and description. Ask yourself if it is just sadness, or is it actually despair, pain, misery, agony, rejection, insecurity, pain or defeat? Is it just anger? Or is it resentment, rage, irritation, jealousy, anger or bitterness?
Why should I be more specific? Barrett, who wrote the book (2017) found that greater emotional granularity was associated with a lower need for medications, fewer days of hospitalization for illnesses, and greater flexibility in emotion regulation. Barrett does not recommend that we dwell on the feeling, but instead try to explore its shape and limits to increase its definition.
Barrett points out that culture largely determines what we attend to and how our emotions are generated. She disagrees with researchers such as psychologist Paul Ekman, who believes that each emotion has its own neurological signature that can be identified similarly across cultures. Instead, he notes that some cultures do not have a unified concept for the experiences that Westerners group together as “an emotion.” He lists as examples the Ifaluk of Micronesia, the Balinese, the Fulani of West Africa, the Ilongot of the Philippines, the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, the Minangkabau of Indonesia, the Pintupi of Western Australia, and the Samoans as cultures that characterize non-human emotions. as something that occurs within the individual, but as interpersonal events that require two or more people.
The power of radical acceptance can also be found in exposure therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In exposure therapy, participants are guided to gradually increase pressure on the events or outcomes they most fear, fear, or seek to avoid. This form of therapy can be done by imagining the experience, for example, when a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is guided to relive a traumatic war event, or when someone who fears public speaking joins and it is necessary, over time, to go on stage and talk to the audience.
Exposure therapy, like radical acceptance, operates from the premise that what remains in the dark grows in the dark; that serenity is best achieved by looking more deeply into the face of what we fear than by going in the other direction. For example, the first time you watch a horror movie, you will be horrified – that is, if you are doing your job. But how scared will you be on the fifth, let alone tenth, viewing of the same movie? At some point, your mind concludes that since nothing terrible has happened, you should check your email or buy something to eat. The parallel with the horror movie is that the more we expose ourselves to (and radically accept) what we fear, the more we diminish its influence on us. The more we avoid facing our fears, the less we can loosen their grip.
Another technique used in exposure therapy is “flooding,” which uses the “down arrow” technique. Here, you take the event that worries you the most and keep going down, down, down until you reach the worst case scenario. For example, Jennifer discovered that her husband was cheating on her. When she confronted him, he admitted it, saying that he was in love with the other woman and that he wanted to file for divorce. Jennifer was understandably devastated and in enormous pain. However, she had a bigger problem, and that was the way her mind terrified her by telling her that it was her fault, that she would never fall in love again, and, perhaps most importantly, that the pain she was experiencing was intolerable. Using the horror movie model, I asked Jennifer to write a paragraph of her most convincing predictions about the future and her beliefs about her worthlessness with all of her chilling details. I instructed her to write it down every day and read it over and over again for 5 to 15 minutes until her anxiety and her emotions began to subside that day. I discouraged her from getting distracted because she knew that her mind couldn’t be properly bored with the horror movie unless she was watching it intensely. Over time, her anxiety began to decrease and her ideas began to challenge the automaticity of her pathogenic beliefs. Like most of her psychological interventions, she required daily practice and diligence. However, with time and effort, she was able to shorten the duration so much…