04/30/2024
There are those who assert that if only we didn’t try to resist our experience, or have a bad attitude, there would be no pain at all. I challenge that. It’s inevitable that by simply living a life, there will be times of adversity and certainly disruption. It’s not because of our attitude that those times are uncomfortable or heartbreaking. And for the dedicated many who work to make their community or the world at large a kinder, more insightful place, the suffering they aim to alleviate will often spill into their own lives. You may be one of them. That experience of vicarious trauma—which we can also call the shock of witnessing—has all sorts of repercussions: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), burnout, depression, and despair among them. While I believe it’s true that some things just hurt, I also believe that we don’t need extra suffering, and therein lies our work. How do we fully acknowledge the suffering but at the same time not let it define and overtake us?
For a start, it helps to recognize that for many of us, a dominant cultural attitude toward pain is that it’s something to be avoided, denied, “treated.” As a result, it can be particularly tough for people—including me—to acknowledge painful emotions in the context of our efforts toward growth and transformation and social change. Some of us may feel that the cultivation of compassion should be a practice that elevates us beyond feeling those “less virtuous” emotions like anger, annoyance, impatience, and disappointment. But part of the cultivation of compassion is simple recognition—including the recognition of those things that just hurt.
Excerpt from "Real Change" by Sharon Salzberg
