Stop Suffering, It Doesn’t Make You A Better Person
All my pain will pay off. Life will put everyone in their place, especially everyone who has betrayed me. I have to suffer because this is how I will get rewarded one day. Now I may not enjoy life, but one day that opportunity will come because the universe or God knows how bad I have been. All the sadness that I suffer is useful, because good people suffer and are the ones who win the most in the end.
Perhaps these phrases sound familiar to you, we could say that they are part of a speech repeated for years. It is so popular, that surely we have all had it as a temptation at some time or we have even adopted it as our own. It is the belief that happiness will be a reward for our suffering, not for the actions we do actively and pleasantly. It is the emotional heritage of our Judeo-Christian roots. He who is good suffers, for himself and for others.
In the clinical field of psychology, there is a large percentage of depressed patients with this totally irrational idea activated in everything they do in their lives. This is what is known as the “fallacy of divine reward”, which is nothing more than believing that our “good” actions should be rewarded by a magical and irrational agent.
Your actions are more powerful than what you call karma
You do not have to wait for opportunities, you have to create them, take advantage of them and make the most of them. That requires tenacity, self-determination and firmness. In this life you have to put limits to the abuses: those that others commit with you and those that you inflict on yourself.
Pain and discouragement are part of life and accepting them as such will give you emotional health, to know how to tolerate and face them, to prevent them from becoming a chronic and dysfunctional feeling. However, sometimes we embrace suffering as a true way of life.
We settle in complaining and victimhood, because we feel that life does not fulfill the principle of reciprocity, since sometimes when we hug, it hits us back. As if life were at the mercy of our desires, as if life were not a source of unpredictable and arbitrary events based on its own strange and indecipherable laws.
If in reality karma were more powerful than our just and correct actions, the people who constantly hurt and manipulate would be suffering compared to those who receive that damage and not the other way around. You only have to take a look around you to realize that the world is far from being fair and rewarding those who suffer. How to act then?
Within the systemic perspective of psychology, the roots of this way of thinking and acting are analyzed, which often finds its anchor in messages within the same family. Punishment does not teach children anything if it is not accompanied by a positive or restorative practice.
The child must understand that to remedy something that he has done wrong, he has to repair what he has damaged or do something positive that compensates for that act, immediately and contingent on the undesirable behavior. . We internalize from a young age that suffering passively is the right thing to do.
Replace self-punishment with valuable actions
If you want something better for your life, put in place the strategies and skills you have to make that happen. Sitting around waiting for the world to identify your pain in order to reward you for it is a misconception.
In many cases, depression is based on that sensation of learned helplessness : we believe that whatever we do, nothing will improve things, because it has never happened like this before. It is time to think about what your strategies were previously. If you had a passive attitude in the face of adversity and threw in the towel with the slightest difficulty or if you faced them actively.
Suffering tends to attract more suffering, it is a matter of inertia. It weakens our immune system, which no longer saves energy for situations of real danger, since we constantly place ourselves in a plane of alert, distrust and tension.
An inner pain that we hope will one day change, when the only way to improve is not to wait for things to happen to reward ourselves just because we have been having a hard time. If you want reinforcements, you have to go looking for them. Sadness and inactivity are addictive. Stop suffering, it does not make you a better person, it only causes pain to you and to those who care about you.
