Suffering: Not a Curse

John Baptist

Clinical Counselor

Different people understand suffering in different ways. Some might understand and experience suffering as a curse. Living our suffering as a curse means that “we experience our pain as a confirmation of our negative feelings about ourselves” (Henry Nouwen). Pain can emerge when we experience physical hurts and sicknesses, emotional and spiritual struggles, broken and abusive relationships, social and cultural exploitations, or separations and deaths. Pain hurts and can lead to suffering. Unfortunately, the painful events in our lives are often understood as a curse – punishment from God or rejection from human beings. 

The human mind craves explanations for what happens in our life, particularly for pain and suffering. Sadly, we can form a self-destructive belief wherein we consider ourselves worthless, deserving only rejection and misfortune. Over and over, we can convince ourselves saying, “See, I knew I was useless and unlovable. No one cares about me, including God. Now, I am sure of this because of how they hurt and reject me”. If we have already yielded to negative beliefs about ourselves, particularly those of self-rejection and loathing, then every form of pain and suffering only confirms them in a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the moments of suffering, the question “Why” — Why me? Why now? — becomes ever-haunting, and we are easily seduced consciously or unconsciously into connecting painful events with a curse. Nouwen, in his wisdom, states, “When we have cursed ourselves or have allowed others to curse us, it is very tempting to explain all the brokenness we experience as an expression or confirmation of this curse”. 

The process of understanding suffering invites us to diagnose the undercurrents of negative feelings about ourselves. Once we detect them we can dare to break the fetters of self-destructive beliefs, particularly the belief of self-rejection. 

 

Notes

Henry Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World