Stop Suffering, It Doesn’t Make You A Better Person

All my pain will be rewarded. Life will put everyone in their place, especially all those who betrayed me. I need to suffer because that way someday I will have a reward. Now maybe I don’t enjoy life, but one day that opportunity will come because the universe or God knows all the evil I’ve been through. All the sadness I suffer is useful, because good people suffer and ultimately earn the most.

Perhaps these phrases are familiar to you, we could say that they are part of a discourse repeated over the years. It’s such a popular speech that, of course, we’ve all had it as a temptation at one time, or 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. Whoever is good suffers, for him and for others.

In the clinical sphere 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” deeds should be rewarded by a magical and irrational agent.

Your attitudes are more powerful than what you call karma

It is not necessary to wait for the opportunities, it is necessary to create them, take advantage of them and make the most of each one of them. This requires will, determination and firmness. In this life it is necessary to place limits on abuses: what others do to you and what you apply to yourself.

Pain and discouragement are part of life, and accepting them will give you the emotional health to know how to tolerate and face them, to prevent them from turning into a chronic and dysfunctional feeling. However, we sometimes embrace suffering as an authentic way of life.

We settle for complaints and victimization because we feel that life does not comply with the principle of reciprocity, as sometimes when we give a 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 fact karma were more powerful than our righteous and righteous actions, then the bad and constantly manipulating people would be suffering in relation to the ones who receive the damage and not the other way around. You only have to look around you to realize that the world is far from being fair and rewarding those who suffer. So how to act?

Suffering doesn’t necessarily make us stronger

To think that if you go through hard times and suffer life, it will give you back all the good things you need and deserve is to think that if I take a piece of paper and say it’s money, I can buy anything with it. It is a somewhat delusional and destructive belief that we impose on ourselves, as if suffering were a kind of blessing.

Many people are scared when things are calm and going well. They are in a constant state of alert and dissatisfaction, as if this were the attitude that would bring them the most benefit. As if constantly thinking about the bad things that could happen would bring greater future happiness.

Within the systemic perspective of psychology, the attachment to this way of thinking and acting is analyzed, which often originates in messages from within the family itself. Punishment does not teach children anything if it is not accompanied by constructive practice.

The child needs to understand that to remedy something they have done wrong, they need to repair what they have done or do something positive to compensate for this attitude, immediately and contingent on the unwanted behavior. If we simply punish her so that she suffers, she will understand that the repair of the damage lies in the resistance of the suffering that the punishment imposes on her. We have internalized since we were children that suffering passively is the right thing to do.

Replace self-imposed punishment with worthwhile actions

If you want something better for your life, use the strategies and skills you have to make it happen. Sitting around waiting for the world to identify your pain to reward you for it is a false idea.

Depression is often based on this sense of learned helplessness: we think that nothing we do will make things better, because it has never happened that way before. It’s time to think about what your strategies were before. If you had a passive attitude in the face of adversities and threw in the towel when faced with the slightest difficulty or if you faced them actively.

Suffering usually brings more suffering, it is a matter of inertia. It weakens our immune system, which no longer has the energy for real danger situations, as we constantly place ourselves on a plane of alert, distrust and tension.

An inner pain that we hope will someday change, when the only way to get better is not to wait for things to happen to reward us just because we’ve been hurting. If you want incentives, you have to go after them. Sadness and lack of action are addictive. Stop suffering, it doesn’t make you a better person, it only causes pain to yourself and the people who care about you.