Suffering is a subjective experience. What I mean is, the physical sensation of pain itself can be experienced by a conscious individual in many different ways, from masochistic pleasure all the way to cries of undue retribution. I have found this clarification, this dichotomy of pain vs suffering to be very helpful in my understanding of the world over these past few years. It’s spoken about at extent in many texts on meditation, and in at least the minimal, yet highly effective amount of Dialectical Behavior Therapy I’ve researched.

So where does meditation come in? Meditation allows us to experience pain without suffering and pleasure without neediness. The difference between pain and suffering may seem subtle, but it is highly significant. Let’s go over it again. When physical or emotional pain is experienced in a state of concentration, clarity, and equanimity, it still hurts but in a way that bothers you less. You actually feel it more deeply. It’s more poignant but, at the same time, less problematic. More poignant means it motivates and directs action. Less problematic means it stops driving and distorting actions. I appreciate that merely hearing these words may not be enough to clarify the concept. But look back; perhaps you’ve experienced something like this in the past. If not, having read these words here will help you know what to look for in the future.

- Shinzen Young, The Science of Enlightenment

"Rejecting Reality Turns Pain into Suffering

Suffering is pain plus nonacceptance of the pain. Pain can be difficult or almost impossible to bear, but suffering is even more difficult. Refusal to accept reality and the suffering that goes along with it can interfere with reducing pain.

Suffering comes when:

• People are unable to or refuse to accept pain.

• People cling to getting what they want, refusing to accept what they have.

• People resist reality as it is in the moment.

- The inventor of DBT, Marsha M Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual, 2nd Edition

It surprised me quite a bit that in my research of what I perceived to be entirely different systems of thought, I found this crystal-clear connection. I think when I was younger, I tried to find one system that could encompass everything, that would have answers to all my questions, or if not immediate answers, at least a path forward. This ill-fated quest probably stemmed from my Catholic upbringing, and having The Church presented to me in such a way as to be the answer to all questions, but my burgeoning adolescence resulted in a rather-upsetting-for-my-family-and-myself schism of myself from organized religion; upsetting for them because they thought it was the only capital-T “True” answer to my questions, and upsetting for me because I couldn’t get any part of my seemingly broken mind or heart to understand it, to have faith in it.

Well, I seem to be mostly past my adolescence, now, and I still have an awful lot of questions; however, I also have a theory. It seems to me that there is no system of beliefs and solutions that can cover everything for you, have an answer for every issue, except for the one you build yourself. Why not just believe that humans are different enough that there’s not a single overarching one for every purpose? Why not believe that part of each of our individual quests is developing a meta-system of thought, one that contains all of our individual beliefs and values, built partially out of things we’ve thought of ourselves, and mostly out of things we’ve heard from others that seem to make sense? I suppose I could attempt to clarify what I mean by system of thought now, just to get ahead of that question.

A system of thought is just what it sounds like.

A connection of many underlying rules, beliefs about the world, and practices that result in providing direction when direction doesn’t make itself easily intuited by an individual who subscribes to said system of thought. For many people, a system of thought is kind of like a pair of glasses, a lens through which you can perceive the world, and you can have as many different sets for different purposes as you want. You can put them on, you can take them off, and you can see an entirely different world in the process. This makes it sound simple, and in some ways, it is.

However, truly understanding a system of thought usually requires some cultivated form of belief that the system is truly effective, and that it will be the one to solve your problem. For some of us, owning and using many differing systems of thought can be something of a protective set of armor for our egos and beliefs, preventing us from truly opening up to them and accepting the many ego-breaking truths that new systems of thought often require. Because it’s fun to think of it this way, I like to think of a system of thought as an old god who requires sacrifice; in this case, the sacrificing of some part of your vulnerability to be offered wholesale and given up in the old god’s name, or a temporary sacrifice of some old system of thought that conflicts with an axiom in this new system of thought.

Now let’s get back to pain. I perceived the vague, nonsensical, miasmic idea of “therapy techniques” and the well-studied eastern traditions of meditation to be about as far away from each other as two systems of thought could be, so I was deeply surprised to see such a blatant parallel in the shared concept of pain vs suffering. I mean, it would make sense for them to share such basic ideas as the existence of a self, or the presence of emotions that can be dealt with in various ways, but pain vs suffering? It struck me as a little too microscope-y of a distinction. Regardless, there it was, and grappling with its ramifications was not exactly simple.

Many years ago, the first good therapist I’ve ever had pointed something out to me that I hadn’t noticed myself (being able to do this is, in my mind, one of the marks of a good therapist.) I was telling him about how miserable my life was, and how I would spend pretty much all day trying to avoid thinking about a small set of things that upset me to the point of hating my entire life, when he asked something along the lines of, “Doesn’t that just make it all come rushing back and hit you at once when you remember the unpleasantness?”

I realized he was right. When I tried to forget the pain, every time I would remember it, it felt new again, like I had just been hit for the first time with whatever the negative stimulus was. Before that, I tried to live in the moments between, the brief periods of forgetting whatever it was that bothered me. This shifted my mindset on which experience was the primary experience, and which one was the exception.

Now, I’ve thought about pain quite a bit. Those who know me well likely know that I enjoy certain types of pain. I’ll not be getting too explicit with this, because I want it to be openly accessible.

"...Masochism exaggerates the complementary and opposite aspect, and says ‘I am so enthralled that I welcome even pain at your hands’."

- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

There are two variations of pain about which I’ll briefly go into detail. The first type of pain is posited in the above quote from C.S. Lewis, being a masochist’s yearning for pain that could be viewed or described as a desire for attention or to give up something to someone that is so strong that it, the desire, overtakes our human body and mind’s biological urges to avoid pain at all costs. I find this kind of desire for pain is often accompanied in myself by strong emotions or insecurities that are not being tended to related to the hypothetical pain-giver, and that if this kind of pain is given to me, while it does feel good, doesn’t do much of anything to ameliorate the underlying issue that I have with the one inflicting pain upon me, or with the relationship I have to that person, or with the other difficult emotions I may be incapable of processing at that time.

The second kind of pain is a kind of pain that I find quite helpful. In some ways, I consider its furthest extent, which I sometimes experience, to be the holy grail of sensation, something as clean and pure as light itself, as it allows me to experience the moment fully, finally silences my internal monologue, and not just permits but encourages and allows me to be entirely present. In its calmer forms, this type of pain simply helps ground me into the moment, gives my attention something to focus on (which is encouraged by the experience itself, as it reduces the suffering, allowing only the pleasantness of physical sensation to continue on,) which also helps me with emotion regulation, and certain forms of overthinking that I can identify as not being necessary, but still can’t figure out how to manage. As there is no desire in me in those moments to “be hurt” in a sort of restitutionary sense, I don’t consider it to be a form of self-harm, though I don’t think this would necessarily apply to everyone.

The balance of understimulation and overstimulation can be exceedingly difficult to strike for myself and other Autistic/and or ADHD people, and my personal experience has shifted massively with my attempts over the past year and change to significantly disconnect from social media and finally address my technology addiction. I find that I feel generally better around people who are willing to inflict small to moderate amounts of pain on me in casual contexts, in a not necessarily sexual way. It just feels good. It puts me where I want my awareness to be, which is back in my body, and less in my head (one of the main topics of discussion between me and multiple therapists over the last ~6 years, incidentally. Much progress has been made!)

People who will inflict comfortable pain on you can be a hard thing to locate. I try to maximize my chances by prioritizing physical contact in my life, and putting myself in a lot of uncomfortable social situations to try to form new relationships. It’s terrifying, but when my two choices are to be scared while alone and not doing anything, or to be scared while trying to improve my material conditions, I’ll pick being scared while trying to improve my material conditions every time that I can.

In my teenage years, I had some masochistic urges, which I consider in retrospective to be mostly punitive, but I can’t exactly tell where that ended and where the desire began, because at the time, I considered it all to be sacrificial, in a sort of Catholic sense. I was very confused on the whole topic of pain, but I knew that according to my religion, I was supposed to offer any suffering up to the Lord, so that’s what I tried to do.

When I was about 20, I had known my partner for years, and I had inflicted a large amount of pain on them in sexual contexts for a very long time. I don’t remember how it felt at first, but I remember harboring an at least partially-formed belief that this may have been, in them, a thinly veiled form of the urge to self-harm that was manifesting itself through my touch. I probably pushed this thought away and figured it wasn’t my place to decide what someone did or did not want, or what was or was not healthy for someone else. But the experience I want to talk about was a specific instance from this time period.

I was under the eye-opening and neuron-connecting influence of LSD, and we were sitting together on its bed. I don’t remember if the intuition of how it would go or the action came first, but I reached over, and scratched their arm reasonably hard with my nails. They smiled and provided some other unambiguous signals of enjoyment, and I realized that, to some people, this was just an action I could perform that would cause them to feel good, in the same way that I could stroke someone’s hair, or hold someone’s hand, or rub someone’s back. It struck me without all of its past connotations from my childhood ideas of flagellation and Catholicism and psychopathology. It was just something I could do. This may sound trite when put into words, but if you’ve ever had an experience like this where an understanding of something that had provided much rumination for years clicks cleanly into place, you’ll know that it’s one of the least trite things we have access to in this world.

[Radical Acceptance] Is Not Passivity, Giving Up, or Giving In

Many people are afraid to accept things, because they fear that they will then not try to change things—that they will become passive and helpless. This will happen only if, at the same time,they fail to accept (1) their feelings of dislike or disapproval (2) the possibility that they can make changes if they put in enough effort, and (3) the possibility that it is worth their time to try to change what they don’t like.

- The inventor of DBT, Marsha M Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual, 2nd Edition

As I go forward, I’m striving never to deny my pains or to reject them in any fashion, and whenever I notice myself doing so, I try to take a second and non-judgementally notice the real, factual nature of the situation, and that I will always be able to deal with it better by accepting the discomfort and pain as it is, first, before trying to move on or influence it in any way. It requires constant awareness and is sometimes profoundly difficult, but it is easier than the alternative of living a life defined by suffering.