“Although other animals experience pain, we alone question the pain. We ask how long it will last, whether and how we can control it, and why it has stricken us. Because we possess reason and language, we seek explanations and ways to cope with our ills and miseries. Modern medicine explains a great deal about how we become sick, and it has given us powerful techniques for curing disease; but it generally ignores illness’s meaning. Yet questions about the why of suffering persist.”
“What is significant is the person’s attitude toward an unalterable fate. The opportunity to realize such attitudinal values is therefore always present whenever a person finds himself confronted by a destiny toward which he can act only by acceptance. The way in which he accepts, the way in which he bears his cross, what courage he manifests in suffering, what dignity he displays in doom and disaster, is the measure of his human fulfillment.” Victor Frankl
“Even at the limits of endurance, we remain free to choose how to suffer and die, and that choice confers meaning on the experience.” There are two broad “approaches to suffering: resistance and transformation. Resistance actively struggles against illness, cruelty, and death. It can be a creative engagement with the limiting conditions of human life. Transformation also involves struggle, but of a more complex and interior kind. It assimilates our suffering to religious explanations and cultural models and in the process fundamentally alters our attitudes toward suffering. … Paradoxically, it is by appropriating traditional, public patterns of meaning that we make suffering our own. For these patterns give us a renewed sense of control by ordering the otherwise chaotic, isolating experiences of pain, illness, and dying. They transform us by making sense of our suffering in ways that we can accept. The contrast between resistance and transformation should not, however, be overstated. For we can also be transformed through active struggle, and protest against an inherited interpretation can yield a deeper transformation that shatters a culture’s established views of suffering.”
“What is significant is the person’s attitude toward an unalterable fate. The opportunity to realize such attitudinal values is therefore always present whenever a person finds himself confronted by a destiny toward which he can act only by acceptance. The way in which he accepts, the way in which he bears his cross, what courage he manifests in suffering, what dignity he displays in doom and disaster, is the measure of his human fulfillment.” Victor Frankl
“Even at the limits of endurance, we remain free to choose how to suffer and die, and that choice confers meaning on the experience.” There are two broad “approaches to suffering: resistance and transformation. Resistance actively struggles against illness, cruelty, and death. It can be a creative engagement with the limiting conditions of human life. Transformation also involves struggle, but of a more complex and interior kind. It assimilates our suffering to religious explanations and cultural models and in the process fundamentally alters our attitudes toward suffering. … Paradoxically, it is by appropriating traditional, public patterns of meaning that we make suffering our own. For these patterns give us a renewed sense of control by ordering the otherwise chaotic, isolating experiences of pain, illness, and dying. They transform us by making sense of our suffering in ways that we can accept. The contrast between resistance and transformation should not, however, be overstated. For we can also be transformed through active struggle, and protest against an inherited interpretation can yield a deeper transformation that shatters a culture’s established views of suffering.”
Duclow DF. Into the whirlwind of suffering: resistance and transformation. Second Opin 1988; 9: 10-28.
See "What Suffering Does" by David Brooks of the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/opinion/brooks-what-suffering-does.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1
See "What Suffering Does" by David Brooks of the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/opinion/brooks-what-suffering-does.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1
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