Addicted to Suffering

Do you know someone who is addicted to suffering? 

Perhaps it’s a family member or a close friend. Their patterns are unmistakable. 

You need only ask them how they’re doing on a random Tuesday, and within 60 seconds you will hear about all of the ways their life is hard right now. There will be a familiar tone, and a story they’ve been telling for years, only today you’re getting the “Friday in October 2025” chapter.

For the record, this doesn’t mean they’re being unpleasant, or that these people enter every room they walk into like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. They may be perfectly loving, even enjoyable, to be around. But what you know for sure is that what will come out of their mouth is some version of how hard life is right now.

Therefore, our biggest frustration, especially when we love these people, is with how much happier we know they could be if they stopped seeing everything through the lens of suffering.

It was humbling, then, for me to realize how guilty I am of this very same thing. I began to notice how many times a week, when someone asked me how I was doing, I gave a cursory “I’m good” before diving into my real answer: how relentlessly busy I was, how hurried I felt, how there always seemed to be too much to do, how tired I was, how I was waiting for life to get easier.

 And of course, I always enjoyed (and sometimes still do), sharing that moment of consensus with the person in front of me when we both nod our heads and agree that “It’s always something with life, isn’t it?”

It’s become painfully clear to me how addicted I’ve been to this kind of rhetoric. It’s also become abundantly clear to me, with every extra year on this earth, that it really always is something when it comes to life. There is always a new project that threatens to throw our life out of balance and into possible burnout. There always is a new sad thing waiting for us around the corner: a new grief, a new disappointment, a new hardship.

And the same is true for everyone else. Realizing this is its own kind of antidote to our addiction to our own suffering.

 

In Judith Herman’s seminal work Trauma and Recovery, she describes the three stages of recovery for trauma survivors. 

The last of the three stages is “Reconnection,” whereby we start to rebuild our life, relationships, and identity beyond the trauma. One survivor, Sylvia Fraser, recognized that her trauma had disconnected her from others:

“My main regret is excessive self-involvement. Too often I was sleepwalking through other people’s lives.”

Herman goes on to point out:

“The survivor must be ready to relinquish the ‘specialness’ of her identity. Only at this point can she contemplate her story as one among many and envision her particular tragedy within the embrace of the human condition.”

She calls this achieving “commonality” with others: the final hallmark of someone who has recovered from their trauma.

 

Of course, it’s necessary that all of us first feel safe, seen, and understood for what we’ve been through before we look to reduce the “specialness” of our own pains. 

This is what the first two stages of recovery are for: “Safety” (feeling safe again in our body and surroundings), and “Remembrance and Mourning” (learning to make sense of what happened and grieve what was lost).

 

But having confronted the past, if we still feel ourselves addicted to our suffering in the present, as I realized I was, seeing our suffering in a wider context can be an essential tool in unburdening ourselves.

Talking to people about our suffering isn’t enough. Really connecting with the suffering that is all around us, all of the time, offers us an opportunity to truly be with other people instead of sleepwalking through their (and our) lives in the haze of our own discontent. But beyond that, it gives us enough perspective to step back from it all, and decide what role we want to play in that collective suffering.

Will we continuously remind everyone of the load, or courageously and generously rise above it?

Matthew Hussey