Something Productive from the Pain

Acknowledging what we can't get rid of: Turning heartbreak into action

“What if we simply took whatever pain we couldn’t get rid of, and turned it into something else…”

“Creativity has the power to look pain the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.”

~Susan Cain

I am sitting with how “realizing that the pain of loss can help point you to people and principles that matter most to you—the meaning in your life.”

I am thinking deeply about the power, potential and opportunity of loss:

“Your loss can be an opportunity to carry what is most meaning toward a life worth having…after having identified what is truly close to your heart, act on it! (Hayes, as quoted in Susan Cain’s Bittersweet).”

I have been working my way through Cain’s newest book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.

I so deeply appreciate many of her insights and am sitting with them, deep within my body and wanted to share a few reflections on them:

One of the things that she emphasizes is how this longing, this stretching toward connection, a melancholy, our deepest points of bittersweet experiences can have a profound potential—one that is not understood or properly appreciated in our American culture and society, especially one that promotes toxic positivity.

I am thankful to be at a better point in my journey in healing to be able to recognize this potential in my own life. When Susan Cain was interviewed by author, Glennon Doyle, and they were discussing her new book, Doyle distinguishes bittersweetness from a wimpy, fragile or weak sadness. And instead, she reframed it as, power, longing, potential. I think it can change the fucking world if we allow ourselves to feel it and to move through us and help us take actions. Amen.

I am filled with gratitude that I can re-vision this now, these events and can feel like it an opportunity has been given to me. So much of what happened in the last 6 years, through my family’s decisions, affected me so deeply, the trauma; it made me feel powerless. I had no control over what they did and many of their actions, decisions, and inactions, were all tragic, their decisions in how they were going to live.

It was many years, so I spent a lot of time in that headspace—one of intense pain, deep grief and mourning, sorrow and heartbreak for them. I think I carried, not only my own pain and trauma, but my family members’ as well, as I recognize that I was born into a family with a lot of intergenerational trauma.

But, now I see that there is also this other part. This other place; it’s the affordance that this allows me. Not only can I choose to learn from mistakes and live differently, but I can also turn this heartbreak into action. I can share my story. I can break the cycle, the pattern. I can do something altruistic and be of service with this, and can find purpose in holding space for others stories, pain and listening to them.

It has taken so much time, but I now see—That this longing, this sadness, is not because I am broken. It is this place that is rife with beautiful possibilities to help myself and others; And it is there because I have these lived, embodied experiences that have deeply, irrevocably changed to my soul.

Cain’s book also introduced me to Rene Denfield, one of the very very few other people that I have heard of who lost two immediate family members to suicide; her mother and brother completed suicide. I have few with whom I can share such a solidarity, so this touches me deeply.

Her own life was also filled with other traumatic experiences, but she said this: “From trauma rises the soul, incandescent and perfect.”

She also said that “We have to make friends with sadness. We have to hold our losses close, and carry them like beloved children. Only when we accept these terrible pains do we realized that the path across is the one that takes us through.”

A-fucking-men.

Another point Cain mentions is that healing others can help heal ourselves. I wholeheartedly agree. I don’t think that this means that we repress, or don’t do our own important healing or avoid therapy, etc. But there is a great potential here as we can see through the ‘wounded healers’ in our society; the ones that are recognized and present throughout the world. We see them through MADD where mothers lost children to drunk driving and their rallied efforts to warn against DUI after prom. We see this also through the organizers of suicide support groups, who have tried to service to others, as they cope through their own loss, desperately desiring good to come from such tragic sadness. We see them through celebrities who raise education and awareness about diseases or conditions that change their lives and cause their own losses.

In doing this, we also see that “there’s someone else like me. I’m not alone with my story.”

And, at the same time, we can tight to this truth: “the place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care.”

I am learning that my experiences can teach me “to use [our] pain as a source of information about what matters most to us—and then to act on it. ACT, in other words, is an invitation to investigate the bitter, and commit to the sweet.”

Thank you, Susan. Thank you.