Suffering is not just a neurotic problem.
It’s equally an existential issue.
And in the end, it’s a spiritual matter.
I invite you to explore yourself on all three levels of analysis.
Why, and how? Allow me to share some experiences and insights.
Hello,
After many years of studying psychological suffering within myself and others, I thought it would be worthwhile to share with you the framework that slowly became the foundation of how I approach psychological well-being and therapy.
Suffering seems to takes place on three distinct but interacting levels:
1) The neurotic level. 2) The existential level. 3) The spiritual level.
The following three paragraphs below aim to convey what suffering on each respective level entails. On the Approach page you’ll find my view on therapy as well as an elaboration on how these three levels interact, and how progress - or lack thereof - on one level, impacts your state on the other two levels.
If this framework and approach happen to resonate, and you could use some professional help, feel welcome to reach out for a free orientation call.
1) We suffer on the neurotic level
What does that mean?
Neurotic suffering is the hardship of emotional themes and patterns established in the past, hurting your ability to navigate life and relationships in the present. It is the pain of wanting to, but seeming unable. The pain of continually ending up in that which is on some level familiar, instead of that which is good for you. Indeed, “You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness.”
It’s being stuck in anxious, depressing, destructive loops that aren’t always what they seem at first glance. There are forces at work within us. Fears, desires, aversions, griefs and relational patterns that can operate at varying degrees below our conscious awareness, and manifest themselves in a repressed fashion.
This repression often has an adaptive history, meaning that at one point in life expressing a theme was deemed an unacceptable risk to relationships with caretakers or peers.
Instead of being expressed, that theme became a source of anxiety, was repressed, and can manifest as the persistent symptoms that usually prompt someone to seek out therapy in the first place: other anxieties, depression, mood swings, anger, physical symptoms, compulsions, addictions, sexual dysfunction, dysfunctional relationships, etc.
But not all suffering on this level requires such thorough excavation. In certain cases of trauma, the nature of psychological patterns is more straightforward. Read more.
2) We suffer on the existential level
What does that mean?
Existential suffering is the suffering of not living well. It is the suffering of living in denial of your conscience and potential. The suffering of living in that dark triangle of resentment, arrogance and deception. Of living as a role-based persona with no substantive concept of self underneath the outward - and inward - display. It is a life “in sin and misery, in the House of the Rising Sun”.
It is said that some original Freudian models no longer apply to the Western world, because we no longer have to suppress our sexual urges and personal preferences like Vienna’s early 20th-century upper class had to.
Instead of suffering from unfreedom, we now suffer from freedom. For being free equally entails your ultimate, sole responsibility for the way your life unfolds — and the clock is ticking.
Irvin Yalom’s school of Existential Psychotherapy posits that man is faced with four so-called “ultimate concerns”: Death, Freedom, Isolation and Meaninglessness. This confrontation can sometimes even be so painful that it is actually repressed and manifests as one of the symptoms mentioned previously on level 1.
“Life without truth is hell” - Jan ‘18
The implicit thesis in Gladiator - Jan ‘19
Additionally, Mytho-Existentialism (yes, I’m making up words) in Joseph Campbell’s vein, and more recently expanded and refined by Jordan Peterson, is an important part of my approach to existential suffering.
Our two entire conversations can be seen here.
3) We suffer on the spiritual level
What does that mean?
Spiritual suffering is the suffering of being trapped in personhood.
It is being burdened by the past, while at the same time being anxious of the future, and therefore rarely present.
It is seeking alleviation through attainment, of ‘adding to yourself’ in the spheres of profession, status, romance, material, knowledge, experience and skill, only to find every time that none of them bring lasting peace.
It is the egoic pain of comparing yourself to others and feeling you fall short. It is oscillating wildly between aversion and desire, being offended and offending in return. It is life lived through the pain-body.
In short, it is the prison of believing that your thoughts, emotions and perceptions - which constitute the totality of your personhood - experience themselves. After all, that would mean there is nothing more to you than a vulnerable body and neurology; a mere person with its countless deficiencies, perpetually threatened by a world of hierarchy, intrigue, lack, finitude and isolation.
That belief, however, is as widespread as it is false. Your thinking mind, emotions and perceptions do not experience themselves. You, as a mere person, do not experience yourself.
Instead, your thoughts, emotions and perceptions appear to you as experience only because within you exists a dimension that is aware of them: consciousness.
Consciousness has no characteristics, apart from being conscious. Therefore it is self-evident, self-sufficient and ever peaceful, beyond harm, lack or threat.
That - consciousness - is your essential identity. It is your truest self that renders the experience of personhood knowable to the mere person.
You, as a person, suffer. Consciousness does not suffer, it simply can’t.
When painful thoughts and emotions haunt you, when your personhood is devouring itself alive, realise this:
The only reason you are experiencing pain is that your truest self - inviolable consciousness - is aware of the experience. How else would you know that you are in pain?
Instead of focussing on the content of your pain, focus on the fact that your truest self - consciousness - is aware of it. Becoming aware of awareness, and realizing that you are awareness, is the path along which your pain of personhood will die of neglect.
Welcome, you have now peered into the realm of Perennial Philosophy, also known as Non-Dualism; the core of almost every spiritual and religious tradition on earth. Read more.
