We don’t like it, but our suffering is where transformation usually takes place. Psychotherapy and other systems that should help us, even our churches, often do not help — mainly because the story they offer hollows out the meaning of our suffering. In their quest to shape a less permeable behavior for us, our healers can undermine our inborn capacity to endure our pain and even be reborn from it.
Psychiatry and clinical psychology are often accused of being consumed by a biomedical model, overrun by neurophysiology, sociobiology, and behavioral genetics. As a result, the everyday troubles we once described with the language of suffering are now described as diseases. Instead of suffering moral and spiritual challenges, we have infirmities caused by insuperable external forces coming at us, as well as biochemical mechanisms and processes infecting our insides.
In his fascinating book Facing Human Suffering: Psychology and Psychotherapy as Moral Engagement [Goodreads], Ronald B. Miller says the suffering experienced by psychotherapy clients has been replaced by
“a concern with eliminating what are construed as symptoms or manifestations of mental disorders, disabilities, diseases and dysfunctions. The client’s agony, misery, or sorrow is viewed as a mere epiphenomenon to be replaced by a description of a clinical syndrome that is presumably more easily defined, measured, and scientifically explained as the consequence of some technical design flaw in the person’s nervous system, cognitive processes, or learning environment that is amenable to change.”
Miller is eager to restore the moral and spiritual center to the discussion of suffering. Because our suffering matters. Even when we have medical issues to face and medicines we need to take, we are still wrestling with our meaning and yearning to live in safety and love.
Like Miller, I try to respect a psychotherapy client’s moral dilemmas and spiritual capacity, even though it often goes against the scientific assumptions they’ve been trained to bring to our process. They may have already been subjected to the biomedical model and see themselves as a set of debilities looking for expert cures. Janet Gotkin became a well-known leader in the psychiatric survivors movement after ten years of treatment by callous psychotherapists, hundreds of electroshock treatments and high doses of psychotropics. This is a bit of how she described her transformation:
I watched the Seine as it flowed and flowed.
“For eons, since there have been human beings,” I thought, “there has been this river. There has been this pool of suffering.” It was as if a light came into the darkness that was in me at that instant.
“There has been this despair…Women and men have looked down into the pit that is themselves and that life is and questioned the meaning and mourned the futility of it all. No amounts of Thorazine will ever make this feeling go away.
In the blackest pit of desolation, I felt I had found myself for the first time in my life. (pp. 376-9)
As Christians we are reminded by Jesus, especially as we shared his travail during Holy Week, our suffering is important, too. In some sense it makes us human; it is elemental to love. You are more than a set of malfunctioning molecules. Last Thursday night after Jesus had handed his disciples the symbols of his unique suffering in the bread and wine, he taught them:
I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. …
Remember the word that I said to you, “Slaves are not greater than their master.” If they persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also. But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me. — John 15:5, 20-21
Everything I do has meaning and everything I am is valuable. The world has been questioning those truths for decades, now. At this moment in our political history, Donald Trump is bringing the argument to a head by disappearing innocent people without due process as if they mean nothing. He is brazenly undoing years of struggle to undo our unequal society as if love is merely “weak” or “woke” and power is everything.
Grassley gets a lesson in morality
Donald Trump is so shockingly and relentlessly immoral [a list], the population seems to be jolted into remembering all the morality it has sloughed off for years. Like Gotkin, they are staring into the pit and many people are waking up to what is important. Chuck Grassley, the 91-year-old senator from Iowa, learned something about how awake people are at a town hall last week. Here is a two-minute clip from ABC’s report.
The New York Times reported on the meeting, as well. ABC skipped Grassley’s responses to his frustrated constituents, but here is what the Times reported:
[A man] shouted: “ Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?”
The question was met with enthusiastic claps from many in the crowd of about 100.
“I’m not going to,” Mr. Grassley said. Pressed to explain his stance, he added, “Because that’s not a power of Congress.”
When the man replied that the Supreme Court had ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release, others in the audience began piling on. Some noted that Mr. Grassley chairs the Judiciary Committee, which oversees immigration policy and judges, prompting the senator to stammer, then fall silent and wait for the shouting to die down before trying to respond.
“El Salvador is an independent country,” Mr. Grassley said. “The president of that country is not subject to our U.S. Supreme Court.”
The crowd practically erupted in jeers.
Others have noted that the Administration (and Donald Jr.) had no trouble intervening to free Andrew Tate from his 2-year detention in Romania. They questioned the ruling in February, made contacts, and soon Tate was back in Florida. [Guardian]
Grassley is on his eighth term as a Senator. Since 1980 he has presided over an increasingly immoral country. On the right, radicals rebel against how the basic morality of the Ten Commandments is ignored and their form of Christianity is undermined. On the left, radicals rebel against the overwhelming forces of capitalist oligarchs, climate change avoidance, and military destruction. I think both sides are rebelling against the limitations of the Descartes-spawned separation of natural forces/Science and spiritual experience/Church which infects all our institutions, including psychotherapy and the Church. Psychology replaced the Church as a “scientific” replacement for soul care and many people are not completely well as a result.
During the Grassley era, people have increasingly become, at least in their minds, subject to causes beyond their control. Their behavior is functional – an expression of an advertising scheme (as in the “GenZ” marketing generation), the outgrowth of their innate “identities,” a reaction to being helpless before climate change, in need of a strong man to tell them what to do. Grassley’s audience wanted him him to choose and act, not just explain the limits of his function.
I think most of us can’t lose the intuition that we are free to make good choices and we have responsibility for what we do. We are not just reactions to external stimuli whether from our gene pool or our environment — or Amazon. Both left and right seem to be clamoring to get their meaning back. The causal facts of life are never the most important ones, it is what we do with what happens to us that’s important. We are actors and creators, not just observers or passive conduits of the latest winner of some power struggle.
Miller says, “like the sculptor who must work with the piece of rock that is available, one fashions one’s life, or chooses not to and remains an ill-defined weighted object.” The crowd jeered at their senator, the weighted object. I think Grassley was surprised to see they thought they mattered and could do something about their situation.
A.I. might make our suffering more meaningless
Perhaps the most overwhelming piece of science determined to bring us under its power is artificial intelligence. We are all quickly conforming to A.I. It is making us its conduit. It is undermining the meaning of our suffering as it becomes the authority to which we answer instead of our own spiritual awareness, feelings, reason and face-to-face community.
We had a lively discussion about using ChatGPT as a therapist in our counseling consortium meeting the other day. Several of us were not A.I. users but more of us were already learning. I think I was the only one who had a client who used their A.I. platform as a therapist.
I found it ironic to open the NY Times a few days later and see this article: “This Therapist Helped Clients Feel Better: It Was A.I.” In our discussion, I suggested my clients who used A.I. might also be trained by it. I have heard of people who love it for it’s “authority.” When they see me face-to-face there is all the uncertainty of feelings in real time, ancient and immediate mistrust arising, and the fear of exposure. I think an A.I. therapist is pretty good with the externals, but we must also have an internal, moral, spiritual and relational process to be whole.
When Donald Trump paraded the tech oligarchs before us at his inauguration and then set Elon Musk loose on the bureaucracy, it slowly dawned on people they were losing their meaning or had already lost it. The science of the economy, employment, food distribution, and entitlements were all subject to the whims of immoral psychopaths. This was always the case, but we had acclimatized to trusting science and experts as the only authority we needed. Once awakened, being ruled by Meta’s algorithms became even more distasteful.
If we go to A.I. to alleviate our suffering after it has been party to creating the suffering, who are we? And, of course, who is God? Where is our soul? What love is left?
Suffering has meaning
The biomedical worldview and the causal philosophy behind it has left us thinking our suffering is some kind of evolutionary, genetic “fate” or, more likely, our fault, since we must have missed the memo or we forgot our password and couldn’t log in to purchase the right help in time. Me, alone against the world, with only machine-operators to help, is exhausting and traps us in avoidance.
What I am exploring here and attempting with my clients, when it seems appropriate, is to question the meaninglessness that causes us so much anxiety and despair. It causes us to keep going to the empty wells of function and expertise to find solutions to our problems. We end up feeling like we are the problem and are stuck unsuccessfully trying to push down the pain.
Jesus reminds his followers that not only his suffering will have meaning, so will ours. The night before his state execution he told them:
Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. — John 16:20-22
Your suffering can result in transformation, sooner or later. That does not mean suffering should not be avoided, or that you deserve it, or it will never go away, or you should not cooperate with what frees you from it. It does mean it is a place our true selves are born, it is also a way we matter, if we welcome that possibility.
If you cannot welcome the possibility, just trust Jesus with it. That trust, in itself, will do a lot of good. Your act of faith says, “I am a person who has faith,” which is an alternative to “I am alone and helpless before forces that make me suffer.” Such a story about yourself says you matter to God and you matter to yourself. It says you are worth saving and healing and helping and deploying – even when you are suffering, or you are afraid you will suffer, or you remember when you did, or you think you’ve suffered enough, or think you should never have to suffer. You matter whether you are suffering or not, and that means your suffering matters, too.
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Today is Anselm of Canterbury Day! Europe was awash in change and development during his day. He was in the thick of it, theologically, politically and mystically. Get to know him at The Transhistorical Body.