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When Someone Says “You Create Your Own Suffering”
A guide to understanding this statement when you definitely didn’t cause all of your own pain.
This essay is for people who don’t understand each other. Specifically, it’s for people who are going down a path towards seeing themselves as the cause of their own pain, and anyone else who feels pain about someone doing that.
The lessons of this essay can be applied to any relationship where understanding and empathy have broken down, but they certainly don’t have to be applied to anything. All of this is voluntary.
1. So you had a bad day
To start all this off, we need to talk about validation. My understanding of validation comes from dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT); it was one of the first things I learned in therapy, and it’s the cornerstone of creating genuine understanding between people.
Validation is the act, the active practice, of explaining to yourself (and perhaps the other person) why that person’s experience is valid.
Why does their perspective make sense? Why do their feelings make sense? Why does their personal experience of the situation make sense for them to be experiencing? Rather than judging whether or not someone’s perspective…
