Why?

Pain occurs in everyone's life. No one is immune. Whether it is physical pain such as breaking an ankle or emotional pain such as losing a loved one, we will all experience pain at some point in our lives, and it usually shows up more than once. Suffering, however, is optional. Suffering happens when our mind will not accept that pain showed up for us. It comes in many forms, and after listening to my clients for over 20 years, one frequent source of suffering seems to come from the short question of "Why?". Why did this happen to me? Why did she have to die so young? Why didn't I look where I was going? This "Why?" often opens the door to many hours of suffering. It awakens the "figuring out" mind and ends up going down many rabbit holes of uncertainty, rationalizing, blame and extra pain. This creates suffering as there is hardly ever a definitive answer as to why something happened, only hypotheses, which means we can end up on the hamster wheel of thinking and suffering for days, months or even years. We end up expending lots of energy and never really get anywhere except we become even more exhausted and confused.

In therapy, I try to demonstrate to my clients that there is indeed pain from the actual experience, but that they have a choice about adding suffereing. As they become more mindful and conscious of the thoughts that their minds bring up, they can easily answer the question of "why?" with a simple and accepting response of "Why not?". It is very freeing not to have to know why something occurred as then we can expend energy on accepting what happened and focusing on what we can control and what matters in our lives today.

This is not meant to say that asking "Why?" is not beneficial and helpful as it is important to learn from our past experiences. The goal is to become very conscious of when "Why?' is no longer fruitful and is just keeping us stuck from moving forward.