Spirituality and Suffering
As a trauma therapist, I hear daily how people’s spiritual beliefs can be a deep source of comfort, strength, and wisdom or sadly at times can literally reinforce the messages of abusers.
Abusers tell their victims:
It’s your fault.
This is for your own good.
There’s something wrong with you.
You are bad.
If you tell, people will know how bad you are and will abandon you.
You are powerless.
You asked for it. You are making me do this to you. You wanted this.
I am hurting you to teach you a lesson.
Submit to me and give me what I want, or I will hurt you.
Don’t cry. Don’t feel. I will tell you what to feel and think.
I will sometimes be loving, and other times be cruel; this is love.
This isn’t really happening. You dreamed it. Forget what I just did; it wasn’t real. You’re a liar and if you tell no-one will believe you.
Sadly, there are many commonly used spiritual/religious statements that reinforce these abusive messages. Most people are sincerely trying to be comforting; the irony is that these statements ultimately block compassion. If people are getting what they deserve, are being taught some lesson, or can contaminate others with their “negative energy”, care and connection are displaced by fear and rejection. Ultimately these messages cast God in the role of an abuser.
Sometimes God must break us in order to remake us.
God uses suffering to teach us that we need Him and to rely only on Him
Everything happens for a reason.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
People attract lessons they need to learn.
God is testing you.
God is in control.
The body is bad and shameful and a source of temptation.
God punishes people who sin and blesses people who are good.
When bad things happen that is karma.
God is sometimes loving and sometimes vengeful but must always be trusted, submitted to, and loved.
Do not question the ways of God.
Suffering is an illusion based on attachment to worldly things, including oneself, one’s ego.
Forgive and forget; all people are sinners so if you want to be forgiven you must forgive those who abuse you.
If you aren’t “over it”, if you suffer from depression, anxiety, and other trauma symptoms it is because you lack faith.
In this article, I will share how I have grappled with this age-old spiritual and philosophical problem and suggest possible ways it may be credibly and compassionately resolved. These reflections are a result of my own personal struggle with the question of spirituality, evil, and suffering. I offer this humbly, believing that everyone has soul freedom -the right to make sense of their life experiences in the ways that work for them.
Ultimately, what matters more than what we believe is how we live and love and serve.
THEODICY
Theodicy is a name for grappling with the problem of evil and suffering. If the word God is replaced by: Higher Power, Buddha nature, Allah, Brahman, Goddess, Higher Self, Karma, Source, Collective Unconscious, it is addressed in every belief system. Each “answer” to the theodicy question is an attempt to solve the often-unbearable problem of how to live with hope and meaning in the midst of evil, violence, and suffering.
Theodicy seeks to explain how the following three spiritual assertions can all be true:
1. Evil and suffering exist
2. God is all good (Omni-benevolent)
3. God is all powerful (Omnipotent)
When people are struggling to make sense of suffering, they must let go of or redefine one of these spiritual assertions. My standard, the center around which all my reflections about suffering must revolve, is this quote by holocaust survivor Irving Greenberg:
“Nothing should be said, theological or otherwise, that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.”
Years later, in need of a way to balance the nihilism this engenders (and after reading too much Camus and Nietzsche), I added:
“Nothing should be said, philosophical or otherwise, that would make their deaths less tragic by insisting that life is absurd, meaningless, and not worth living.”
1. AN EXAMINATION OF THE SPIRITUAL ASSERTION THAT EVIL AND SUFFERING EXIST IN A WORLD WITH AN ALL- GOOD AND ALL-POWERFUL GOD
How can the vast amount of evil and suffering in the world be compatible with an all-powerful and all-loving God? To resolve this, evil and suffering are often explained as being an illusion, not real, or a misunderstanding of reality.
Here are the arguments most often put forward:
A. “Everything happens for a reason”
In this argument, what appears to be evil is viewed as what is necessary to achieve a greater good; if it is necessary for greater good then it is not actually evil. It is an “ends justify the means” belief.
Some people find it comforting to believe that something bad is happening in order that that something good will come of it or that the suffering they are enduring is a temporary “pain” in order to bring about some greater “gain.” Sometimes this is true. The ability to endure discomfort to accomplish a goal is an essential life skill called self-discipline. It helps people exercise, practice difficult tasks, study, go to work, fulfill responsibilities, and save money. There is an enormous difference, however, between discomfort and true suffering, between pain chosen freely for a positive purpose and pain inflicted in violence.
Sometimes, even extreme pain can be transformed in remarkable ways. This happens with love wraps the wound, when suffering is responded to with kindness, skillful assistance, comfort, and connection. Survivors may gain many things including increased strength and resiliency, deeper compassion for self and others, wisdom, and even inner peace. It is not the perpetrator of the traumatic experience that gave these gifts; they emerge because of supportive allies and a survivor’s hard work!
If everything happens for a reason, most often the reason traumatic suffering happens is because there are people who intentionally inflict pain on others. The reason is not some divine purpose but because there are sadistic, selfish, greedy, or otherwise terribly broken people, who make a choice to do harm.
The reason natural disasters occur is because of the laws of nature which lack moral agency; winds blow and fires burn without regard for life or property. The reason accidents happen is because of randomness and human imperfection. The reason for disease is that life is precarious and vulnerable; germs and toxins, cellular errors and DNA complexities can make us sick. Both painful and joyful experiences also happen randomly, being in either the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time; in life there is both randomness and causation.
If a woman is passed out at a party, rape is not inevitable; a man could ignore her, find help for her, protect her, understanding that he has no right to touch her without her consent. Interviews with batterers tell us that the decision to beat up his partner is made long before she has burned the dinner or otherwise displeased him. The decision to batter is also made before he gets drunk; in fact, the alcohol is often a pre-planned excuse for his later behavior. Robberies happen when there is a thief present. This happens as often in white collar board rooms as in dark alleys.
High risk situations are only high risk because of the likelihood of a perpetrator being present; if no perpetrator is present, nothing bad happens. Most abuse happens in the home or other supposedly low risk places and at the hands of people who are known and trusted, to children or to others who lack the power to protect themselves.
B. “Suffering teaches us lessons we need to learn.”
Perpetration is not instruction.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the idea that suffering teaches us necessary lessons implies that the victim should consider the person who harmed them their “teacher” and send perpetrators thank you notes for the lessons.
Abusers are NOT instruments of cosmic goodness; they are agents of destruction and harm. Again, all healing, growth, deepening of soul that comes out of that destruction is because of the love, support, resiliency, courage, and hard, hard work, of survivors and their advocates. The evildoers do not get credit. They are not the in the service of God, karma, or some future greater good. Instead, they are working against the love, compassion, and evolving spirituality at work in the world and within each soul.
It is important to distinguish between the necessary sorts of suffering that are inherently part of being human from traumatic suffering that is the result of brutality, cruelty. Necessary, normal suffering includes growing pains, healing pains, the natural cycles of living and dying, creation and dissolution, mistakes, and amends-making. This suffering is universal and embedded within it is the potential for the comfort of connection, loving memories, shared humanity, and even beauty.
Expected suffering comes from grief and loss, growing pains, humbling moments of mistakes and the painful vulnerability of amends. These agonies unite us in shared humanity. These are not “sent” to teach a lesson; they are the inevitability of human imperfection and natural law. How we choose to respond and the support we receive, determine whether we will mature and deepen in empathy or allow our pain to make us bitter, despairing, and closed-hearted.
Traumatic suffering is caused by abuse, neglect, violence. Sitting with clients describing unbearable horrors, I am unable to uphold any belief that suggests extreme suffering is purposeful, to teach a lesson. No child is born cursed to a life of suffering because they have lessons to learn. All children are born filled with blessings and miraculous possibilities; this makes the global inequalities of our world even more tragic and unjust. Children achieve their fullest potential through being nurtured, taught, allowed to struggle within their developmental window of tolerance, to safely fail, to make mistakes, to make amends, to experience both hurt and healing, and to know that all of this is all part of being human. Shame, terror, unbearable pain, and traumatic suffering are not teachers; in fact, when the mind/body/spirit are overwhelmed, the frontal lobes, which are essential for learning, are literally offline.
C. The Law of Attraction
The Law of Attraction puts forth that every positive or negative event that happens to you was attracted by you; your thoughts manifest/make your reality.
This idea has been around for a long time but was made popular recently by the book The Secret. The Law of Attraction states that everything that happens to you, positive and negative, is caused by your thoughts; whatever you focus on will be attracted to you. Basically, negative thoughts cause negative things to happen to you and positive thoughts cause positive things to occur. People are taught to ask the universe for what they want and think positively expecting these things to happen, including items of material wealth and cures for diseases.
The problem is that this often leads people to become phobic of the healthy range of human emotions and to avoid people who are experiencing suffering. This belief system often becomes a block to compassion, support, and intimacy.
It is normal for people to have all sorts of thoughts--positive and negative, anxious and hopeful. Many mental health interventions are intended to help people understand that they are not their thoughts, that their thoughts are not magic, and that having a thought does not cause something to happen outside of their mind. Research tells us that those whose hearts are open to the tragedies as well as the joys of others, often report higher levels of satisfaction with their lives. Those who choose to live simply and not to pursue excessive material wealth also score higher on happiness inventories.
Human beings are not islands of isolation where causation is linear and immediate. We live within circles of community, of family, of relationships. We are affected by ripples past generations set in motion. There are numerous and complex influences that have an impact on us at any moment, many of which are beyond our control.
We live in an interdependent ecology where all aspects of creation are so interconnected that they cannot help but affect each other. Reality is multi-determined. Good things can happen to people who have behaved terribly and tragedies can overwhelm people whose entire lives vibrated with positive intentions and actions. The truth is that sometimes good decisions and well-intentioned actions can have accidently have painful, unfortunate outcomes; bad decisions and immoral actions can unfairly have successful outcomes. Our best efforts might happily bring forth the results we seek, or they might not.
The aggression of another person can prevent positive outcomes despite our best efforts; the kindness of another person can improve outcomes despite what appear to be overwhelming barriers. Miracles do happen; so do catastrophes. “The world is full of suffering; it is also full of the overcoming of it” (Helen Keller)
Most spiritual belief systems teach some sort of meditation and prayer. It can be tremendously helpful to clarify our goals, placing ourselves in the creative, spiritual flow that will guide us to reach them. This may include getting in touch with our deepest dreams and yearnings, writing them down and being mindful of choices that are in sync or out of sync with reaching them. Seeking the wisdom of our intuition as well as our rational mind, seeking connection with G_d, spiritual guides, and trusted others, are part of a spiritual discipline that may help us fulfill our life’s purpose. Setting goals and working toward them can be part of our spiritual work. In most spiritual teachings, the idea of setting goals for obtaining more material things than necessary is discouraged. Soul work is where we have the most spiritual power and we bring these love-based qualities into the material world through our words, our actions, our creativity, our love.
D. “Karma”
I admire many aspects of Buddhism and am a grateful follower of many Buddhist practices especially Metta, the loving-kindness mediation. I experience the current Dalai Lama as an embodiment of compassion and wisdom. I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of Karma as Buddhism teaches, but I have been told that most Buddhists reject the notion that whatever someone is experiencing in this life is punishment for what they did or didn’t do in a past life. It is a distortion of Buddhist Karma to assert that the suffering someone is experiencing is because it is needed to evolve their soul.
This becomes vivid when we consider that karma would include harm to children. I cannot place the declaration “Whatever happens in this life is a consequence of what you’ve done in a past life,” next to the cries of babies, of children all over the world. To interpret the meaning of Karma in this way is to insist that reality is ultimately just and good, that atrocities are necessary and perhaps even instruments of healing and purification. It is victim-blaming.
Yes, tremendous growth may be possible within the healing process, but this is not inevitable. Traumatic suffering literally, neurologically, psychologically, physically inhibits the healing process. It is an overwhelming effort to merely survive extreme suffering. People who have experienced horrific events find themselves not only in unbearable pain but also blocked from access to the innate, hard wired, healing resources within their bodies, minds, and communities.
The biological mechanisms for processing trauma and then archiving it in the brain as something that happened and is now OVER, is disrupted by the physiology of survival terror. The hippocampus, the part of the brain that sorts and archives experience, is shut down during traumatic events. This leaves the trauma locked in the right hemisphere of the brain, stored in fragmented capsules of vivid sensory experiences and strong emotions.
Survivors of abuse are often consumed with self-loathing. They may fear positive emotions because it compromises their hypervigilance and therefore their safety. They are often flooded with flashbacks-visual, somatic, emotional, resulting in chronically feeling unsafe and hopeless.
When abusers are also mother, father, family, trusted other, a child’s innate impulse of self-protection is over-ridden by their love and loyalty to those they depend on for survival. Self-compassion would cause them to protest, disrupting the attachment relationships that provide food, shelter, identity, belonging.
Psychological studies affirm that all children are born yearning to bond, to love and be loved. All children are filled with blessings and positive potential, as innate capacity for compassion and connection that when nurtured leads them to seek safety for others as well as self. Innocent aggression is also part of all children. Children do not develop the brain regions necessary for impulse control until around age 4. They need ongoing support and skill building to manage strong feelings and impulses, not punishment. Children do not have the capacity to understand the impact their actions have.
Parenting with punishment and shame is more likely to cause children to be emotionally dysregulated, lacking the emotional skills necessary to navigate relationships. The triumph of healthy development, the achievement of their soul’s purpose, is best served when children are well cared for-- fed, soothed, and celebrated. Resiliency is built by lovingly supporting them through the naturally occurring difficulties and sufferings of life, the ebb and flow of pain and relief, tears and laughter, mistakes and triumphs.
Research has shown again and again that enduring patterns of aggression and cruelty are linked to childhood neglect and abuse. Even so, most people who have been abused do not go on to abuse others; in fact, those who have endured painful childhoods most often become deeply empathic with others.
We learn life lessons best when they are taught with love, with patience, and a profound, unconditional belief that all beings, everywhere, deserve respect and the opportunity to thrive. The human brain is hard wired for empathic attachment. We are made for experiencing joy, for healing, for comforting one another, for gaining strength and courage, for overcoming adversity, resolving conflict, and living in harmony.
I believe it is essential to assure people that adversity is not being sent to them as some kind of lesson, or to refine them like as if they are metal being forged in a fire. Adversity is simply part of being human. Atrocity is something beyond adversity, beyond the scope of what we human organisms can metabolize. It is the warmth of loving connection, healthy self-esteem, and the hard, courageous work of standing in the truth of one’s life, that may transform trauma, that can metamorphose even extreme suffering, into infinite possibilities.
Our karmic destiny is interconnected. Our soul’s evolution is fulfilled because of how we help one another, not because of the bad things that occur in our lives.
Years ago, I had a client who was horrifically abused. She found hope in her belief that her suffering was a way of achieving enlightenment in the next life. She insisted that she choose to be born into her violent family. She reasoned, how else would she have ended up in recovery meetings, offering healing and hope to others who suffered as she did. I inquired, gently, whether if she did chose her path, perhaps it was her soul’s compassion to choose to enter into the suffering of the world in order to help transform it, not because it was necessary for her to experience horrific abuse in order to attain enlightenment. This was a helpful shift for her depression. Instead of feeling cursed by karma and guilt that she deserved the cruelty perpetrated on her child self, she was able to consider a more heroic story; one that does not blame victims.
E. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
This premise is NOT true. Suffering often kills, if not physically, then mentally, spiritually, and morally. Every 65 minutes a combat veteran commits suicide. The Adverse Child Experience Study (ACES) proves a strong correlation between child abuse/neglect and both physical and mental illnesses. All too often, suffering weakens and even breaks people.
I repeat: When people do emerge from hell and heal, when some of them find themselves especially strong at the broken places, it is because of the love, the comfort, the attuned connection, of the listeners, the helpers, their own inner wisdom and healing abilities, their courageous hard work and determined, and tenacious struggling to heal, that made them strong. The love at work in their lives deserves the credit for their healing, NOT the hatred, not the perpetrators, not cruelty or abuse. I REJECT anything that implies that anyone must someday thank their abusers for “helping” them.
2. AN EXAMINATION OF THE SPIRITUAL ASSERTION THAT GOD IS ALL GOOD EVEN THOUGH THERE IS EVIL
A. If God is all-powerful and evil/suffering/atrocity happen, then how can God be all-good?
There are versions of redefining the goodness of God in most belief systems, usually by making God exempt from morality, outside of ethical standards. It is common in many religions to invoke an angry, vengeful even violent deity at times and tell sacred stories of that deity behaving in immoral and destructive ways toward humankind to either execute punishment or bring about some greater good.
Even the notion of hell, sending people into an eternity, forever and ever, of torture and pain, is considered an appropriate response to “sin” by a “good” God. Some religions have different deities that “destroy” life, wage war. Some refer to different faces of the divine or that there is a “shadow” side of God. The message is that fear is a necessary part of faith. Followers are taught ways to appease the wrath of God by performing rituals, making offerings, or otherwise cajoling the deity into mercy.
This is chilling in its similarity to the way abused children respond to those who hurt them, especially when they are being abused by parents or people they are attached to, dependent upon, or love. It reinforces the distorted but common perspective that victims bear responsibility for abuse because the abuse could have been prevented if only they would have prayed the correct prayer or performed some other placating action. I believe the opposite is true: It is when victims can feel their justifiable anger at the abuser, to shift from appeasement to protest, to know bone deep that there is nothing they could have possibly done to deserve being abused, that there is healing.
I have read everything I could find by holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel and heard him speak many times. His novels offer a poignant description of his arduous healing journey. In his first novel Night, Wiesel describes in excruciating detail his experiences as a child in a concentration camp. There is no hope, no comfort, no meaning making. There is only a survivor’s speaking of the evil endured, telling the story, and asserting that there is meaning in telling the story if only to fulfill his promise to bear witness on behalf of those “turned to smoke”.
In the book Dawn, the character decides whether he will kill a Nazi soldier, now his prisoner. In The Accident, the character wrestles with the pull to commit suicide. In a world where holocaust can happen there is no reason to live. In Town Beyond the Wall, he takes on those who stand by and do nothing, the culpability of those who hide behind their “neutrality” as spectators and observers as if not taking sides can keep their hands clean.
In Gates of the Forest living becomes a protest against an all-powerful and morally corrupt God. There is a scene at the end of that book that I must have read 100 times. Holocaust survivors are ecstatically dancing, angry, defiant, pronouncing God as less moral than they are and that God is the one in need of forgiveness. In that moment of rage however, they are deciding to live if for no other reason than to protest against an unjust God.
There are no platitudes in Wiesel’s novels, no happy endings, no whitewashing of the agony of surviving and the ambivalence of living, but there are moments of human transcendence, courage, tenderness, love, compassion, and healing.
I will never forget the moment when I saw a newspaper photo of Elie Wiesel throwing out the first baseball in the 1986 world series. It is one thin moment of simple happiness that stands in profound contrast to the thousands of words he’s written that paint pictures of horror and evil. It is especially meaningful because he is not a baseball fan; he agreed to throw the ball because of his son’s excitement about him doing it. I have a copy of the photo tucked away in our fireproof safe with our important papers. It sounds ridiculous, silly, but this little newspaper clipping showing a look on his face that is boyish and playful, connected to the happiness of his son, is sacred to me.
B. “God is testing me.”
If this premise is true, then God is sadistic. Any parent or teacher, who causes harm to the student, inflicts pain and suffering to “test” them, would be considered immoral. What exactly should infliction of suffering measure? If God is “all knowing” anyway, why is testing necessary? Profound suffering (as differentiated from growing pains) is not instructive but is destructive. Again, what transforms all suffering is love, care, support, compassion, comfort, and for me, THAT is where the Holy is found, as a Source for healing, comfort, and transformation, and not as the source of the torment.
Once suffering has overwhelmed, has broken, the mind/body/spirit, causing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), complex PTSD, dissociation, dissociative identity disorder, it cannot be called a test. Torture is toxic and cruelty is catastrophic. Sadistic hunger for the pain of others and the need for control over their minds, spirits, and bodies is an atrocity. All of these are evil. When inflicted upon children, these harm our very DNA and create cycles of abuse that corrupt generations.
If we do not heal our shared human potential for these kinds of extreme violence, for genocide, for war upon war upon war; if we do not protect all children and teach them how to nonviolently seek justice, to make peace within their own hearts and in relationships, humanity will not survive.
3. AN EXAMINATION OF THE SPIRITUAL ASSERTION THAT GOD IS ALL-POWERFUL EVEN THOUGH THERE IS EVIL
The notion of an “all-powerful” God is what I have had to let go, to redefine. I miss it. I often find myself inadvertently believing it again, especially in moments of sudden fear (like airplane turbulence and medical scares), seeking comfort from it again and that too is human.
For me the only spirituality I can credibly place next to Greenberg’s quote is rooted in and adapted from Process Theology. From here on I will write Higher Power or G_d instead of “God” to convey that I am not referencing the traditional God and not even describing a deity per se, much less a male gendered one. When I write Higher Power, I am referencing the Source of love, life, connection, healing, compassion, courage, justice, radical possibility, and creativity. Higher Power is beyond religion and even spirituality because secular humanists and those who don’t believe in soul/spirit do usually affirm that there are non-tangible realities like love and compassion, unity, and collective wisdom and power.
Process thought offers that it is the TYPE of power that needs to be reconsidered. We are conditioned to imagine power as force, domination, combative. For Process Theology, the highest power is not force but love, not domination but compassion, not competition but connection and collaboration. Higher Power and humanity, indeed all of creation, are interdependent.
For Process Theology, there is no God “up there” who is going to come down and fix things for us and magically save the day. At every moment a Higher Power is actively, passionately, powerfully at work to bring about the best possible outcome and at every moment this is also but one power among many, especially human free will and natural laws, and is therefore necessarily limited. No matter what is happening, this Higher Power is at every moment working with us to bring about transformation, peace, solutions, and healing.
I think of this as in line with Mr. Rogers’ message to children, that when bad things are happening, look for the helpers. Stories of helpers, of kindness, of courage, were true in the horrors of the concentration camps, in the barbarity of slavery, in places of genocide and epidemics. There are, everywhere, in all times and places, ordinary heroes and heroines acting with courageous compassion, self-sacrificial generosity, and quiet humility. That is how Higher Power works. What we do matters. We are co-creators of reality. G_d is at work doing what only G_d can do, and we are called to do what is ours to do-- to serve, to offer our presence, our abilities, and our efforts.
Praying, meditating, performing rituals, making offerings, and other spiritual practices become ways of connecting more deeply to the presence of G_d, the energies of transcendent guidance and help, and of the power of loving connections to our own individual body/mind/spirit as well as between one another. The complexity of our human capacities for kindness and cruelty, service and selfishness, are explored and accepted instead of denied; this reduces the need to project what we’re ashamed of about ourselves onto others.
When we believe that the ultimate power at work in the universe is nonviolent then nonviolent resistance becomes our power too.
If we believe that there is a power at work in the universe that is infinitely creative, then every moment is full of possibility and hope.
If we believe that no matter what happens, our soul, the essence of who we truly are, is eternally part of, connected to, infused with, the Sacred (by whatever name) then everyone is equal and worthy of deep respect, and we are all spiritually eternal.
If we believe that everyone has a sacred path, a unique calling, special gifts and abilities to contribute, then we are pulled beyond competitiveness fueled by ego and instead instinctively encourage, support, and celebrate each other.
If we believe that when bad things happen there is a Higher Power working to create new paths and new possibilities, working for us not against us, there is comfort.
If we understand that we are interdependent and interconnected with the earth and all living things, models of domination and exploitation fall away.
If we believe that anger is a spiritual gift meant for helping and protection not vengeance or violence, then we become empowered to seek justice and speak truth to power.
If we believe that Higher Power is within and between us, is interdependent with us, then the question changes from “How could God let this happen?” to “How can I be part of the creative, compassionate, loving power at work in all that is and is to be?”
May the power of compassion and loving-kindness for self as well as others, of courageous gentleness and humble self-awareness, be yours in all that is and is to come.
Rev. Lynn James, LMHC. Ordained Minister/Licensed Counselor. www.lynnjames.net revlynn.counseling@gmail.com 812-345-6941
Photo courtesty of Boston University Daily Free Press 1986, used with permission
