Legitimate Suffering

11 May 2022

As many of you know, some of these blogs are the result of questions SMART Recovery attendees have asked.  This blog is another answer to a gratefully received question.

That question sought understanding of a quote attributed to Dr. Carl Jung (1887-1961) stating that “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”  I agree with Jung’s statement. 

The theory behind that statement involves the misuse of psychosocial defense mechanisms like denial, projection, and reaction formation, as examples.  Jung used the term “legitimate suffering.”  Understanding that idea is crucial to understanding the direction of Jung’s argument. 

For suffering to be legitimate means it is organic i.e., that the suffering arises from natural engagement in day-to-day life.  For example, heartbreak, illness, and setbacks of a professional, personal, or social nature are all parts of being alive.  Each can be extremely painful to move through, but Jung’s real point is that experiencing that pain—as legitimate pain—is the cost of growth toward adulthood and self-actualization.  Let’s look at an example.

Fourteen-year-old Dick has fallen hard for classmate Jane.  Jane does not reciprocate his passionate feelings, so she politely tells Dick that they are classmates and no more.  Dick has some choices.  He can go away, lick his wounds, and come back in pursuit of another mate—the healthy option—or he can fail to accept Jane’s rejection and turn his anger on her, his parents, himself, or the world. Doing any of these things (manifesting anger at Jane, his parents, himself, or the world) is a refusal or “...unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” 

The earliest quote I know of, regarding the experiencing of pain, is from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”  Finding appropriate channels for sorrow and pain is the essence of understanding Jung’s quote.

If Dick turns his rejected anger back on Jane and starts saying nasty things about her, what is the effect of that slander on Dick?  First, Dick has alienated himself from himself.  Instead of letting the tears fall and sharing the embarrassment, hurt, and rejection with a trusted friend, he has closed off access to his own pain and redirected the natural and inevitable energy toward Jane who has actually been a good, honest classmate to Dick.  Bottled pain eventually spills out.

If Dick turns his anger on his parents, for not warning him about this unbearable pain, he has thwarted his own growth toward adulthood by misdirecting responsibility to outside agents, his parents.  With that misdirection will come resentment.  When Dick’s parents make suggestions or seek to lovingly discipline his misbehaviours, Dick will see those parental actions, not for what they are, but as the unfair lashing out of two “idiot adults.”  Everyone suffers in this outcome.

Another option is for Dick to turn on himself and withdrawal from the dating and social markets to protect his already wounded ego.  If Dick starts telling himself that he is not worth dating anyway—or the million other negative lashings he can self-administer—his own belief in himself as an agent, and in the goodness of life and the world, are diminished.  If Dick continues to nurture his withdrawal, his own ego will be unable to accept full responsibility for his loneliness and isolation so his fear, sadness, and weakly-founded sense of unlikableness will be turned on the world as resentment of a terrible life.  Resenting the world leaves Dick feeling more alone, less successful and with greater self-doubt while alienating those who listen to his largely unjustified complaints about how badly life sucks. 

Some of these examples have been taken to a linear extreme to make a point, but I suspect many readers are able to recognize someone who has followed similar paths, maybe not as directly, but with the same final result.

When the catalyzing quote (paragraph 2, above) was presented to me, I had a recollection that M. Scott Peck had discussed that same passage.  Sure enough, on the third page of the first chapter Peck (1978, p. 17) quotes from Jung’s Collected Works, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”  (The distinction here is that Peck, like many others, divided neuroses from personality disorders.)

Peck amplified the thinking above with direct reference to addiction as an escape from legitimate suffering:

As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Those things that hurt, instruct.’ It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems. Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, [“cancel” them] pretend they do not exist. We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain. We attempt to skirt around problems rather than meet them head on. We attempt to get out of them rather than suffer through them. This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness” (Peck, 1978, pp. 16-17, Bold emphasis added). QED

I hope this answers the question but urge readers not to be shy in following up with comments or further questions—that’s how we learn.  And please, do not bid for heartbreak: give your sorrow words.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.

References

Peck, M. S. (1978). The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth.  Simon & Schuster.