June Exploration: The Links To Human Suffering

Most human suffering is related to love and loss-Elvin Semrad. –The Body Keeps Score, by Bessel Van Der Kolk

This is a partial quote as it goes on to say the therapist job is to help people “acknowledge, experience, and bear” the reality of life-with all its pleasures and heartbreak. However, if you simply look at that first part about most human suffering, is it not true? I was told we want things to be more complicated than it is as human beings when it comes to answers and solutions. We insist it be and often reject simple rationalization or explanations.

I can see most, keyword most, human suffering related to love and/or loss. This actually isn’t only about the first things we may think about like losing a loved one or divorce and breakups. Love can lack in many areas of one’s life and it can be surface level or deeper rooted issues about love. It can be the loss of a job or the loss of identity. As I use this month to explore, I thought about in this season what my current suffering is linked to. What love or loss or both? Are they tethered to my past? (Of course there would be some connections but, not so much if I were solely a believer of Adlerian psychology. Which I think people are too different, complex and simple to be reduced to one belief.)

As I type in real time, what comes to mind is I have lost more than a father and a best friend, I have also lost myself in caregiving that was a category 5 on my nervous system. The journey back to me gives me pause because who and what will I find when I return to “me”. I am certainly not the me of 4 years ago. Yet, I remember I have been here before. Rediscovering and rebuilding “me”. It’s like returning home from a trip and things have been moved around in your house or worse; coming home and your home has been destroyed. Thankfully, this is a time where the old me has not been destroyed. This is a time where things have been lost, removed, demolished, and it’s time to rebuild and expand.

~Nikki