by Dr. Anna Braverman

My work with young people – people in the “climbing” stage of their lives, has crystallized for me a phenomenon that I think exists everywhere in our society – the misuse of suffering as a marker for effort, success, worthiness, etc.
Let me explain what I mean:
Think of a role you play in your life that matters a lot to you. It might be your role of a parent, a student, a practitioner of your profession, a citizen, a friend, an artist – these are just a few (and we all play multiple roles in our lives). Now, in each of these areas there are some markers of success that are easily quantifiable. For instance, if you think back to a time in your life when you were a student (e.g. in school) you will probably recall that grades are one such quantifiable marker of success – it may not be easy to get an A, but it is quite easy to define what an A is and you can easily know whether you got it or not. It is also easy to quantify how much time, in hours and minutes, you are spending with your child/spouse/friend etc. For that matter, it is easy to quantify how much gross time you spend doing anything (stay in the office, for example).
The challenge is that some of these quantifiable markers of success are not necessarily the most meaningful, important or personally relevant. Grades are a compellingly simple reward system, but their relevance fades once we leave academic settings, or advance in them beyond the undergraduate level. Time spent is also simple, but if you think about it, it is a very crude measure of actual effort and even less good as a predictor of the value of someone’s contribution to any cause.
One thing that tends to be true of most people is that they struggle with ambiguity and tend to be driven to reduce anxiety-provoking doubt. Therefore, people on average, no matter how fervently they proclaim that they do not like to be formally evaluated (e.g., tested), tend to struggle with tasks that offer no built-in way to evaluate success or progress. And what do people do when an obvious way to measure progress does not exist? They try to create a way.
 
Unfortunately, it seems that there is a process in our society (and perhaps it is not unique to our culture – that may be a topic for another blog) that compels people to view suffering as an acceptable way to measure success. This makes a lot of sense. After all, what really does it mean to spend QUALITY time with a child? That is a deeply philosophical question that requires deep reflection on what kind of person that child is, what kind of person you are, what each of your skill sets are, what both you and this child are most in need of in this particular moment in time, what your general goals for parenting are, what kind of adult you want this child to become, how long the child’s attention span is, and much, much more. Suppose that a deep reflection on all of these questions leads you to believe that this child would benefit most from seeing you take care of yourself so that they feel that they are allowed to take care of themselves too. What if quality time for this particular child right now means seeing you give yourself a manicure? But can you be sure that this is true? Can you be sure that this conclusion was not driven by your selfish desire to have a manicure?

The truth is, that we can have a pretty strong hunch, but we can never be 100% sure that we are succeeding, because almost everything in life that is meaningful (like raising children, building a career, being creative) is also complicated. But somehow, there seems to be a process in people’s minds that says that if they have suffered or made sacrifices while doing something it is more likely to be the right thing to do than if they enjoyed it. Therefore, people seem to be more likely to conclude that if they give up their date night to spend an evening with their child (whose only desire that night may be to chat with a friend), that is more likely to make them feel like better parents than giving themselves a manicure.

Even the way we talk reflects this bias. For instance, it is not very common (probably because it is not always viewed as socially acceptable) to openly compliment oneself on how WELL one has done something. However, it is perfectly acceptable to imply that one has worked on something more hours (and slept fewer hours) than anyone else at the office. It is not socially acceptable to praise oneself as a parent, but it is acceptable to expound on all the sacrifices one has made for one’s child and the suffering one has accrued while making said sacrifices.
 
I wish there were an easy way to get out of this pattern of thinking, but there may not be. After all, using suffering as a proxy is a shortcut, and people create shortcuts for a reason – because the alternative road may be long or complicated. The alternative to using this shortcut, in my opinion, is to reflect deeply on one’s values and goals, and to be mindful of what one truly wants to see as an outcome of a particular action or activity. This may require a good measure of honesty with oneself and general self-awareness. However, the benefits are considerable. Imagine what it would be like to give yourself permission to leave work on time, to take the weekend off without guilt, to invite a babysitter on a night you really need to recharge, to accept help from a loved one, etc.
 
I encourage all of us (myself included) to reflect on the moments of suffering in our lives and try to be mindful of which ones are driven by the inevitable pain of being human, which we cannot avoid (e.g. by painful life events), and which ones are instances of needless suffering driven by the desire to quantify success/progress in areas of our lives that may be inherently not quantifiable. This might be a necessary first step to suffering a little less.
 
 

Reflections on living a life of choices, as opposed to a life of forced moves 
written by Dr. Anna Braverman
 
One of the cornerstones of mindful living is living a life where we make conscious choices and then take responsibility for the choices we have made. The opposite of this is a type of existence where we let life happen to us and experience our life circumstances as inevitable. Often this kind of living leads to feeling trapped in some way.
 
Learning to open up to the possibility that we have choices when it comes to the big picture circumstances of our life (like our relationships, work, health, etc.) can be a lifelong process and often becomes an important theme in therapy. But what about what seemingly is the minutia of our lives? What about the myriad daily tasks we perform, the small promises we make, the emails we send, the tiny insidious turns of phrase that roll off our tongue multiple times a day? I have been reflecting on the fact that we often don’t treat these small occurrences as real actions, and therefore often do not treat them as worthy of mindful consideration. However, I have come to reflect that these small habits, despite, and maybe even because, they are so small and so easily able to fly under the radar, have the power to train our brains to turn in a certain direction – to view the world through a certain lens. In particular, I have been reflecting on how our mundane choice have the power to turn us toward, or away from, a stance of active choosing in our lives.
 
All of this sounds a bit abstract, so let me illustrate:
 
Let’s use the example of a simple email. Suppose you have been asked to join some optional activity at work and you are crafting a reply to indicate that you will not be attending. Now think of the first opening phrase that pops in your mind. For many people, the go-to opening sentence would sound something like this:
“Thank you very much for your invitation. I would love to attend your event, but unfortunately I am unable to attend….”
This is a great way to reply to an email – if it were true. However, hidden in this sentence is a message that you have NO CHOICE but to skip the event, that you are SORRY about that, and that if you COULD attend, you certainly WOULD. In other words, that you are a victim of circumstances that are keeping you from what you want to do. However, what if the actual truth, if you allowed yourself a moment of honest reflection, is that you have no interest in that event, that you would rather not take time to attend it, and that if you really wanted to be there you would have been able to swing it – you simply are choosing not to.
Now, one might ask, “So what? What would be the harm in writing a polite email and making someone else feel good? It’s only a small, innocuous white lie – everybody does it!”
 
That may be true. But I have been reflecting that the danger of getting used to communicating like this is that the first one to get this message is our own brain. The person getting the email will soon forget all about it, but our own brain, through constant repetition, becomes imprinted with the idea that there is no such thing as WILL NOT – there is only CAN NOT.  Put simply – if you become subconsciously convinced that the only way to bow out of a lunch meeting is by having a massive headache, your body can certainly deliver one for you.
In my own life, I have been practicing using more honest and choice-based communications, that are still perfectly polite. For example:

• I cannot attend your event on Tuesday because of prior commitments (***note to reader: self care is a perfectly legitimate prior commitment), but I hope that your event goes very well and that you have a wonderful time!
• It will be hard for me to meet you so early in the morning, but I have a lot of flexibility from 10 am onward – is there any time that works well for you? (***Here I am resisting saying that I am really sorry that I cannot meet this person at 7 am – I am not sorry at all about that. I am very happy in fact that I plan to be sleeping at that time)

Can you think of examples from your own life?
Other situations where this becomes relevant include:

• Telling your kids, for those who have them, that you CANNOT give them something they want because you are busy/not feeling well/angry at them when the deep down truth is that you just want to read a book but are feeling guilty about that. Parents often feel that they need to find the justification for not doing something for their kids (the CAN’T), when maybe they could have said the truth – I can, but I don’t want to right now. This could have led to a productive conversation and taught the kid that they are allowed to take care of themselves too.
• Telling yourself that you didn’t clean/exercise/do laundry/reply to your friend’s email etc. because you just couldn’t, having been too unwell/stressed/busy etc. when the truth is that you COULD have done these things but chose not to because you just couldn’t be bothered. It might not feel nice to admit this to yourself, and in admitting this you do admit to a potential moment of less than exemplary behavior. However, in doing so you are also allowing yourself to live in the full glory of having had a choice and of having made a choice, and being free to make choices in the future. If you don’t like a choice you made, you can choose differently next time. If convince yourself that you were a victim of negative circumstances outside of your control there is less you can do about that.

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