How can we be more tender?

Normalising the flop era

Nov 28, 2023

Hii. How are you doing?

A few of my friends and I keep talking about being in our collective flop era. For those who aren’t chronically online, that's the term for when various parts of your life seem stuck or aren’t progressing in the way you would like. In the past few weeks I’ve been reflecting on what helps when working with clients and in my personal life when things feel in a period of decline.

A concept I find useful is psychotherapist Stephen Gilligan’s idea of effective suffering. He suggests that “every basic experience of being human will visit you, over and over again. There is nothing you can do to avoid it: simply by virtue of being alive, you will be touched repeatedly by sadness, happiness, anger, joy, disappointment, and so forth”. There is nobody on earth who can escape this, and our challenge is to develop ways to accept and be with each experience that arises. As Holocaust survivor and existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl argued for in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how we cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with purpose.

So, how do we suffer effectively when things feel hopeless?

Effective suffering means that you recognise and accept that difficult events and feelings are an unavoidable and sometimes helpful part of living in the world and growing as a person.

Being in a perceived flop era doesn’t need to be pathologised as depression, anxiety or proof of your inadequacy. It is possible to name some of the emotions being felt and allow yourself to just sit with it. Effective suffering really is as simple as allowing it to be and shifting to an accepting and curious relationship with the experienced pain.

Our job is to not create a rigid narrative about our emotions (e.g. I’m not good enough, people always let me down, the world makes things hard for me), and to not develop compulsive strategies to try and control them (e.g. starting arguments, self-sabotage, abusing food or drink). When we suffer ineffectively, anything that doesn’t go to plan becomes a stick to beat ourselves with.

In Stephen Gilligan’s book he writes:

“The proof is in the pudding. In effective suffering, the heart cracks open to a deeper tenderness and centeredness. As the Buddhists say, the heart was meant to be broken, over and over again. Not shattered, but opened to a greater connection with self and world. In ineffective suffering, identity hardens and possibilities close”.

In my experience, the easiest way to integrate this approach is to find real examples of people who do it well. I’ve learnt a lot from seeing a friend go through a miscarriage. Her ability to be in touch with her physical and emotional discomfort, whilst becoming a more empathetic and loving person in the face of the loss, was a helpful model in effective suffering. Although her heart cracked, it did not shatter completely.

Some questions to get you thinking:

Is there someone in your life who is coping well with something difficult?
How do they suffer effectively? (e.g. they don’t speak badly about themselves, they still look after themselves when feeling down, they have faith that it will pass)
What do you think gives that person hope?
Can you tap into any of their inner resources when facing your own challenges?(e.g. an ability to be able to laugh in the face of any situation, a belief system that things usually work out okay, a willingness to ask for help, a braveness)

I’m wishing you all the tenderness in the world as we head into the festive period.

Thank you soo much for reading,

Adelaide

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