Welcoming The Pain of a Good Climb

Embracing the pain of psychological growth but rejecting the pain of the physical.

Dragging myself up the steep hill on one of the many wonderful trails around my new home, head down, pistons blasting, I comfort myself with the mantra, “What goes up, will come down.” I hate climbing. My Dutch DNA has a deep aversion to inclines and treats them like an unwelcome and unnecessary obstacle. What follows is an exploration of my own hypocrisy in embracing the pain of psychological growth but rejecting the pain of the physical.

The roots of my aversion may also lie in my primary school days in the UK, where the 25-minute walk home from school was completely uphill. Trudging home, at the end of the day, when school is done, and life should be easy, just seemed wrong! I was indeed driven, as Freud says, by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. In our wealthy developed world today, that adversity to pain seems to have been raised to a true and unhealthy art.

Collectively, high on our own imagined ability to control life, we hold an innocent belief that the wheel of fortune’s darker turns not only should but will pass us by. We’re not only intolerant of suffering, but we’ve also become rather incompetent at it. And when misfortune touches our lives, as it inevitably will, we treat it much as I treat walking uphill; as an insult, an inconvenience, something to be resisted or battled through. Something out of the ordinary.

And the more fortunate we perceive ourselves to be, the more we have to lose, be it beauty, wealth, acclaim, drugs or love. Some people are afraid to celebrate the good, because they believe that it will somehow trigger the bad, forgetting that prosperity and adversity are both part and parcel of being human.

The fear of losing what we have is more conscious in some than in others. One client had experienced a brutal uphill battle all her life. But now her fortunes had changed for the good and it terrified her. Fearing that any minute the tide might change, she undermined the very joy of being together with a wonderful partner and having a more settled life. Whether it was tempting the devil or the innate understanding that this couldn’t last, she sought help in trying, at least, to savour the good while it lasted.

I think many people would recognize themselves as unconsciously fearing what the future may bring, especially when we are told we have almost won the battle of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.

To make matters worse, our younger generations have grown up in the dichotomy of personal empowerment on the one hand and the doom scenario of the climate emergency on the other. No wonder this leads to an anxious paralysis where not even the good in life can be savoured. It’s like enjoying the downhill walk in the knowledge that one of the next uphill battles will never reach its zenith.

What we need to do is step out of the trap of either the denial of suffering or anticipating it at every corner. Embracing the tides of fortune is the correct mental attitude. In our false belief that we have the power to avoid pain, we turn ourselves into victims of fate, rather than the heroic, growthful warriors that we are.

When we resist suffering, we suffer even more. And when we are constantly anticipating the grief that may or may not lie ahead, we ruin those periods in our lives where we can be joyful and build up our strength for what may lie ahead.

Creating an inner roadmap for future adversity

As I trudge up the hill, I remind myself that once I’ve passed the beautiful red farm on the left, the path will begin pointing downwards again. I know this trail and I am prepared. In the same way, once we’ve lived through a cycle of pain and adversity correctly, we gain an internal road map that will see us through future troubles. It is a roadmap called dynamic trust, a roadmap that tells you that whatever happens, you’ve got this! It is the only antidote to the anticipation, fear, and uncertainty that keeps us awake and ruins the easier and more flowing times in our lives.

But in our pain-intolerant societies, we fear what we can’t foresee and thus create a false sense of control by imagining every single scenario in our heads. This intrasensory process, being constantly aware of what is going on inside us, is just as much the cause of overheated survival systems as the true threats we may face in the outside world.

We’d do better to accept that being alive means getting hurt. Whether we like it or not, there are random events that bring pain and suffering in their wake. We can actively choose to welcome them, seeing them as useful manure to assist in the inner process of growth.

But that’s not a recipe for smiling through your pain. I don’t advocate bypassing the experience of grief, pain, disappointment or anger. These are human emotions and human reactions to adversity. We need to experience them, express them and then let them go. In doing so, we learn that they are not to be feared or avoided, thus creating this inner road map of dynamic trust. Just as I know that the trail I am on will soon flatten out, but still feel and maybe even curse my aching glutes from my uphill climb.

We can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond. We can reframe the experience from something inherently bad and to be avoided, to something that is inevitable and needs to be embraced. And even if we could avoid misfortune, it wouldn’t serve us.

Living in Holland, I could easily avoid hills completely. But here in Sweden, choosing to walk in less challenging landscapes would make me miss out on so much. And as this blog writes itself in my head while I continue on my path, I realize the hypocrisy of having such an open attitude to mental suffering, but when it comes to physical suffering, I am totally stuck in an avoidant mindset.

Here too I have a choice; I can get stuck in my Dutch flatlander annoyance and consider each hill as a conquest over physical adversity, or I can surrender to the process of healthy growth that my body will experience as I weave up and down through the Swedish forests and meadows.

After all, it’s often at the summit where we find the most spectacular views.

Lysanne Sizoo