Creating Meaning From Suffering

Posted on July 31, 2024 by Jerry Henderson, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Our brains are constantly working to keep us safe at the conscious and subconscious levels.

The brain wants to make sense of what happened so that we can feel a sense of closure, move forward, and try to feel safe.

However, we can create a lot of suffering for ourselves when we get stuck trying to make sense of trauma and other painful events that have happened in our lives. Sometimes, it just doesn’t make any sense.

When we get hung up on trying to make sense of things, it can lead to personal fault-finding, the inability to move forward, rumination, and other unhealthy thinking patterns.

But what if you didn’t have to make sense of any of it? What if you could come to a place where healing is so real that the need to make sense of things simply falls away?

It is possible, and one path that has been healing for so many people is to let go OF making sense of things and turn toward finding meaning FROM them.

These two approaches to suffering, trying to make sense of things and finding meaning from something, may appear similar, but they are vastly different and have very different outcomes.

For example, Candy Lightner, the founder of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), never came to a place where the death of her daughter made sense to her, but what she did do was find meaning from the loss of her daughter by helping others and advocating for the prevention of drunk driving.

Letting go of trying to make sense OF things and instead find meaning FROM our pain and loss by reframing it and directing our energy towards creating something from the pain can allow the pain to bring meaning to ourselves and to others.

This post is a quote from my book “Returning,” I share it here as a reminder that there is a place of healing that transcends making sense of what happened, a place of healing that makes meaning from what happened.

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry