Suffering as Signpost

A Discernible Scaffolding Directing us to True Being

“Your ‘value’ is free of the opinion of others, free of past suffering, free of future fears, free of social definitions, free of arbitrary circumstances, free of past ‘errors’, free of future intentions. You are invaluable, you are free – you are conscious.”

Humanity struggles with the belief that our situations, our circumstances are the source of our suffering and thus, control over our situations and circumstances is our hope for peace, joy and freedom. This is a fundamental confusion of the nature of reality so noisy that it requires a scaffolding of dry logic to dismantle. The beauty of this scaffolding is that it pricks us, awakens us and invites our attention ever deeper until we meet the nature of true being. Without awareness, the model is just suffering and noisy misery. Exposed to intelligent awareness we are invited into the nature of being.

This scaffolding is made of three discernable levels in which we can be blinded by or illuminated by our experiences. We spend most of our time at the surface level, situations/circumstances, which we consider “objective” reality. In the next level many therapists draw people in to acknowledge and work through psychological or emotional suffering and confusion. At this level we make meaning of patterns of experience (our experience of situations and circumstances) and our psychological and emotional response to them. There is real value in attending to our experience at this level. However, the only level in which people can permanently heal is at the level of erroneous identity-belief. This level results in truisms like, “in the end, it really is about you” or “your experiences are a reflection of your own beliefs” or “If it really bothered you that much maybe the problem is that you believe it”. These reflect an important truth, however, without scaffolding, people fake behaviors to reflect these truisms without internalizing how and why they are true. Without the benefit of seeing the mechanisms at this level, we cannot navigate to a deeper truth. This last level functions to either obscure your own true nature or reveal it under the light of conscious awareness.

The three discernable levels obscuring true self-knowledge are:

Situations/Circumstances - Objective, measurable realities. E.g. my car got a flat tire, I was born blind, my parents are impoverished. Without an emotional or psychological reaction, these facts are neutral.

Emotional/Psychological – often created by a narrative or further reinforcing a narrative. Not only do I have very little money in my account, but “I am so tired of being poor, why does every else get what they want but I don’t?”. These emotional/psychological responses result from narratives driven by and supported by an identity belief.

Erroneous identity-belief – This creates or starts with a deep, unconscious body state that drives emotional/psychological responses, and builds narratives which tend to create “objective realities”. This is the last level that confuses objective reality as an indicator of the nature of consciousness. This is a belief about who and what I am, which drives all my interactions and experiences with self, others and all reality.

Situations and Circumstances

There is little excavation necessary at the level of situations and circumstances. Our senses are designed to render this level as “objective reality”. Here is an example. A couple comes into therapy feeling conflicted after years of serious friction and the dialogue goes something like this:

Husband, “Look I know it shouldn’t be a big deal but I’m sick of her leaving cabinet doors open. I don’t know how many times I’ve asked her to just make sure she closes the doors when she’s finished.”

Wife, “You see what I’m dealing with? Out of all the things we have to deal with and with everything I do to keep our family up and running, he focuses on one tiny meaningless thing and I’m sick of it.”

A therapist could work with logistics (situations/circumstances), make behavioral contracts, and mediate the situation, but any therapist worth their salt knows, this kind of conflict is never simply about the situation or circumstance. Over time, these two people have experienced patterns of behavior, and these patterns mean something to them emotionally and psychologically.

This will always be some level of power struggle with both people wanting to feel empowered to configure their environment and possibly also to configure their partner’s behavior to satisfy what circumstances signify to them. Each person within a couple makes their own individual meaning based on DNA coding, personality characteristics, childhood experiences, cultural, religious and racial socialization, biological comforts and discomforts, internalized narratives and the complex interaction of all these things.

Emotional & Psychological Responses

With this couple, the psychological and emotional meanings are probably something like:

The husband experienced a chaotic childhood with parents with poor boundaries who refused to acknowledge his right to space, his right to configure his own environment. In fact, sometimes they mocked him and called him “anal retentive” or “compulsive” Therefore, he has a deep unconscious feeling that if someone is messy in his shared environment, they fundamentally don’t respect him or value his feelings. This means this is not just about leaving cabinet doors open. This feels like his wife doesn’t care about him, doesn’t care about how he feels and doesn’t care about what he says. He feels criticized and dismissed by her resistance. He feels unheard, the way he was unheard as a child. Since his parents never acknowledged their impact and always blamed him, he feels that this is a hopeless day-to-day grind of putting up with these boundary violations. Thus, his protestations, even when expressed reasonably, always come with an underlying vibe of anger, hopelessness and victimhood.

The wife experienced a childhood with meticulous perfectionistic parents who valued an externally organized environment over the creativity, play impulses, and the developmental needs of their daughter. They micromanaged her, criticized everything she did, and she grew up feeling smothered, denied and her talents and impulses treated like they were a problem. This means, this is not just about a husband asking her to close cabinet doors after she’s finished. She feels unseen, the way she was unseen as a child. She feels that someone else’s situational demands are being valued over her very being, her deepest instincts to move her body, to create, to act without being controlled and criticized. When she responds to her husband’s feedback, even when she speaks in a level tone, there is an underlying vibe of righteous entitlement, combined with pent up anger, frustration and victimhood.

Therapists are good at sorting through these meanings, drawing them to the surface above the circumstantial conflict of cabinet doors. There can be resolution when the couple does love and care for one another. Instead of having triggered experiences, fruitlessly arguing about situations and circumstances, they begin to see that their spouse’s needs, even if counter to their own, are important and valid, given their life experiences. They may learn a dialogue, something like this:

Husband, “I get that I criticize too much, and I bring a lot of heat when I ask you to close the cabinet doors. I know you’ve had more than enough of that in your life. I love you and want to be able to negotiate stuff with you kindly. From my perspective, no one ever listened to me and my entire home was chaos and mess, so I start feeling kind of depressed and scattered when things are not organized. And if I ask you for a change and you get mad, I feel like you’re shutting me down and refusing to hear me. Is there a way we can handle this better?”

Wife, “Honestly, just hearing that you understand why it’s so hard for me to take feedback in these kinds of situations calms my nervous system and I feel more loving and open to you. To be honest, it’s not a huge problem for me to be more careful about closing the cabinet doors, as long as you can make space for me to be messy, creative and playfully impulsive sometimes. Maybe we can trade off, leaning more in one person’s direction at different times?”

And they’re off. Most people are insightful and intuitive about their own needs, once they’ve been shown the level at which meaningful (emotional/psychological) negotiation happens.

Erroneous Identity Belief

Therapy often ends here. People are being kind, loving, and empathetic. They are incorporating their spouse’s needs with their own. However, very few people can ever really explicate the true purpose of conscious experiences, especially painful or difficult ones. This is important, because without understanding that their emotional and psychological response (which they are now acknowledging and factoring in), reflects an erroneous belief about themselves, they cannot experience deep peace and healing. Acknowledging and making space for our emotional and psychological responses is healthy but does not factor in that emotional and psychological responses like these reflect a distorted belief about self.

In a recent podcast (https://jswonders.com/podcast-item/palisades-wildfires-ii_how-my-struggles-resulted-in-excavating-an-old-stubborn-belief-about-myself/), I shared how a recent trauma, the loss of our home to wildfire, brought into my conscious awareness an emotional or psychological meaning that I had carried as a foundation in my relationship to humanity. The circumstantial level has objective realities – there was a fire, our home burnt, we were unhoused, we struggled with money, location, clothing, logistics of schools for our children, air quality, etc. All these things were “true” in the objective sense (the first level).

However, I noticed a quality to my fear, a feeling of abandonment, a sense of injustice, an anger, maybe even a rage. And when I investigated it, I realized I was reexperiencing colorations of an emotional response that had been shaped when my parents used to forget me at middle school and would then argue about who was supposed to pick me up in front of me. I experienced feelings of injustice, a world of callous humans in which assigning blame was more important than an abandoned child yearning to feel valued. There is the second level, emotional/psychological response.

Most people would say, I had every right to feel the way I did, that I was objectively experiencing something very difficult both in childhood and as an adult. True, but remaining at this level abandons the more important self-realization. The more important self-realization renders this emotional response transitory.

As I explored my emotional experience, I realized that in childhood, I had constructed an emotional response that defined my entire relationship to other people, all my behaviors as a teen and adult, and most of my choices. That response was something like, “I’m going to be perfectly moral, just and kind, and then people will have to show up, people will have to be kind, reality will have to be fair (my house won’t burn down). If people or reality fail their end of the bargain, then I have a morally superior right to hate everyone for being the worthless, feckless shitty human beings that they are. I have a right to reject them and refuse to interact with them”. Anyone who knows me will have recognized this deep programming all throughout my twenties and thirties.

Objectively, I experienced painful treatment at the hands of my parents and difficult circumstances in life. Emotionally and psychologically, I had developed a response that is understandable and deserving of empathy. But WHY bother understanding or empathizing?

Understanding and empathizing is not merely about accommodating emotional or psychological responses. This difficult emotional experience was a signpost directing me to a belief, that created a dynamic with other humans and with reality which resulted in frustration, anger, narcissism and cutoff from deeply meaningful experiences with other conscious beings. Difficult emotional experiences are directing us to examine an underlying assumption not about situations or circumstances, not about an emotional/psychological stance, but about a deep, visceral, unconscious belief about self. This erroneous belief obscures the true nature of your being.

This painful emotional response attributed to the wildfires and the human condition was a signpost directing me to a quiet underlying assumption about me. The assumption itself is so intertwined with suffering that the assumed belief and the emotional experience are almost inextricable. The identity belief is a response to a painful emotional experience but also the cause of continued emotional experiences of the same kind, recreated by a narrative reinforcing the original erroneous belief, then resulting in more painful emotional experiences, ad nauseum.

Extricated from the emotional experience and the narrative, the belief is simply an assumption about what is true of my own nature and thus my place in this world. Once I consider letting go of the narrative and the reinforcing painful emotional responses, there is nothing left to consider other than what I believe about myself. To access this visceral belief, we must let go of outrage, of feelings of persecution and injustice for a moment and ask, if I accept my emotional stance in relationship to the world what does that belief assume about who I am in the world?

In response to unearthing my childhood emotional experience, I could construct a reasonable adult interpretation of the underlying belief. I could pretend something psychological like, I am permanently a helpless twelve-year-old, without anyone who cares, without the ability to ask for connection and help, without any power to problem solve. Within therapy, this would be challenged to help me alter my perception of my current resources and change how I relate to my current circumstances. However, this is really an attempt to defuse the adult interpretation, not the true self-belief. Many people get stuck at this stage of healing, because they confuse their intellectualized, adult attempt to deconstruct the narrative as acknowledgment of how they really feel and what they really think. However, if I get quiet, if I listen to my body, the self-belief or constructed narrative is something much deeper, more childlike, more painful and drastically skewed like:

I’m a worthless piece of shit that nobody wants. I’m so un-wantable that it’s a problem for my own parents to pick me up and bring me home. I should never bother society with my presence.

That was the story my body held, if I stopped being about circumstances, stopped being about psychological, or emotional responses, my basic body state, held that “truth” and had since I was an infant. The emotional/psychological stance “I’m going to be perfectly moral, just and kind, and then people will have to show up . . .” was not an honest belief or narrative. It was a scarred, trauma response, a coping skill, a way of obscuring how terribly hurt, unwanted and damaged I felt. I was never going to be able to heal, if I used this emotional/psychological stance to cover how I really felt about myself. All the moral superiority, the perfectionistic expectations for myself and others gave me permission to punish and hate humans and even reality, as a cover for how I felt about myself.

The True State of Conscious Being

I had an erroneous belief about self that was buried so deep, it required a wildfire to thrust me naked and shivering into the wild world, it forced me to accept heartfelt acts of kindness and generosity from my own loving community and from complete strangers. Being enabled to care for my children by the generosity of the human community invited me to notice the emotional response under my situation/circumstance, then to remember where and how I had developed that emotional response. But most importantly, it then led me to examine the assumption about myself under that emotional/psychological response. That assumption revealed, not something about humans but revealed that I did not understand my essential nature as a conscious being. Hating and rejecting humanity was not about humanity, it reflected how I felt about myself and what I believed about me. I did not relate to others and the world in a manner that reflected the truth about me.

So here is where psychology, therapy, and self-help meet the true state of reality, which is to say, the true state of conscious being.

I spent most of my thirties, a confirmed atheist, a skeptic so dedicated that I avowed that I did not believe in belief, that it was merely an excretion of some kind, no different than sweat resulting from exercise. I spent most of my forties, an agnostic, merely accepting that I didn’t believe anyone who believed, nor did I trust my own mind’s ability to ascertain the truth. I was an expert at logically deconstructing.

Being a therapist offered me experiences that resulted in a much stronger spiritual leaning. After 5-7 years in practice, I observed with fascination that when people suffered psychological dysfunction it directly correlated to erroneous beliefs about themselves first, which resulted in erroneous assumptions about their relationship to reality and other living beings. Over time, it became apparent that the more angry, cruel or limiting the self-belief, the more severe the psychological dysfunction, up to psychotic breaks, inability to work, complete self-destruction through addictions, anger, etc.

I became aware that I was in a business in which success meant unearthing, challenging and releasing unconscious beliefs about self. Maybe “success” is not an accurate word. Peace, relief and healing did not arise from achieving the client’s outward goals though that is always a byproduct. It was not about becoming something other than the client had been. It was about realizing that they had never been what they believed they were. In other words, all their suffering (not pain) resulted from attempting to operate in the world with seriously skewed assumptions about their own value and place within reality. Being confused about their true nature, lead them to choose inappropriate tools and modes of operation that inflicted pain, friction and damage on themselves and others.

At this point, there is a duality in which both sides of the same realization confirm one another. I am not that which I believed I was, begs the question, then what am I? Through my own suffering as well as learning through watching my clients heal, I realized that psychology was not asking the most important question – if my beliefs about myself are not true, when I release them, what is left? It is a failing of psychology that it often focuses on negative situations, emotions or beliefs but never asks, what remains in the absence of these “pathologies”? Or in plainer language, what constitutes self-esteem? What constitutes a healed state? What am I?

Why “Self Esteem” is a Depressing Trap

I will take a detour to address the idea of building self-esteem because there are many in self-help, life coaching and therapy who believe that you can build self-esteem, that you can work on your self-worth.

I happily reject this premise in any guise or form. Anyone who follows the logic is met with contradiction. Thinking about your value, the act of working on your self-worth, having any relationship to definable characteristics (objective reality), devalues you. I’ve done a deeper dive into this subject in an essay called “The Delusion of Self-Esteem” (https://jonsorensen.substack.com/p/the-delusion-of-self-esteem). To summarize, any attempt to justify yourself as valuable as defined by observable characteristics, objectifies you, and sets you up to lose your value when the characteristic you used changes. In addition, your definition devalues those who do not share the same characteristics. So, defining that which might objectively prove your worth, is precarious and unsustainable while simultaneously devaluing any who do not share the characteristic.

Let’s briefly prod the subject. If you think that contributing to others, being kind and thinking of others before yourself, makes you a good person, a person of value, then what of the child born with such severe developmental limitations that must be clothed, fed by hand and carried around for their entire lives? Are they worthless? And what happens when you are in dire circumstances and your existential needs begin to create a social cost for others? Have you now become a person of low value, a person of no worth? This example demonstrates how definable characteristics are inherently empty of value assignable to a conscious being and how by defining the characteristic we devalue any who do not share those characteristics.

In the absence of concrete, definable characteristics, what can we assert about a conscious being’s value? Any truly effective work with self-esteem resorts to the undefinable or that which defies objective definition. You can work on your self-esteem by telling yourself that you are loved and loveable or by experiencing yourself as a mysterious profound presence. To enter the realm of consciousness, you must consider the possibility that your presence is profoundly significant, beyond definition and unquantifiable by objective evaluation, because the moment you resort to objective evaluation, you have objectified yourself and tied your worth to a set of circumstances over which you have no permanent control. The true state of being is that of being conscious. With that comes many beautiful, ineffable, profound experiences.

Returning to the scaffolding by which we access knowledge of the true self, we leave the last level that is enmeshed with the external world, the painful, visceral, unconscious “belief” about what I am. In my case it was “I’m a worthless piece of shit that nobody wants. I’m so unwantable that it’s a problem for my own parents pick me up and bring me home. I should never bother society with my presence.”

In therapy, we might recognize that this belief is seriously skewed and erroneous. We should recognize that it is the result of a child’s mind, bewildered and confused by painful experiences, placing blame on himself rather than facing the precarious capriciousness of the adult world. However, instead of arguing with this belief, I turned to the only real question with which any of us struggles – if situations and circumstances do not indicate who I am, if emotional responses do not indicate who I am, if my unconscious relationship to humanity and reality is not a reliable indicator of who I am, if the deeply visceral and childlike belief about myself is not a reliable indicator of who I am, then who and what am I? I’ve eliminated all obvious, noisily discernible elements of experience. Who and what am I?

Here is where my experience as a therapist has led me through a process of questioning deeper and deeper assumptions to a mysterious, wondrous reality – though the report of it is only anecdotal.

I practice a form of therapy that shies away from the cognitive or even the emotional. The focus is on the body and deeply visceral unconscious reactions that result in tormented relationships to self, others and reality. People who have been sexually assaulted usually have a deeply held somatic experience of themselves as spoiled meat, or as a dirty or shameful object to be used for others’ pleasure and discarded. People who have been abandoned or verbally abused have a deep body experience of feeling discardable, unwanted or unlovable.

In this form of therapy, the therapist does not suggest alterations to the client’s cognitive style or emotional response. The client is led to consciously connect to their body state and process (eye movements, somatic sensing, etc.) until the beliefs, cognitions and emotions surface and resolve in the light of consciousness.

Through this process, I have spent over a decade watching people process and heal without therapist direction or directives. Startlingly, when they resolve or move painful heavy chronic body states/beliefs something mysteriously light and beautiful appears. They become unconcerned with objective valuation. They stop comparing themselves or their experiences to others. They become unconcerned with self-esteem. They are simply left with the experience of themselves, and it is non-tangible, beyond concrete definition. They experience themselves as conscious beings that are beautiful, connected, creative, wise, light, and joyful in nature. They experience themselves as love, loved and loving. They begin to suspect that they are something wondrous, mysterious and unknowable by the mind. They begin to understand that demands for justification, definitions and proof of worth are unnecessary constructions of the biological mind. They begin to experience their true nature of being. Watching this over and over, I can tell you it is energetically light and beautiful.

What is Left to Say?

Though logic fails to teach you what you are, logical progression walks you to the door of an energetic experiential state in which you inhabit your true nature. You know it as something beyond concrete objective “reality”. And your experience of yourself leaves you with, conscious awareness, beauty, love, connection, unity, peace, wonder and mystery. Once we have descended the scaffolding, there is little to say about your true state, because you defy construction or deconstruction. You defy definition. There is nothing to say. There is only the conscious experience of yourself. You are unalterably beautiful. This is the only enduring circumstance. You are your enduring circumstance. You are beautiful and beyond all value. You always were, you are now, and you always will be. You are beautiful.