Your Pain is Valid

Sometimes we mistake depth of suffering for validity of suffering. We think to ourselves our broken finger is a less valid source of pain than someone having a bone marrow transplant or that losing a friendship is a less valid source of pain than losing a loved one to death. These are certainly different levels of suffering and pain, but none is more or less valid than any of the others, and they all have one thing in common—they hurt. This also happens with mental illness and mental and emotional pain. We think anxiety about an interview is a less valid source of suffering than feeling suicidal. These situations differ and call for distinct responses, but they are both acute forms of mental and emotional suffering.

The Importance of Seeing Your Suffering as Valid

If you have read any of my posts up to now, you no doubt understand that I struggle. Mental illness, specifically schizoaffective disorder, has been a conscious part of my life for about fourteen years. A mixture of schizophrenia and Bipolar (in my case), this disorder affects both my thought patterns and my mood or emotions. It can feel dramatic, ‌and many people might call it dramatic. I have scars from box knives and stovetops, all self-inflicted, and I cower beneath the compelling of a creature I know is only in my mind. There have been days when my duties to others are the only reason I’m still alive. One time in college, I agreed to give my friend a ride to the airport. The morning of, I held my pill bottle in my hand, intending to take them all, but something reminded me my friend wouldn’t make it to see her family if I killed myself. I had to get her to the airport. So, I put down the pill bottle and postponed my intended suicide. All this to say, my life—my inner life—can appear pretty intense.

I don’t mind sharing it. I want people to know the hope that has kept me afloat all these years. Yet when I share my story, I feel there is an unfortunate side effect sometimes. Because of the phenomenon I mentioned earlier in which we mistake depth and validity of suffering, my story can seem to minimize the suffering of others. This is not at all my intention. I never want to dismiss or invalidate another’s pain. Someone who struggles to get out of the bed in the morning, who finds no pleasure in what once delighted them, whose self-deprecating thoughts plague them, has a suffering no less valid than my own. Furthermore, it is their pain. My pain is mine and can teach something, I’m sure, but their pain is theirs, and God can use it uniquely to shape their hearts.

You see, through pain I have been shaped to have joy and love, and I believe others can find the same joy, the same love, the same peace, if only they will take their suffering seriously. Here is a post about why we must give credence to our own experiences, why we must believe thinking about them and processing them is worthwhile. It is the first in a series of posts, which will contain ways God can use our pain to teach and grow us.

Problematic Emotions

I believe that everyone has experienced or will experience mental and emotional pain at some point in their life. It doesn’t have to be clinical depression, Bipolar mania, or disorienting psychosis that leads you to this suffering, though those afflictions certainly result in mental and emotional pain. Maybe your depressive thoughts lead you to a numb sort of boredom, or maybe some event in your life has you clawing at a figurative cliff side, trying so hard not to fall. Whatever the case, we have all felt how pain distorts our perception of reality. Many of us, having come out on the other side of suffering, can attest to the fact that due to our feelings during a rough season, we could not see clearly. Hindsight is 20/20, we say, because being removed from the pain allows us a different and more nuanced perspective.

What is the difference between the moment of suffering and the times of clarity after it? Our emotions.

Our emotions and mental vantage point shifted when we were removed from the situation, or to put it a different way, we have gained distance between us and our difficult emotions. That distance helps us look at our emotions and situation through a more thoughtful lens, less driven by the immediacy and urgency of feelings and more driven by logic and rationale. Often we find that our emotions in the moment of affliction disorient us so that we cannot see an accurate or more long-term picture of what our suffering means. Suffering is not good in and of itself, we know, but the more far-reaching effects of suffering can be good. The death of a loved one is never good, but taking more care to remember their inspiring words and actions can be good. Likewise, feeling depressed is never good, but the lessons we learn about ourselves, reality, and God in the midst of depression can be good.

What Problematic Emotions Teach Us

What sorts of lessons do we learn? Mental and emotional pain teach us this—we cannot always trust our emotions. We must separate ourselves, our actions, from our feelings in such a way that our emotions might inform our decisions but not control them. Suffering from mental illness or from any mental and emotional pain forces us to question our feelings and look for a deeper, more enduring truth than the fickle wanderings of our hearts. Depression and anxiety, no matter how intense, invite us to seek something greater than ourselves, something we can cling to and that can protect us from the pain we’re enduring. Suffering can drive us toward God.

For this reason, I would encourage anyone struggling with any level of mental or emotional issues, take your pain seriously. Let it light a fire beneath your feet to seek the Comforter. Let it be how you understand ultimate healing. No one can promise the situation you are in will get better, and no one can guarantee your mental health issues will abate, not in this life. It might be that things get worse—that does not mean the end for you. Rather, that means Christ’s healing at the end of age will mean that much more. Wholeness will feel that much more glorious for having been broken. Don’t shove your pain under a floor mat somewhere, hiding it behind a smile and drowning it out with self-talk that “others have it worse” or “it’s not that bad.” You matter. Your pain matters! More so even than blessings, your pain can be what brings you to greater maturity, peace, compassion, and growth. C.S. Lewis put it this way: “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains.”

We Want Dramatic—God Wants Effective

I remember wanting to have one of those life stories that demonstrates in a dramatic way how good God is. I wanted a miracle, both to experience and to tell. What I didn’t understand is the most incredible miracle of my life has nothing to do with my mental illness or surviving suicidalism. It has to do with the everyday process in which God is changing my heart toward Him and toward others. Saving me from my schizoaffective disorder takes a great deal of orchestrating of people, medical support, medications, and motivation, to be sure, but the real miracle is that I embraced God at all in the first place. I was blind, but now I see. I thought I understood, and I could have easily continued my whole life claiming Christianity but missing the point. I don’t want to think of where I’d be mentally and emotionally if I had done that. Instead, God reached down and placed just the right people at just the right time in my life. He performed the miracle I wasn’t looking for, the one I desperately needed. He saved this broken, blind, bull-in-a-china-shop heart and bestowed on me grace upon grace, which He is growing even still.

So you might not have had a past as a drug addict. You might not have attempted suicide. You might not have destroyed all the relationships in your life. As a Christian, you are still a miracle! Where you come from might not have looked disastrous, but God took what was dead and made it alive. He took the old heart of stone and placed in you a heart of flesh sensitive to His teaching and whispers. You might not struggle with clinical depression or anxiety and you might never have hallucinated, but your life is still precious and a beautiful depiction of God’s grace. So let your pain guide you to the Father. Take your suffering seriously, and allow your affliction to advance God’s kingdom in you. It’s worth it.