On World Mental Health Day, can we please normalise extraordinary amounts of suffering?

This World Mental Health Day, I am thinking of that almost universal condition on this planet, to varying degrees: childhood trauma. Of how it shapes us as adults. I could talk about its effect on a child’s brain development. I could talk about inter-generational trauma, how it gets passed on from parent to child. But I want to talk about slightly tangential things instead, using some perhaps dodgy analogies.

Not to dive right in, but the first Noble Truth taught by the Buddha is that suffering/dissatisfaction (dukkha in Pali) exists. I paraphrase it sometimes to mean that suffering is a part of life. The psychiatrist M Scott Peck has paraphrased it as “Life is difficult.” In the next three Noble Truths, the Buddha goes on to explain how to reduce (or eliminate, depending on your views) suffering.

So now we find that there is some mandatory suffering in life. Even for children. It’s sitting here in our laps like a shotput ball. What are we supposed to make of it?

The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says that just as the stress and strain of physical exercise strengthens muscles, some amount of suffering and struggle keeps us, to very boldly paraphrase Tolle, emotionally fit. Without it, we and our world would become smaller and smaller (which will, in turn, produce suffering). Gravity, too, challenges our bodies and keeps our bones and muscles strong. Lack of gravity makes us smaller and frailer. Astronauts know this. But sometimes gravity is our enemy. When I experienced the agony of a slipped disc I wished I was on the moon just for a day. But “coming back to earth”, literally and metaphorically, would have made my pain worse.

What does all this mean for children? We talk about “spoiled” children, a highly subjective and violent term. Yet a child who is eventually taught at the right age, gently and in a safe environment, that everything cannot go their way, is surely being seasoned, like wood, to be more resilient in adulthood. Not that one would know it from a child’s reaction to, say, not getting Tirunelveli halwa every single time they want it.

But suffering can make our inner and outer worlds smaller too. It depends on the magnitude of the suffering, and it depends on how we handle it. Sometimes nothing seems more important than learning how to suffer in a helpful way, as the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has emphasised. The Thai Buddhist monk and teacher Ajahn Chah once said:

There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and in doing so become free.

This is a lifelong learning process for us adults. Almost no child is taught how to suffer the right way.

Too much exercise would be bad for our bones and muscles, as Eckhart Tolle acknowledges. Too much suffering can handicap us, and if it happened in childhood, it has the potential to handicap us for life. It could break us, kill us. So what is the “right” amount of suffering? In the standard narration of the children’s story Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the girl Goldilocks appears to us as a finicky, fussy character. Most things are either too hot or too cold, too this or too that for her. Very few things are just right. This is where the term “Goldilocks zone” in astronomy comes from: the set of conditions that a planet needs to fulfil in order to sustain life as we know it.

Buddhist cosmology seems to have its own version of a Goldilocks zone. Hell realms and heavenly realms are both considered too unpleasant and too pleasant respectively for a being to attain enlightenment. But the human realm is considered ideal, with just the right amount of suffering to potentially push us to start asking questions, to develop “[in]satiable curiosity” like Kipling’s fictional baby elephant. On the question of the rarity of being born in the human realm, with the potential to attain enlightenment, the following analogy has been used:

A blind turtle lives on the ocean bed and surfaces just once every hundred years. A golden yoke floats on the vast ocean, blown here and there by the wind. What are the chances of the turtle surfacing at just the right time and in just the right place to be able to put its head through the yoke?

Here we have an even narrower Goldilocks zone. For me it answers the question: how hard is it to find the “right” amount of childhood suffering among the billions of children on this planet?

Now, the above-mentioned Buddhist cosmology seems to suggest that the suffering here on earth is uniform among humans. This seems utterly crazy because of the insane inequality and wide spectrum of suffering, in childhood and adulthood, right here on earth. Take Prince Siddhartha’s childhood, for example. As a child he might have had a cushy life to some extent (one wonders if he hated his presumed military training as a child), especially because attempts might have been made to protect him from the realities of sickness, old age, and death. In one scene of Zee TV’s eponymous historical fiction series on the Buddha’s life (a show that doesn’t shy away from the questions of caste in the Buddha’s life), the prince’s father King Shuddhodhana orders all the residents of Kapilavastu to dye their grey hair black to hide the fact of ageing from the young prince. The Buddha has also been called “Shakyamuni”, the “Shakya sage”, referring to his privileged caste. He had to leave it all to get to the bottom of the question of suffering, and along the way he learned that too much suffering (in the form of starvation meditation, in his case) is counterproductive.

To continue my pure speculation: when you start off like Siddhartha, with social privilege and (I imagine) a relatively uneventful childhood, the trauma of losing your mother as an infant may not have broken your functioning as a child, and yet it might have primed you for a contemplative, thoughtful mindset. And with no external personal hardships except for social pressures, you witness bigger, larger-scale sufferings like war, sickness, ageing, and death, and it makes you thoughtful and sad and you start asking philosophical questions, perhaps on the nature of suffering.

To my mind, this wildly speculative account of the Buddha’s childhood that I have just hypothesised is the best way to arrive at the struggle that Eckhart Tolle recommends for emotional and spiritual growth. To continue my hypothesis: the Buddha is a great example of how too little external hardship and struggle, combined with internal trauma, will eventually naturally ripen into something resembling the “right amount of suffering”. To arrive at this place, coming from a privileged life, means that you can experiment with and explore external hardship at your own pace and arrive at a lifestyle and regular practice that works for you. This kind of situation seems as improbable as the aforementioned turtle putting its head through the golden yoke.

But if you start off in life with too much trauma to bear, and your functioning is affected, your path might be more labyrinthine than the Buddha’s. Meditation doesn’t often work so well for people with serious PTSD, for instance. Other, more creative and gentle ways are called for. Many of us didn’t have the right amount of suffering as children. We had too much suffering, too early. Some of us were socially disadvantaged. Some of us were disabled or ill, physically or psychosocially. Some of us suffered poverty. Now it’s going to be harder to arrive at a philosophy and practice that relieves our suffering. It’s going to take longer, too. Yes, even if we sit under a fast-track bodhi tree for thirteen years. This is why the description of someone as “together/ settled/ sorted” in life is not a function of merit, but of privilege.

What kind of privilege(s) am I talking about here? Why do different people react differently to trauma and ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)? Our society has definitely seen the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth, which can be dangerously romanticised and prescribed. Soni Sori, Maya Angelou, Viktor Frankl – the list could go on and on. Post-traumatic growth shows us that childhood trauma factors aren’t purely deterministic. But post-traumatic growth is one of those things that either happens or doesn’t. Nobody gets a say in it except for the survivor. So forget post-traumatic growth for now. I’m talking about post-traumatic “functionality” – that word that psychiatrists love. Why is a person able to function post trauma – or why not? Does this mean some people are more meritorious than others?

“Stronger”?

In my opinion, a partial answer is twofold: it depends on the nature and on the incidence(s) of the trauma. Firstly, there are so many types of childhood trauma, to begin with (what I mean by the “nature” of a child’s trauma). The ACEs only list some of them. We’ve got social oppression (collective trauma as experienced by a child), poverty, chaos, abuse, childhood disability (including neurodiversity) and illness, physical and emotional neglect, secondary trauma (witnessing other’s trauma and abuse), a family member’s illness or death, the divorce of one’s parents, among many others. Secondly, there’s the incidence of the trauma(s). I feel that this part is about how many different traumas you experienced, how many areas of your life the trauma (or traumas) affected; how many times you experienced it; how early in your childhood; and for how long (complex trauma).

These aforementioned factors are partially what, to me, make up psychosocial privilege (or lack thereof), which is not necessarily the same as “functionality” but does affect it sometimes. Examples of areas that childhood trauma could affect in adulthood: brain wiring; relationship with one’s body; relationship with one’s self; relationships with other people; education; career; finances; risk of substance abuse; physical and mental health, risk of self-harm. There are those who, as a result of childhood trauma, usually think that everything is almost always their own fault or responsibility. Guilt and shame dominate their psyches. There are those who think the opposite: everything is everyone else’s fault. Some of us are a combination of the two. In all these senses, the less psychosocial privilege you had as a child, the harder it’s going to be to function as an adult.

Here’s my conclusion: if almost nobody was in the Goldilocks zone for trauma as a child, and if so many of us go through extraordinary amounts of suffering as adults, can we please normalise extraordinary amounts of suffering? Can we say, yes, a huge amount of darkness exists in life? Can we try not to shun those who show us, through their hardship, our own trauma that we have shunned? Can we quote the writer Ursula Le Guin, who wrote that “Light is the left hand of darkness/And darkness the right hand of light”? Can we try not to shy away from, romanticise, trivialise, stigmatise, minimise, invisibilise, gaslight, repress the struggle and suffering of billions – whether these struggles manifest as mental illness or not? Neha Margosa recently shared an excerpt with me from an essay by Rebecca Solnit on the leprosy doctor Paul Brand about the nature of pain:

Brand concluded that “shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being,” but we are a society that values the anaesthetic over pain. We hide our prisons, our sick, our mad, and our poor; we expend colossal resources to live in padded, temperature-controlled environments that make few demands on our bodies or our minds. We come up with elaborate means of not knowing about the suffering of others and of blaming them when we do.

This is why, for me, World Mental Health Day is about more than mental illness. It’s about all of us, together, as a society, acknowledging widespread suffering, first and foremost.

Sneha R is a Bengaluru-based writer. She has been trying to make sense of her bipolar diagnosis since 2006. She loves trees and reads too many self-help books.

Views expressed are the author’s own.