Productive and Unproductive Suffering

Sometimes, in order to heal, we need to navigate painful emotions, like grief and shame. However, there is a difference between productive suffering and unproductive suffering.

There are three critical distinctions between productive and unproductive suffering.

1. Consent. Productive suffering implies a form of tacit consent. This consent may not be between a person and a third-party in all cases. Sometimes this consent is with oneself. For example, we consent when we tell ourselves that we're willing to suffer through challenging emotions in order to navigate a path to healing. Trauma needs to be processed in many (but not all) cases to be resolved. Grief envelops us like a wave and passes through us. Shame and guilt burn us at first. When we suffer productively, we give consent to feel these challenging emotions in order to get to the other side of the storm.

2. A tinge of hope. Productive suffering is grounded in hope. When we suffer productively, we do so on a bedrock of the hope that this suffering will not be for nothing. Productive suffering often leads to post traumatic growth. And this is based on hope.

Take the example of a person who is leaning into grief. In my former role, as the Senior Advisor at the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, I learned this insight: "We grieve because we love." While true, I think we also grieve because we hope. Sometimes we grieve people that we have lost, and sometimes what we need to grieve is the loss of a dream, or years wasted because trauma has blocked us from filling our potential.

When we approach this grief and move through it, we do so because we hope for a better future. This hope lies waiting to be reclaimed, intact underneath the weight of our grief. We grieve what was, so that we can start a new chapter leading ourselves towards a better future. Productive suffering is therefore an act of Hope.

3. Control. When we suffer productively, we retain some level of control. Just as we consented to suffer, we hold onto some capacity for meta-level cognition. Meta-level cognition is the ability to zoom out and observe ourselves in the present moment and to simultaneously hold onto hope despite being assailed by a range of challenging emotions.

When a therapist takes us into the storm, and we lose all control of ourselves, this is not productive suffering. This is the opposite of a trauma-informed approach to taking care of survivors. For example, if a sexual assault survivor is asked to recount the details of the assault and feels ungrounded and out of control, this is not therapy—it's retraumatization.

Unproductive suffering feels like a spiral. When we suffer unproductively, we feel out of control and overwhelmed by fear, anxiety, hopelessness, and despair. Our boat gets swamped by the storm of suffering. Unproductive suffering diminishes us, while productive suffering enhances the strength of our core values and sense of self. Unproductive suffering breaks us down and makes us feel ashamed and broken while productive suffering restores our dignity and self-respect.

My hope is that a better understanding of these distinctions will allow all of us to experience productive suffering, and avoid experiences of unproductive suffering. And it's critical for healers to observe these differences in order to protect our patients from unproductive suffering.