HEALTH PLUS:Suffering can have advantages, but only for some
THE WORKS of the poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran have been translated into more than 20 languages. His words seem to speak to people in perturbing or profound ways.
They confront deeply held beliefs about many aspects of human interactions and relationships. Consider the words "the deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain". Now that is more than a sentence! That is a challenge.
This curious psychological paradox, that sorrow brings deeper appreciation of the dimensions of emotions, that there is richness in spanning the octaves of agony and ecstasy, that only those who have been admitted to the dark soul of the night can equally appreciate the intensity of rapture, is not a new philosophical perspective, but it is challenging.
To many people it is unacceptable. It is an affront: a rationalisation for what is unfair having befallen them. A psychological opiate and insult.
The idea that there is benefit in suffering does not sit well with many people who would gladly relinquish so called ecstasy to be spared the agony of depression. Many do not wish to be admitted into the intensity of "pure joy" if the price is the pain of intense sorrow.
The perspectives gained from bereavement, loneliness, trauma, near death and being different are not worth that price. And who can speak of this, except those who have experienced it?
But it is curious that this idea that there may be benefit in suffering is entertained at all: that it persists despite its provocative nature. Perhaps this is because it has found credence in artistic endeavour, whereby what was experience in pain has admitted artists to dimensions of creativity that might not otherwise have been available to them - not just dimensions of creativity, but dimensions of life.
This is manifest in actors: that capacity to enter into and experience ranges of joy, laughter, profundity and pain.
The actor is more than a person who adopts a role, the actor becomes that role and during the play lives the experience of another, of non-self, of imagined self in make-believe encounters that the audience love and absorb because it either informs, mirrors or resonates with them or gives them insight into aspects of life that they would not otherwise know, for "sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things".
What distinguishes the actor who "acts" from the actor who brings us into the character is that one is "acting" and the other is "being". This appropriation of another person's persona enthrals us. We are mesmerised by actors' capacity to "be" another person, to feel that character's emotions, to enter into and occupy the life of another.
Actors will sometimes reveal that as children they did not lose the opportunity to observe their tears as they shed them, that watching their misery in the mirror allowed them both to experience and observe the emotion.
Writers also often write from their experience of suffering or observation of life's emotional range. For example, they will sometimes speak of knowing at the moment of distress in their lives that they were also being given privileged access to insights they would not otherwise have had, or that they would only have achieved at second hand, had distress not befallen them.
Even as life events occur, writers may observe themselves observing those life events, observe themselves experiencing them, take note of their reactions and the reactions of others, document their visceral responses, examine their psychological processes and even anticipate the outcome with a strange detachment while nonetheless being in the throes of the event.
It is in this depersonalised way that writers commit to memory all their experiences for later retrieval about which they will write. Artistic endeavour is usually about life itself.
"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament coarse, hard and callous, but behind sorrow there is only sorrow," wrote Oscar Wilde in De Profundis.
Sorrow is authentic. It is real. It is itself. It "wears no masks". It is part of life. In this extraordinary way, life and agony and art may intersect and we are often at our most human when we are struggling with human angst. Life at its most painful is also often at its most profound.
To people who have suffered much in their lives, the idea of advantage in suffering is either an affront or something which provides a balm of meaning to their pain. Only they can answer that and only they have a right to speak about suffering's meaning.
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is the director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD