You're Making Your Pain Worse. Here's How to Stop.

What if the hardest part of what you're going through isn't what's happening to you, but what you're telling yourself about it?

Not exactly the question you want to hear when life already feels like it's kicking you while you're down. But after months of unexpected changes, loss, and circumstances that looked absolutely nothing like what I'd planned, it was a question I desperately needed to consider.

A friend had sent me a podcast episode after listening to me go around in circles about everything I was going through. Her message was essentially, I love you, but maybe someone else can help you with this.

So I pressed play.

And there I was, listening to Buddhist teacher Vinny Ferraro talk about his new puppy, who apparently had decided that barking was its full-time job. The puppy barked incessantly, and Vinny was losing his mind. But then he made a distinction that stopped me in my tracks.

The pain was listening to the puppy bark. The suffering was believing the puppy shouldn't be barking.

Oh.

Well, that was inconvenient.

Because I'd spent months believing that several things in my life shouldn't be happening. And suddenly, I realized that perhaps the problem wasn't entirely what had been happening to me, but how much time I'd spent arguing with the fact that it was happening.

The Puppy Was Still Barking

There's a Buddhist philosophy that says pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

I know. The first part is terrible news, and the second part sounds a little insulting when you're in the middle of something genuinely painful.

But hear me out.

Pain is part of being human. People hurt us. Relationships end. We lose people we love. Opportunities disappear. We get rejected, fired, disappointed, and sometimes find ourselves living a life that looks absolutely nothing like the one we thought we'd have.

That is pain. And no amount of positive thinking is going to make those experiences suddenly not hurt.

Suffering is what we start layering on top of that pain.

It's the thoughts that follow: This shouldn't be happening. They shouldn't have done that. I should be further along. I shouldn't still feel this way. My life should look different by now.

And here's where the puppy became particularly annoying, because Vinny was absolutely right.

The puppy was barking. That was reality. But the more he thought the puppy shouldn't be barking, the more frustrated he became. Nothing about the puppy had changed. The barking hadn't gotten louder. The only thing that had gotten louder was the argument happening inside his head.

And I realized I'd been doing exactly that.

I'd spent months mentally building my case for why certain things in my life shouldn't have happened. I had the logic, the explanations, the evidence, and plenty of friends who agreed with me. I could tell you exactly why something was unfair, why someone should have acted differently, and why my circumstances should have been something else entirely.

And you know what all that arguing had accomplished?

Absolutely nothing.

Except making me feel worse.

Welcome to the Should Gap

There's a concept I use in coaching that I call the should gap, and once you recognize it, you'll probably start noticing it everywhere.

Imagine two points. Point One is where you actually are. It's your current reality, exactly as it exists today. Point Two is where you believe you should be, or what you think your circumstances should look like instead.

The space between those two points is the should gap, and it's where we can create an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering.

Let's say you're single and you want a relationship. That's Point One. Maybe you're lonely. Maybe you're disappointed. There's absolutely real pain in wanting something you don't currently have.

But then your brain introduces Point Two: I should be married by now.

And suddenly, you're not just single. You're behind. Everyone else has figured something out that you apparently haven't. You start questioning your age, your choices, your future, and whether there's something wrong with you.

Congratulations. You've just turned one painful circumstance into an entire existential crisis.

Nothing about your relationship status changed. But look at everything you added to the experience.

I did this when I was laid off from SoulCycle earlier this year after seven years with the company. Losing that job was genuinely painful. I loved teaching, and I'd built so much of my community through fitness.

But then came the should gap.

I shouldn't have been laid off. I should still be teaching. I should still have that community. I just moved to a new city. How am I supposed to meet people now? I work from home. I've always met my friends through fitness. I'm never going to meet anyone.

Apparently, getting laid off also meant I was destined to spend the rest of my life alone in my apartment.

See what I did there?

I took something that genuinely hurt and started building an entire imaginary future around it. And then I made myself miserable about that imaginary future, too.

The layoff was the pain. Everything I was adding to it was the suffering.

You Can Be Right and Still Be Miserable

Here's the part of this philosophy that really kicked me in the gut.

Sometimes, you actually are right about what should have happened.

Someone should have treated you better. Someone should have apologized. Your employer should have handled something differently. A relationship should have worked out the way you both promised it would.

I'm not suggesting otherwise.

But there's a question worth asking yourself: Is being right about what should have happened changing what actually happened?

Because you can assemble an entire legal team of your closest friends, present exhibits A through Z, and make an incredibly compelling case for why your circumstances should be different.

And reality is going to look at you and say, Okay. But they're not.

The puppy was still barking.

This was where acceptance came in, and before you roll your eyes, acceptance doesn't mean approving of what happened. It doesn't mean someone else was right, that your feelings aren't valid, or that you're supposed to give up on wanting something different.

Acceptance simply means acknowledging what's true right now.

You can accept that the puppy is barking and still train the puppy. You can accept that someone hurt you and still set a boundary. You can accept that something didn't work out and still want something completely different for your future.

There's an enormous difference between saying, I wish this were different, and saying, This shouldn't be happening.

One allows you to acknowledge what you want while remaining grounded in reality. The other keeps you fighting with something that already is.

And reality has a pretty impressive winning streak.

Maybe Letting Go Isn't About the Pain

I'd spent a lot of time studying acceptance lately, and this was the realization that helped me the most.

We tend to think letting go means eventually reaching some magical place where we don't care anymore. We've gotten over it, found the lesson, made peace with everything, and can look back with a beautiful sense of gratitude for the whole experience.

Wouldn't that be lovely?

But maybe letting go doesn't mean letting go of the pain.

Maybe it means letting go of the argument with reality.

I can still be hurt without arguing that I shouldn't be hurt. I can wish something had gone differently without mentally trying to rewrite the past. I can acknowledge that I don't like my circumstances without spending every waking moment insisting that they should be something else.

And once I stopped using all my energy fighting what was happening, I could finally ask myself a much more useful question.

Okay. This is happening. What do I want to do about it?

Maybe I set a boundary. Maybe I have a difficult conversation. Maybe I make a change I've been avoiding. Or maybe there's genuinely nothing I can do about it today, and I simply allow myself to feel disappointed without also judging myself for being disappointed.

Because acceptance isn't giving up. It's what allows us to respond to what's actually happening instead of constantly reacting to what we wish were happening.

And sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do is admit, I don't like this. I wish it were different. And this is where I am right now.

Here's the interesting part. Since I started practicing this more intentionally, many of the circumstances that were causing me pain haven't changed. I'm still navigating some of the same challenges, and there are still things I wish were different.

But I feel significantly better.

I was telling a friend about this recently, trying to explain why I suddenly felt so much lighter despite nothing really changing. And we had this wonderful little aha moment.

When you let it go, it leaves you.

Not necessarily the pain. Not necessarily the circumstances. But all that extra suffering you've been carrying from fighting with what is.

The puppy is going to bark sometimes. Life is going to bark sometimes, too. And while we can't always control what's happening around us, we can start noticing when we're making an already painful experience even harder by insisting that it shouldn't be happening.

Maybe that's what makes suffering optional.

Want to go deeper?

This is only part of the conversation. Get the whole story on this episode of Create Your Fate.

LISTEN ON APPLE OR LISTEN ON SPOTIFY

Before you go, consider this:

What is causing me pain right now, and what suffering am I adding by believing it shouldn't be happening?

And if I accepted that this is what is happening right now, what would I choose to do next?