I’ve been spending many hours thinking what’s wrong with me? I have found so many answers to the question, starting from “that’s the world we’re living” and ending with “that must be my (unconscious) choice”. Changing the perspective and shifting responsibility from an abstract world to specific me helped a lot. Yet that was painful process, because no matter what we choose we tend to become stable. Psychologist call it very explicitly: compensations.

Nobody is 100% healthy, but there are well-compensated individuals.

We go for what we value

Playing a suffering card is a complex topic. From one side it is a real pain real people feel. On the other hand this is very often the choice. For me that was the choice without a choice, I adopted this attitude early in my life and used these patterns for decades. Despite I’ve started questioning many aspects of my life when I was 17-18 y.o. it took me another 15 years to face real problems. The problem I am able to solve. The problems I couldn’t solve, because it’s impossible to give up on something we love or is of a high value.

Suffering was something of a high value for me. I believed, accordingly to what I’ve seen and I’ve been taught, that suffering means I’ll get something good at the end. Some sort of price. I need to earn good moments with suffering negative moments. Guess the percentage of “good moments” in this setup? I would name it barely reaches 5%, leaving over 90% of time for suffering.

This simple schema shows exactly what the trap is. Want something good? You need to suffer. Got something good without suffering? Okay, you’ll suffer much more a bit later, paying for that good. For healthy people it looks like a complete burden, but this is the way world works for many of us.

This broken logic attaches additional value to the negativity, blocking attempts to avoid the pain, because this will take “the prize” away. Once again: we can’t dump away anything of high value, it’s what we call irrational behavior. Therefore we are seeking the pain and the suffering because of the wrong perspective, believing it brings good rewards to our lives.

Where it comes from

My personal experience and believes comes from family traditions and supported by religion. I belong to roman catholic church and I trust the God. However, analyzing my way of thinking I feel I got tricked by hyper-focusing on suffering aspects, that lead me to misunderstanding the reality.

The traditions I’ve mentioned are closely related to the religious ideology of suffering in this life to get rewarded in afterlife. I don’t see a bigger misinterpretation or misunderstanding here: making right decisions is often hard, sometimes causing suffering and death. The only thing that I got wrong is an attempt to use this as a shortcut. There is not need to look for additional suffering, life is challenging enough the way it is.

It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God Matthew 4

The dividends of toxic suffering

Why I call it toxic? Because hat’s clearly manipulative behavior. When individual is ignoring own needs, physical and psychical states to be good to others and help them. And then demand understanding and help and love and so much more. Because I suffered so much to do that for you.

I made a long path to face my own behavior of this type. It was challenging to take ownership and responsibility of it. It started with my attempts to change the behavior and becoming vocal of stuff I don’t like or feel uncomfy. Opening up the mouth and saying simple words, like “I don’t like it”, “let’s do it my way”, “I don’t feel good about doing this” and similar. This has a big correlation with “I messages”. I had to learn to speak about myself, my perspective and feeling, without criticism towards anyone else.

There is no one size fits all. It is actually great we are different and like different things. Disliking something turned out to be the first step towards learning what I like. Then I figured out how toxic it was. To keep silence and then explode. To keep gather negativity to return 10x of it when it’s too much. This is a great moment to turn it into manipulation. I suffered so much because of you, now you must compensate it.

But have I told anyone about me suffering? I did not? Then suffering was my choice. Subconscious, irrational choice of feeling pain to return more pain. To have more chance of enforcing manipulation on others. When I write this I’m still feeling a bit guilty because of the way I used to behave. But at least I understood why I struggled so often to build relationships. The other problem was to be idealistic about relationships: the one had to perfect or should not exist at all. Following this way of thinking I’ve ended professional and personal relationships, suffered because of it, but taking responsibility showed me the path out. I stopped hiding behind helping others and saw my own flaws. It became obvious what to do next.

Summary

Self-victimizing strategy by constantly looking for situation to feel guilty or suffering has a huge potential of executing manipulations on other people. This strategy helps to avoid unknown pain, by suffering the known pain first, then explode and execute the manipulation.

Under normal circumstances interactions are based on requests, potential dialogue and the outcome. The outcome might consist of positive, negative or neutral outcome, depending on the topic and context. However, the moment request is done an individual seems to loose the control over situation, passing it to the other side. I was among those people who can’t tolerate the possibly negative outcome. Especially unknown negative outcome, that may feel very-very painful.

Positioning myself into a known negative situation (that becomes a prerequisite) creates a fake feeling of control, because of potential manipulation that could be executed. And relations built on manipulations are exactly the ones we call toxic.