Why avoiding suffering makes life harder
A Jungian and philosophical reflection
Most of us are taught, in subtle and not‑so‑subtle ways, that the goal of life is to minimise pain. Stay comfortable. Stay safe. Stay in control. If something hurts, fix it or flee it.
On the surface, this seems reasonable. But when you look more closely—through the lenses of Stoicism, Buddhism, Jungian psychology, and ACT—you start to see a different pattern. The more we organise our lives around avoiding suffering, the more tangled and distressed we often become.
Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash
Stoicism: Turning toward what hurts
Stoic philosophy doesn’t romanticise suffering, but it doesn’t treat it as an enemy either. Pain, loss, and difficulty are seen as inevitable parts of life. What matters is how we relate to them.
Rather than constantly trying to escape discomfort, the Stoics encouraged meeting it with curiosity and courage. They saw challenges as opportunities to practise virtues like patience, courage, and wisdom.
Avoidance, in this framework, is risky. When you spend your life trying not to feel certain things, you narrow your world. You become more fragile, not less. You may feel temporarily safer, but your capacity to cope shrinks.
Turning toward suffering—gently, at your own pace—can actually expand your sense of inner strength.
Buddhism: The extra layer of suffering
Buddhist teachings make a distinction that’s incredibly useful here. There is the pain of life itself—illness, ageing, loss, disappointment. And then there is the suffering we add on top of that through craving, resistance, and aversion.
You can think of it like this:
The first arrow is the unavoidable pain.
The second arrow is our reaction to it—“This shouldn’t be happening,” “I can’t bear this,” “Why me?”
We don’t have much choice about the first arrow. But we have more influence over the second than we often realise.
When we avoid, suppress, or fight our pain, we often intensify it. We add shame (“I shouldn’t feel this”), fear (“What if this never ends?”), and self‑judgement (“I’m weak for struggling”). The original pain is still there, but now it’s wrapped in layers of secondary suffering.
Acceptance, in the Buddhist sense, is about not shooting that second arrow. It’s about allowing the pain that is already here, without adding extra layers of struggle.
Jung: The shadow we don’t want to see
Jungian psychology offers another angle. Jung suggested that we all carry a “shadow”—the parts of ourselves we don’t want to see, feel, or acknowledge. These might be painful memories, difficult emotions, impulses we judge, or aspects of our personality that don’t fit our self‑image.
When we avoid these parts, they don’t disappear. They tend to show up indirectly—in projections, in sudden outbursts, in patterns we can’t quite explain. The energy it takes to keep them buried can leave us feeling tired, flat, or disconnected.
Facing the shadow—turning toward what we’ve been avoiding—is often uncomfortable. But it can also be deeply relieving. As we bring these parts into awareness, we can relate to them differently. We can integrate them, rather than being driven by them from the dark.
In this sense, avoiding suffering doesn’t protect us. It keeps us fragmented.
ACT: Experiential avoidance and psychological flexibility
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has a term for the attempt to outrun or control inner pain: experiential avoidance. This includes all the ways we try not to feel what we feel—numbing, overworking, perfectionism, constant busyness, substance use, endless scrolling.
Again, the intention makes sense. We’re trying to protect ourselves. But over time, experiential avoidance tends to shrink our lives. We start organising everything around not feeling certain emotions or sensations. Our world becomes smaller, more rigid, more fragile.
ACT suggests a different path: instead of struggling with our inner experience, we can learn to make room for it. We can notice thoughts and feelings as they arise, allow them to be present, and still choose actions that align with our values.
This is not about liking pain. It’s about refusing to let the fear of pain dictate the shape of our lives.
What happens when we stop running?
When you bring these perspectives together, a pattern emerges:
Stoicism invites us to meet difficulty with courage and clarity.
Buddhism invites us to stop adding extra suffering through resistance.
Jungian thought invites us to turn toward the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled.
ACT invites us to drop the struggle with inner experience and move toward what matters.
In all of them, avoidance is the thing that quietly tightens the knot.
When we stop running—when we turn toward our pain with support, pacing, and care—several things can shift:
The intensity of the fear around it often softens.
We discover that we can feel more than we thought without breaking.
We gain insight into what our pain is trying to tell us—about our needs, our boundaries, our history.
We become less controlled by unconscious patterns and more able to choose our responses.
This doesn’t mean diving headfirst into overwhelm. It means gently, gradually, allowing what is already here to be seen.
Acceptance as an act of courage
Acceptance, in this context, is not passive. It’s one of the bravest things we can do.
It might look like:
Admitting to yourself that you’re grieving, even if others think you “should be over it.”
Acknowledging that anxiety is part of your life, and choosing to live fully alongside it.
Recognising anger or resentment you’ve pushed down, and exploring what boundary or hurt it might be pointing to.
Each of these moments is a small act of turning toward, rather than away. Over time, they build a different kind of relationship with suffering—one that is less about control and more about companionship.
You don’t have to like your pain. You don’t have to agree with it. But you can sit beside it, listen to it, and choose your next step from a place of groundedness rather than panic.
A life that can hold both joy and pain
A life worth living is not one in which nothing hurts. It’s one in which you are able to feel the full range of your experience—joy, grief, fear, love, anger, tenderness—without needing to exile parts of yourself to survive.
When you stop organising everything around the avoidance of suffering, you make room for other things:
deeper connection
more honest relationships
a clearer sense of who you are
a more flexible, responsive way of moving through the world
The aim is not to become invulnerable. It’s to become more whole.
And wholeness, as these traditions keep reminding us, doesn’t come from escaping suffering. It comes from walking with it, gently, as part of the path.
