But our inclination, due to our inherited cultural attitudes, encourages us to try to ignore, make light of, outdo and deny our actual portion of real human suffering. This is not healthy or healing. Suffering comes in many ways: physical/material/relationship losses, health decline, family stresses, poverty or threat of it ....to name a few. It can be felt in body and mind as physical, emotional and/or psychological pain.
To deny our own suffering is to deny caring for ourself. It separates us from our self. It's a failing effort to escape our personal humanity.
It must be no accident that the gospel refers to Jesus not only as one "following his discovered joy' but at the same time a 'person of many sorrows'. These opposing realities must paradoxically go together and mark us, perhaps more than anything else, as a maturing human adult; not pretending life to be what it is not or denying our own incarnate real personal experience.
Often denying our personal suffering runs along with denying the suffering of others and of the world. So denying the reality that we do personally suffer as human beings is not a winning attitude toward this mystery of human life and our individually unique suffering consciousness.
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