D10 Pain Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

You are personally responsible for all the pain you suffer.

OR

Some of your pain stems from situations beyond your personal control.

Anankelogy

We easily blame ourselves for all the pain we suffer. After all, any emotional pain I experience occurs within me and not outside of me. So I dare not attribute it to others.

Not so fast. While it’s true we alone experience our pain, many limits to functioning reported by pain occurs outside of us. Some of that beyond anyone’s individual control. If I am only taking responsibility for my own emotional pain and never addressing its external contributors, I will easily get stuck suffering more pain.

Need-response

Only need-response as a professional service identifies and addresses all impediments to resolving your needs. Only unresolved needs result in pain. Only by addressing your unmet needs can you remove cause for pain.

Obeying every law is supposed to keep you out of trouble. But the impersonal nature of law cannot promise you a trouble-free life. Just ask the wrongly convicted innocent. I’m one.

Reactive Problem

When our institutions prioritize pain-relief over resolving needs, it sits complicit in our many maladies. If you support pain-relief over avenues for resolving needs, you sit complicit in the resulting problems. Whenever I am doing anything that detracts from fully resolving needs, I sit complicit with the negative consequences.

Need-response casts a wide net of accountability. It holds the more powerful to a higher standard of accountability. It must. Left to their own devices, they would have us settle for merely easing our needs. Then manipulates the scenery in ways that easily trap us into cycle of pain. Which perniciously ensures their lock on dysfunctional power. The less our institutions provide for the needs they exist to serve, and all means to hold them to account fail, need-response with its power of tough love may present as the last viable option.

Anyone in a position of power—of significant social influence over others—either supports resolving needs or does not. There is little if any neutral ground. Any position of significant social influence (i.e., “power”) carries far more weight and responsibility than we generally accord. Not only on a personal level for such experts, but also on an institutional or professional level. To whom much is given, much is required.

If checked and they agree their institutions get in the way of resolving our needs, while continuing to serve such institutions, they present as professionally but not personally complicit. But if they defend their institutions that prevent you or I from resolving our needs, they are personally complicit. The more complicit in these destructive results, the less legitimate they are.

The more they cling behind their destructive norms, the more we shall levy a more loving response from them, as a condition to maintain minimal legitimacy. Otherwise we must attribute to their action or inactions our increasing levels of anxiety, depression, addictions, suicide ideation, and deaths of despair. We shall demonstrate an empirical link that could potentially crush their careers. It doesn’t have to be this way. They can learn to be more need-responsive. They could exhibit love.

Responsive Solution

Our leaders generally do not know what they do not know. There are far too many of us for them to personally know us. Impersonal laws keep them in the dark of their actual impacts in our lives.

Need-response offers our leaders a path toward greater legitimacy, toward improving their brand of leadership by demonstrating better results. We incentivize them to respect our affected needs as we initiate greater respect for their vulnerable needs.

We replace overgeneralizing with more specifics. We replace impersonal interactions with engaging understanding. We replace mutual hostilities with mutual support.

Together, we shift from avoiding discomfort, with our hyperrational thinking, to relating deeper with each other, to relate better to each other’s painful needs. Together, we shift from limiting categories like “progressive” and “far right” or “defendant” and “accuser” to address the needs on all sides. Together, we shift from divisive norms, provoking anger and hate, to mutually supporting the resolution of each other’s needs, spreading more understanding and love.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs? Post in our Engagement forum your thoughtful response to one of these:

• How can I tell the difference between pain I caused in myself and pain from powerful others?

• Won’t I suffer some kind of backlash if I attribute more of my emotional pain to others?

• Is it even possible to resolve all of my needs and remove all this cause for pain?

• I find myself vacillating between blaming myself totally and blaming others totally for my pain.

Instead of selecting one of these, post your own engagement feedback about your experience with the subject of this principle. 

Remember the aim is to improve our responsiveness to each other’s needs, toward their full resolution. If you’re new at posting here, first check the guide below.