The meaning of suffering in counseling τό διαλέγησθαι εστί τό μήγιστον αγαθόν (Socrates)
The word "suffering" comes from the Latin "sub-ferre, to bring down, down, as if to underline a position of subservience to the man with pain. Suffering is the emotional resonance of the pain and mystery of nature and of man. Anyone who has met throughout his life suffering. Freud himself believed the psychic pain as necessary for the formation of the ego which, through the frustration of a loss, leaving the state of infantile omnipotence to get to the reality principle.
The world of suffering also refers to another world of human love, care for others, aid and solidarity. The term derives from the verb to counseling counsel, which dates itself from the Latin word consul-ere, translates to "console", "comfort", "come to help." The doctor is not just the suffering that manifests itself in physical pain for which there are pharmacologic remedies: you are suffering, moral definable, which is not cured by medication and who have lived and represented differently in each of us in related to its history, its own personality, its neurobiological available. Our ability But to understand the suffering must start by recognizing that there is no traceability to a given exclusively biological or psychological. The person, unity of body, mind and spirit, is fully invested by the experience of pain.
A first consideration is that the pain always refers to the search for meaning, as suggested by the writer Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize for Literature, in the book "The Rain King" Suffering is perhaps the only valid means to break the sleep of the spirit. E 'common experience that every patient asks the question: "Why me?". A question that often comes to us in doctors' surgeries in an attempt to receive help in finding an answer. The search for meaning is innate existence as taught by Victor Frankl. Failure to find a way to expose the existential angst, neurosis noogena. Frankl writes, interned in a Nazi concentration camp: "I told my teammates," that human life has always, in all circumstances, meaning, and that this infinite meaning of being also includes suffering, death, poverty and deadly diseases. I told them that in these difficult times someone looking down, with look of encouragement, each of us, especially those who lived their last hours, a friend or a woman, a live or dead, or that God someone s'attendeva not to be disappointed, we knew not to suffer and die poor but proud! "Making sense is also therapeutic. If it is not no woman would repeat the painful experience of childbirth. The task of a good counselor is to bring the sufferer to make sense of their condition, to be able to understand it and rework the engine of a revival. Eliminate the cause is not always possible, the suffering at times you have to live and in the absence of his reworking there is annihilation of the spirit, depression, moral death.
When you are dedicated to helping people in difficulties, we must encourage them, to put it Socratic through a Socratic work in some of its resources and capabilities. As Confucius said: "If you see a hungry man does not give him rice teach him how to cultivate it." To do this you need to know about the people, without dwelling too much on the problems that afflict it. One problem is in fact the only weapon at the time the person has to endure the suffering that grips. Everyone has their own story, unique and unrepeatable. An example of counseling hooked to the story: "Vincent went to the counselor rather scruffy. He felt a pain in him that he was anniettando. A month before Vincent had written to his brother Theo in relation to the attempt to express the "lack of joy and extreme loneliness "painting the wheat fields under blue skies at night. Vincent is perceived as a substitute, called upon to compensate for an absence and to replace another life, that of the dead brother, who was born exactly one year before him and too 'it called Vincent. Having an identity of others is a difficult burden to bear. Vincent, selfless, generous, seeks its own identity, as a preacher reading the Bible to the miners in the coal mines of Belgium and trying to help people if same clothes and food. Conduct that had annoyed the church resulting in the highest spheres his removal from office. Perhaps his was an attempt to emulate his father, pastor Protestant. A resource that turned into a rout. He enrolled at an art school, taking with him a sense of failure. Through the paintings expresses all the pain, his travels and emotional search for identity and love. Some time ago, on January 31, the wife of his brother Theo, who was very fond of Vincent, had given birth to a son the couple named Vincent. The coup de grace. As the bullet that will pierce the July 27 and that brought him to death two days later. As a substitute identity of a dead man to be replaced by the identity of a living man. Episodes of self-mutilation and self harm may be read as a desperate attempt to feel exist. Despite the creative vein painting Vincent Van Gogh was probably not given the opportunity to hear someone, no one has helped in the revision of its internal drama. " From this story gets another lesson: the counseling should not be a vicarious function of the person. We must instead offer an opportunity, an opportunity to "see beyond" that those who suffer in the struggle to find their daily lives, completely folded on the problem. A hint of the social actuality does not offer many opportunities for teenagers. The social organization, forgiving and demanding at the same time, a little more inclined to the rights and duties of more value to what is done rather that what one is. The company's carpe diem where it is common practice to try to capture the moment without thinking about tomorrow. All the institutions within which at other times setting up the personal and social identity over time have suffered an erosion of values. But teenagers need to look to the future, have a need for hope. The complexity of the current scenario, weighed down by endless contradictions not easy work of this projection into the future. It 's a complex variable, with no reference points, defined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman liquid society that leads to the mortification of hope and planning. The pain of loss Hope is covered by the desire object, the virtualization of reality, by the substances, the search for the extreme risk. But this is a process that triggers a further desire of possession or achievement of immediate pleasure, but ephemeral, necessary to keep alive the desire not to be put in the shadow of depression. This endless game of unfulfilled is the gateway to the nihilism that defines the philosopher Umberto Galimberti guest disturbing. The lack of reference points creates confusion and confusion. This crisis planning risks being undermined in the experience of illness and suffering further closing the horizon of hope. There a suffering that comes from the values \u200b\u200band educational failure of many families who have abdicated the role of education to take refuge in masochistic compliance with the freedom of their children, on the contrary seek guidance. The question is not how this is the background in counseling, but how will you place the counselor! The counselor is the one who surrenders his own suffering, a reference to hope. It 's a difficult task, demanding but can not ignore what the counselor is, as a professional but also as a person. A counselor adapted to a sick system, merely a technocrat with special skills, but does not cure disease generates. The strategies to be confined cognitive / behavioral as often happens, is the son of this adaptation process. Adapting to such a conception of life that determines classification list of who should or should not, however, that human life is an aberration has already been covered in the history of which adversely affected. The counselor must possess an anthropological vision of the person. If one is deprived of this original vision is likely to become of the simple adaptation to the smugglers. Counseling must be done in the appropriation of human dignity, the only real weapon against the adaptation. One wonders where she is the dignity of many people with disabilities placed in structures that isolate them from the world or the elderly, no longer economically useful to the system, parked in nursing homes. Today's society has forgotten how to accept suffering.
Counseling is also the time and place of empathic understanding, leaving the inner solitude. The modern medicine, which focuses on technology and economy even worse, a drug-free empathy. A medicine that objectifies people the illusion that the expropriation of subjectivity is a therapeutic advantage considering that not to get involved with their patients or situations is an advantage to the objectivity of diagnostic and therapeutic. It 'true that sometimes this may correspond to reality, but it is equally true that actively ignore the feelings of empathy without a weapon very effective therapy, the patient himself. Sure, there may be room for a drug or an investigation instrumental but the fact remains that the human link between doctor and patient is a determining factor in the process of help.
Edith Stein reminds us that "Empathy is the act by which the paradoxical reality of" other ", of what we are, we have not experienced or do not live there and never move anywhere else, in 'unknown element becomes more intimate experience of feeling that is the whole that produces expansion and expansion into what is beyond, "Unexpected. It 's inevitable in this respect that the empathic process also opens to us at the office. In this sense, the counselor may also represent a social therapist. Quoting William Shakespeare "When you have pain companions who share it, the mind can overcome a lot of suffering."
Counseling is the kairos, the opportune time to give meaning and value to the person. E 'at the appropriate time to induce an ethical question, knowing how to distinguish what is good from evil without falling into the trap of relativism prevailing in the name of the much-vaunted personal freedom. In counseling you build a mechanism of accountability in relation to their health is not only the medical care but the patient becomes a crucial part of the healing process by observing his own suffering and caring. The physician is therefore required to "midwife" to be re-born a person. Of course we can not help people overcome all suffering: think for example to chronic or debilitating. However, we can ensure that people become aware of their suffering, their limits and that they can still find places where people feel and express their individual and creative. In counseling, person-centered art of medicine is expressed in its meaning Hippocratic holistic. Hippocrates died 2300 years ago but not now consider his teaching is stupidly self-defeating because, as he himself said, "Rejoice because your inner powers are the source of your health and your perfection." There is no pretense of perfection, but through culture, preparation, sacrifice and dedication we can be recognized by the sick man as a "gift", an opportunity. Quoting Thomas Mann: "The interest in the illness and death is always and only another expression of interest in life."
