Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

He also recasts the pain of separation as a spiritual opening rather than a psychological event: “If we follow the path of any pain, any psychological wounding,” he writes, “it will lead us to this one primal pain: the pain of separation.

“Those who search for intimacy with others are reacting to this longing. They think another human will fulfill them. But how many of us have actually ever been totally fulfilled by another person? Maybe for a while, but not forever. We want something more fulfilling, more intimate. We want God. But not everyone dares to go into this abyss of pain, this longing, that can take you there.”

S. Lewis, who heard the call of bittersweetness all his life and became a committed Christian in his thirties, eventually concluded that we have hunger because we need to eat, we have thirst because we need to drink; so if we have an “inconsolable longing” that can’t be satisfied in this world, it must be because we belong to another, godly one.

But the books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.

It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.

“He…felt at home in darkness, the way he wrote, the way he worked,” observed Sylvie Simmons. “But in the end, it really was about finding the light.”

What if we simply took whatever pain we couldn’t get rid of, and turned it into something else?

Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering—or find someone who makes it for you. And if you do find yourself drawn to such a person, ask yourself why they call to you. What are they expressing on your behalf—and where do they have the power to take you?

“which is brokenness—the broken Hallelujah, the crack in everything.

the onset of darkness is not the tragedy we imagine, but rather the prelude to light.

That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.

yearning: The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet. But “to open your heart to pain is to open your heart to joy,” as the University of Nevada clinical psychologist Dr. Steven Hayes put it in a Psychology Today article he wrote called “From Loss to Love.” “In your pain you find your values, and in your values, you find your pain.”

called acceptance and commitment therapy. ACT, as it’s known, teaches people to embrace their thoughts and feelings, including the difficult ones: to see them as appropriate responses to the challenges of being alive, and of their own particular hardships. But it also teaches us to use our pain as a source of information about what matters most to us—and then to act on it. ACT, in other words, is an invitation to investigate the bitter, and commit to the sweet. “When you connect with things that you deeply care about that lift you up, you’ve just connected yourself into places where you can and have been hurt,” Hayes explains. “If love is important to you, what are you going to do with your history of betrayals? If the joy of connecting to others is important to you, what are you going to do with the pain of being misunderstood or failing to understand others?”

The first five skills involve acceptance of the bitter.

But it’s the final two of the seven skills—connecting with what matters, and taking committed action—that move us from bitter to sweet, from loss to love.

“Connecting with what matters” is realizing that the pain of loss can help point you to the people and principles that matter most to you—to the meaning in your life. “Taking committed action” is acting on those values. “Your loss can be an opportunity to carry what is most meaningful toward a life worth living,” writes Hayes. “After having identified what is truly close to your heart, act on it.”

What are you separated from, what or whom have you lost? And also ask: Where is your particular pain of separation pointing you? What matters most deeply t...

She started to speak again. At first, through the words of others; later, through her own. Poetry, essays, memoirs. Before long, she was speaking for others.

One young woman tells the truth about her sorrows, and another young woman, a generation later, is uplifted. There’s someone else like me. I’m not alone with my story.

There’s something about the act of speaking—of singing—the truth-telling language of sorrow and longing.

Wounded healers also appear in studies finding that mental health counselors personally affected by mental illness tend to be more engaged in their work.

had trouble holding the line against people who were bullying or manipulative. When I finally started to draw proper boundaries, I found that the only way I could protect myself from them was to steel myself with indifference or anger. I didn’t like how this felt; I thought there must be a better way.

Not everyone’s going to be your friend. But you can wish everyone love.

“Making yourself feel good is not a nothing,”

“It also allows the connection to grow,”

wishing people well has a way of changing the way we relate to them, and to the world.

was invited to show up authentically to my grief and pain.”

I hear you, but this is your story. Her teacher didn’t deny Susan’s feelings, nor did she encourage them. She simply witnessed them.

Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth.

But Calvinism was replaced by the new national religion of business, in which you were predestined not for heaven or hell but for earthly success or failure.

“reconfiguration of the doctrine of predestination,” with success as the holy grail, and the tycoon as high priest and alpha role model.

“hapless person, one who habitually fails to win.” Another person’s misfortunes should elicit compassion—as we saw in chapter 1, the very meaning of the word compassion is “to suffer with” someone. But the term loser now evoked not empathy but contempt. Loss became a condition to avoid, by relentlessly cultivating the mindset and behaviors of a winner.

Increasingly, failure was attributed to such flaws of the soul.

the question of who was a winner and who a loser was answered by looking “in the man,” then it followed that we’d start to seek the characteristics that would predict wealth and victory. We’d try to acquire the positive and vigorous affect of a winner.

journalist Neal Gabler wrote in Salon in 2017, “America is deeply divided between those who are considered (and consider themselves) winners, and those who…are considered by the winners to be losers. Losers are cultural pariahs—the American equivalent of India’s untouchables….You have to be a winner to have any respect, including self-respect.” The “prosperity gospel,” without ever mentioning the word Calvinism, holds that wealth is bestowed by God upon the worthy, and withdrawn from the undeserving.

“she was so overwhelmed with the pressure to keep up appearances.”

They call this thing “effortless perfection”: the pressure to appear like a winner, without needing to try. And it has many manifestations.

Effortless perfection is also about masking any signs of loss, failure, or melancholia.

Because the phenomenon is not so much about perfection as it is about victory. It’s about being the kind of person who wins; about floating so high that you avoid the bitter side of life; it’s about not being a loser.

How do we get to the point of seeing our sorrows and longings not as indications of secret unworthiness but as features of humanity?

“Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger,”

Some hold “positional” power (including the perception that they can and will bestow rewards and punish transgressors), while others tend to “personal” power (including the ability to inspire others to identify and sympathize with them).

Greatness, he told me, often comes from developing a superpower that adapts to the blow that almost killed you. But people’s desire to turn themselves from “losers” into winners can also undermine them.

We’re most passionate about that which we’re most denied, and these things manifest in the companies and teams we build. If you’ve been bullied, your whole life is trying to disprove the peers or family members who once tormented you. If you have deep insecurity, you might hire a lot of yes people.”

David, the lesson of such studies is clear. “Businesses are often trying to shape themselves to be safe, innovative, collaborative, and inclusive,” she told me. “But safety holds hands with fear; innovation holds hands with failure; collaboration holds hands with conflict; and inclusion holds hands with difference.

“Expressive writing” encourages us to see our misfortunes not as flaws that make us unfit for worldly success (or otherworldly heaven), but as the seeds of our growth.

of expressive writing, I’d like to suggest a new daily ritual for you: Find a blank notebook. Open it up. And write something down. Draw on your bitter, or on your sweet.

“Those who let their eyes adjust,” my cookie reads, “can see in the darkness.”

We’re each given our own Post-it, on which we’re to write an “I am” statement about ourselves, based on a memory or a self-conception that holds us back: “I am a fraud,” someone writes. “I am selfish.” “I am needy.”