The Weight of Suffering
There are seasons in life where pain doesn’t look dramatic, but quiet. Where the heaviness doesn’t come from one defining moment, but from the accumulation of small losses, emotional exhaustion, or unspoken grief. You may find yourself functioning on the outside—working, showing up, smiling in photos—but inside, something feels tender, tired, or fractured in a way you can’t find language for.
Maybe you’ve told yourself you should be fine. Maybe you’ve compared your pain to someone else’s and convinced yourself it’s not “big enough” to matter. Maybe you’ve learned to hold everything alone, because somewhere along the way, suffering started to feel like a private responsibility.
But suffering isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s a sign that something in you is asking to be acknowledged. Not fixed, not rushed, but witnessed.
And when suffering is not denied or spiritualized away, it becomes a place where transformation begins.
Sitting with Romans 5:3–4
“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” — Romans 5:3–4
This passage doesn’t tell us to celebrate pain. It doesn’t command us to pretend we’re okay or force thankfulness for things that have wounded us. What Romans offers is a reframe: suffering is not empty. It is not wasted. It produces something.
Suffering teaches us how to keep going when nothing is easy—which slowly becomes perseverance. Perseverance shapes how we see ourselves and the world—which becomes character. And character, refined over time, becomes a rooted kind of hope—one that is not fragile, not naïve, not built on circumstances, but built on what we’ve survived.
Hope doesn’t grow in ease. It grows in the dark, in the waiting, in the places where we wondered if anything was changing at all.
The promise here is not that God removes suffering, but that He refuses to leave us alone in it. Suffering may break us open, but it is not meant to break us apart.
Walking with the Stoics
The Stoics saw suffering as part of the human experience—not a punishment, not a flaw, but a teacher. Seneca wrote that “we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” Not because suffering is imaginary, but because the fear, shame, and isolation surrounding suffering often deepen the wound more than the event itself.
Marcus Aurelius believed that obstacles aren’t interruptions to life—they are life. What stands in the way becomes the way. In other words, the very thing we wish we could avoid often becomes the thing that grows us.
Stoicism doesn’t ask us to be emotionless. It asks us to stay anchored. To acknowledge what we cannot control, and still choose how we will respond.
When faith, Stoicism, and therapy overlap, they all point toward a similar truth:
Suffering is not the end of a story.
Sometimes it is the place where the story begins to deepen.
The Inner Work
Neuroscience now confirms what Scripture and philosophy understood long before research existed: emotional pain is not just “in the mind.” It is experienced in the body.
Heartbreak feels like pressure in the chest because the brain processes emotional loss in the same regions as physical injury. Grief feels like exhaustion because the nervous system is working overtime to protect us. Anxiety shows up as tightness, nausea, or racing thoughts because the brain believes something is unsafe—even when we can’t name what that is.
When we don’t have space or support to process suffering, we cope in the only ways we know how—by staying busy, numbing, overworking, shutting down, or carrying the pain alone because letting it out feels too vulnerable or too risky.
But suffering isn’t healed by silence. It softens when it is named. It shifts when it is allowed to exist without being judged. It transforms when someone sits with us inside it, rather than trying to pull us out of it.
Therapy doesn’t erase suffering—but it helps us hold suffering without losing ourselves inside it.
Suffering can harden us or soften us. It can make us bitter, or it can make us clear. The difference isn’t whether we suffer—it’s whether we are supported while we suffer.
When pain is dismissed, denied, minimized, or compared away, it turns inward. It becomes shame, resentment, numbness, or self-blame. But when pain is witnessed with compassion, something new begins to form—self-respect, resilience, clarity, depth, the ability to feel without collapsing.
Suffering is not a sign of inadequacy. It is often the beginning of becoming.
Not the polished kind of becoming people applaud, but the quiet kind—where you learn how to stay with yourself when life doesn’t feel easy, when faith feels quieter than fear, when healing feels slower than you hoped.
That is the work no one sees, but everyone grows from.
A Moment for Reflection
If you pause long enough, you may notice there is a place in you that is tired of being strong, tired of holding it together, tired of pretending that pain doesn’t still live in your body. Maybe suffering has been something you’ve carried in silence, because you weren’t sure where it was safe to set it down.
Maybe the question is not: Why am I suffering?
Maybe the better question is: What is this suffering asking to be heard, or healed, or released?
Where in your life does something feel too heavy to hold alone anymore?
What part of you is asking to be met, instead of managed?
What would it feel like to let suffering be something shared, instead of something hidden?
You don’t have to rush the answers. You only have to make room for honesty.
🌿 Ready to Begin Your Own Healing Work?
Whether you’re contemplating a big life shift or simply feeling the inner nudge that something needs to change, therapy can be where clarity, courage, and healing begin to take shape. If you’re feeling stuck—but also feeling called forward—I’d love to support you in that process.
I’m currently accepting new virtual clients across Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories.
You can book a 20 minute complimentary consultation to see if we’re a good fit:
