Two Ways to Carry a Wound

There's a well-known distinction in Buddhist psychology: pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Pain is the arrow. Suffering is the story we tell about the pain, the second arrow we shoot into ourselves, and if we can learn to stop narrating, the pain can move through us rather than lodge in us.

I understand why this framework has helped so many people, and I use versions of it in my own clinical work. But I don't think it's the whole picture. The existentialist tradition offers a different proposal: suffering isn't simply a mistake to be corrected. It can be raw material. The task isn't only to reduce pain, but to ask what it means, and to let that meaning change us.

I've come to think these two ideas aren't in competition. They may be two sides of the same coin. Meaning isn't always the consolation prize we reach for once relief has failed to arrive; sometimes it's the mechanism of relief itself. We sit with what hurts, we ask what it's trying to tell us, and something loosens.

This is on my mind because of the calendar. We are approaching the anniversary of September 11th, and we are living through the two years since October 7th, along with a resurgence of antisemitism that has left many people feeling less safe than they have in a long time. Underneath both is something older: the generational trauma so many of us carry without having chosen it.

For me, as a Jew, that history includes the Holocaust, even though my own path to it wasn't direct. I converted; my grandparents were in the United States during World War II, and weren't Jewish. And yet I carry Ashkenazi DNA from somewhere further back, some earlier trauma in a line I can't fully trace, and it's present in me anyway, in what I flinch at, what I fear, what I feel compelled to pass on to my own children.

This is not a uniquely Jewish experience. The Cambodian killing fields did this to a people. The Rwandan genocide did this to a people. There is a long list, and everyone on it inherited something they did not choose and will likely pass down in turn.

This is not about the war in Gaza. It is about something older than any war: how trauma moves from one generation to the next, for every people who have had to survive it.

Clinically, this raises a real question: what do we do with an inheritance like this? One option is to work toward metabolizing it, to reach a place where old trauma no longer organizes present-day reactions. That work matters, and it's a meaningful part of trauma-informed therapy. But I'm not sure the goal is to arrive at a place where the trauma has no weight at all.

Because there is also this: remembering can be more than a wound. It can be a form of connection. "Never forget" isn't only about carrying pain forward, it's about a community telling itself who it is. The remembering becomes part of the meaning, not just a symptom of what happened.

In my work with clients, I see this pattern often. The goal isn't always to eliminate suffering, and it isn't to suffer for its own sake either. It's to help someone ask a real question of their pain, so that, over time, it can begin to answer.

If you like the idea of looking at life through an existential lens, I am here to explore that with you.