Mahmud Reza Chowdhury

We also often add to our pain and suffered by being overly sensitive, over reacting to minor things, and sometime taking things too personally.

With these words, the Dalia Lama recognised the origin of many of the day to day aggravations that can add up to be a major source of suffering. Therapists sometimes call this process personalizing our pain- the tendency to narrow our psychological field of vision by interpreting or misinterpreting every thing that occurs in terms of its impact on us.

Recently one night I had dinner with my one old friend at a Resturent. The service at the restaurant turned out to be very slow, and from the time we sat down, my friend began to complain. ” Look at that ! That waiter is so damn slow ! Where is She? I think she is purposely ignoring us ” !
Although neither of us had pressing engagement, my friend complaints about the slow service continued to escalate throughout the meal and expanded into a litany of complaints about the food, tablewear, and anything else that was not to.his liking. At the end of the meal, the waiter presented us with two free deserts, explaining, ” I apologize for the slow service this evening”. She said sincerely ” but we’re a little understaffed. One of the cooks had death in the family and is off tonight, and one of the servers called in sick at the last moment. I hope it didn’t inconvenience you.
My friend said ” I still never coming here again”. My friend muttered bitterly under his breath as the waiter walked off.

This is only a minor illustration of how we contribute to our own suffering by personalizing every annoying situation, as if it were being intentionally perpetrated on us. In such case, the net result was only a ruined meal, an hour aggrevation. But when this kind of thinking becomes a pervasive pattern of relating to the world and extends to every comments made our family or friends, or events in society at large, it become a significant source of our misery. It describing the wider implications of this kind of narrow thinking, Jacques Lusseyran once made an insightful observation. Lusseyran, blind from the age of eight, was a founder of a resistance group in World War 2. Eventually, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp. In later recounting his experiences in the camps, Lusseyran stated, ” Unhappiness, I saw then, comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction that we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity. Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one’s own skin, in one’s own brain”.
We can learn  many things through our many personal pain issues.