Meaning makes suffering bearable

The Short Version

A Holocaust survivor, a Buddhist nun, a Jungian analyst, a clinical psychologist and a motivational coach reach the same conclusion by very different roads: you often can't escape suffering, but you can change your relationship to it, and finding a meaning or task inside the pain is what makes it bearable and lets you grow [1][2][3][4][5]. Edith Eger survived Auschwitz by guarding an inner freedom no one could take, and later turned her pain into service [1]. Pema Chödrön teaches that running from pain deepens it, while staying with it opens a path to wisdom [2]. James Hollis says every serious suffering carries a task, and that meaningful work "will support us even in the face of suffering and sacrifice" [3]. Jordan Peterson argues that the most worthwhile life means taking on responsibility and burden, and came out of three years of severe illness grateful for ordinary life [4]. Mel Robbins, drawing on Viktor Frankl, calls meaning a choice you can make even when circumstances don't change [5].

Table of contents

What They Said

Edith Eger: inner freedom in the worst possible place

Edith Eger was 16 when she was sent to Auschwitz, where she lost her parents and nearly her own life [1]. Now a clinical psychologist in her 90s, she describes how she survived mentally: by holding on to an inner spirit her captors couldn't reach [1]. She recalls telling herself, "They can throw me in the gas chamber, but they cannot murder my spirit" [1]. Where others collapsed in despair, she trained herself to neither fight nor flee but to find strength from within [1].

The core of her philosophy is a distinction: "I was victimized, but I am not a victim" [1]. Many people, she says, live in psychological concentration camps built from resentment, fear or the past, but the key to freedom is in their own pocket [1]. It starts with owning your choices rather than your circumstances [1]. She challenges people to "rewrite your mental script," let go of blame and take responsibility for their emotional state, even after injustice or abuse [1].

Eger doesn't treat meaning as a way to skip the pain. She believes unexpressed emotion, not emotion itself, is what makes us sick, and that depression often grows out of years of suppression [1]. So she tells people to rage, cry or scream if they need to: "Write the anger letter. Get it out. Then write the love letter. That's where healing begins" [1]. Forgiveness comes only after the rage is processed, and it is for yourself: "Forgiveness is not for them. It's for you. It's the decision not to carry them in your heart anymore" [1].

Her own sense of purpose came slowly. After the war she struggled with survivor's guilt, even skipping her college graduation because she didn't feel worthy of success [1]. Only after decades of inner work and helping others heal did she find her purpose: turning her pain into service [1]. Her message now is that healing from abuse, heartbreak, loss or betrayal can become your greatest gift to the world [1].

Most strikingly, she calls Auschwitz "the best classroom" of her life, not because of the suffering but because of what she learned there: that even in total darkness the human spirit can choose light [1]. That view let her feel compassion even for some of her guards, many of whom she saw as "more imprisoned than I was" [1].

Pema Chödrön: stay with it, and let it teach you

Pema Chödrön's book When Things Fall Apart approaches suffering from Tibetan Buddhism [2]. Her starting point is that pain, uncertainty and loss are not interruptions to life; they are life [2]. Suffering, in her view, is not a problem to be solved but a truth to be lived [2].

She argues that our attempts to avoid suffering, through distraction, control or denial, only deepen it [2]. The antidote is presence [2]. Her central practice is learning to stay: when grief, anger or fear arises, instead of shutting down or grabbing quick relief, stay with the emotion, observe it without judgment, breathe into it and let it unfold [2]. Over time, this builds resilience and loosens the fear of pain itself, so that you no longer need things to be perfect or stable to feel grounded [2]. Staying with discomfort also opens what she calls the soft spot of bodhichitta, the open, tender heart that leads to awakening [2].

She adds the idea of groundlessness: reality is always changing, and our hunt for solid, predictable ground is the root of much of our anxiety [2]. The more we try to guarantee outcomes, the more we suffer, and peace comes from letting go of the need for certainty [2]. She calls the ability to relax into uncertainty, as a source of freedom rather than fear, "positive groundlessness" [2].

For moments of crisis, such as loss, heartbreak, betrayal, illness or the collapse of an identity, Chödrön offers no hollow positivity [2]. Pain, in her teaching, is not a mistake but a portal to wisdom: when everything falls apart, the ego has less to cling to, and in that rawness we can reach truth, humility and something deeper in ourselves [2]. Her practice of tonglen, breathing in others' pain and breathing out compassion, turns personal suffering into compassion for everyone [2].

Her book doesn't promise to eliminate suffering. It reframes suffering as a spiritual teacher, and builds trust not in outcomes but in your own capacity to stay open, kind and awake whatever happens [2].

James Hollis: suffering carries a task

James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst and author of more than 17 books, gives the most developed account of why meaning makes suffering bearable [3].

Meaning as what supports us. Hollis lists signals from the psyche we can learn to read: feelings, which we don't choose; energy; dreams; and, "most importantly," meaning [3]. "If what we're doing is meaningful as understood by the psyche It will support us even in the face of suffering and sacrifice and so forth," he says. "If what we're doing is wrong as seen by the psyche Then over time it begins to pathologize" [3]. He notes that psychopathology, taken literally from the Greek, "means the expression of the suffering of the soul" [3]. Forcing yourself to keep going without that meaning "leads as we know to boredom and burnout and ultimately depression Often with self-medication attached to that" [3].

He points to history: "The people that we would most admire in history are people who in some way Found and lived out what the soul was asking of them It didn't spare them from suffering sometimes even martyrdom It doesn't spare you from conflict and pain maybe isolation Maybe exile But you're fed by the purposefulness of it Take that away and life is pretty empty" [3]. That is the clearest statement in these sources of the point this article makes: meaning doesn't remove suffering, but it feeds you through it.

The same logic shows up in retirement. Many men who retire to play golf become depressed within months, Hollis says, because it is the meaning, not the activity, that sustains us [3].

His own depression. Hollis tells his story as an example. "I myself was cruising along in my 30s that achieved everything that I wanted to achieve And was enjoying my life and then suddenly inexplicably had a very serious depression" [3]. His first question was the natural one: "How quickly do I get rid of this" [3]. He came to see it as the wrong question. "The real question is why has your psyche autonomously withdrawn its approval and support From the agenda that you've been addressing" [3]. The agenda was good, he says, but something was missing, and "at the bottom of that well, there's always a task there's always an issue" [3]. Finding that task led him to leave a secure ten-year academic post, move to Switzerland and retrain as a psychoanalyst. "I now look upon that depression as Beneficent but at the time I certainly didn't as you can imagine" [3].

Suffering as a question. He quotes Louis Pasteur: "Tell me not your politics or your religion tell me only your suffering" [3]. Life is suffering, he says, as a description rather than pessimism [3]. The questions to ask are "what does this make you do? What does it keep you from doing?" and what task it's asking of you [3]. In Swamplands of the Soul, he describes how anxiety, loss or betrayal can leave people mired, but each has a task: if a partner's betrayal took your self-esteem, "your task is the recovery of self-worth" [3]. For survivors of abuse, the task is reclaiming a sense of self larger than what happened to them; a core message of his therapy is "you're not what happened to you" [3]. Jung, he notes, said we can't solve these things "but we can outgrow them" [3].

He is honest about the limits. The two hardest lessons of his career, he says, are patience and powerlessness [3]. He also distinguishes kinds of depression: reactive depression, biologically driven depression, and the intrapsychic kind he had, in which something walled off is crying out [3]. Not every depression is a summons.

Therapy isn't a cure; it's a question. "I've often said to people this is not about curing you because you're not a disease," he says; it's about making life more interesting, so that "every morning you get up You have something profound to address today Why am I here at in service to what" [3]. He adds that people rarely come to therapy until "it has to hurt enough inside" [3].

Mortality as the source of meaning. Hollis has outlived one of his children and has had recent surgeries [3]. He describes Erik Erikson's final life stage, despair versus integrity: despair as friends die and the body fails, integrity as deciding how to live in the face of it [3]. "It's mortality that makes this life meaningful," he says [3]. His motto, "Shut up, suit up, show up," means stop whining, prepare, and step into life doing your best [3]. He cites the idea that "we all need to find what supports us when nothing supports us," and advises asking at key moments "does this path enlarge me" or diminish you [3].

Jordan Peterson: take on the burden, and find the treasure

Jordan Peterson's case is framed through religious stories and his own illness [4].

Adventure and burden. Peterson reads Abraham, who leaves comfort in his 70s because a voice calls him, as a story about following the call to adventure: "if you follow the voice of adventure you'll become a blessing to yourself" [4]. Humans aren't built for comfort, he argues [4]. Asked what the truest adventure is, he gives the Christian answer, the Passion: the most worthwhile adventure is correlated with taking on the maximal responsibility and burden [4]. Even Christ asked to be spared, and the answer is to welcome whatever comes, which is why he titled his book We Who Wrestle with God [4].

Challenge as opportunity. On envy and hardship, he says "every dragon has its treasure" and "learning to see a challenge as an opportunity that's the beginning of wisdom" [4]. He reads Job, tortured by misfortune, as someone who refuses to lose faith in his own goodness or the goodness of being; moving forward in good faith means assuming that whatever happens will be the best that could happen [4]. When betrayed, he says, grieve, try to forgive, help if you can, and if not, move on to the next adventure [4].

His own suffering. Peterson describes three years of illness in which every minute was worse than anything he had experienced before [4]. He walked 10 to 12 miles a day, his pain eased by late evening, and then sleep reset it all, so sleep itself became an enemy; some mornings it took an hour and a half to stand [4]. What carried him through was his family and friendships, and the support of people who knew his work [4]. His wife Tammy survived a rare cancer, and felt that part of what saved her was realizing how deeply their son loved her [4]. He came out grateful for ordinary life: standing in a slow pharmacy line as he recovered, he thought, I'm not on fire, and could happily have stayed there forever [4]. Lex Fridman calls it the miracle of the mundane [4]. Peterson ends by saying that keeping a positive orientation toward the future isn't naive optimism: "It's a moral obligation" [4].

He adds an example of meaning chosen under hardship: a former patient with every disadvantage who went back to a psychiatric ward to take patients worse off than her for walks [4].

Mel Robbins: grieve, accept, plan, and choose meaning

Mel Robbins offers the most practical version, a step-by-step plan for when nothing is going your way: a lost job, a diagnosis, a collapsed dream [5].

First, say out loud that life isn't fair, because suppressing that builds resentment and paralysis [5]. Second, give grief a deadline: cry, stay in bed, vent, but tell yourself, "I will allow myself to feel fully, but I won't live here forever" [5]. She cites studies from UC Irvine after 9/11 finding that people who processed emotions early recovered faster, while those who didn't were still stuck in trauma years later [5]. Her rough guide: about 11 weeks for a breakup, six months to two years for a major loss [5]. Third, accept what happened, which is not giving up; she quotes Rumi: "Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you" [5]. Fourth, make a plan, even a small one, including asking an AI tool for a 30-day plan and finding people who have been through the same thing [5].

Then she turns to meaning, drawing on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, written after Frankl survived Auschwitz [5]. His insight, as she relays it, is that everything can be taken from a person except the ability to choose their attitude [5]. You may not control what happens, she says, but you control your response, and meaning is a choice, not a gift [5]. She suggests three questions: What can I learn from this? Who might I help because of what I've been through? What part of me is growing, even now? [5].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Agreement: escape makes it worse. Chödrön says avoiding suffering deepens it [2]. Eger says suppressed emotion makes us sick [1]. Hollis says asking how fast you can get rid of a depression is the wrong question [3]. Robbins says suppressing the truth that life isn't fair builds resentment [5]. Peterson says we aren't built for comfort [4].

Agreement: the inner response is the part you control. Eger's "I was victimized, but I am not a victim" [1], Frankl's freedom to choose one's attitude as relayed by Robbins [5], Chödrön's trust in your capacity to stay open whatever arises [2], and Hollis's question of what task the suffering brings [3] all put the power in how you meet the pain, not in whether the pain stops.

Agreement: meaning often means service. Eger turned her pain into helping others heal [1]. Robbins asks who you might help because of what you've been through [5]. Chödrön's tonglen turns personal pain into compassion [2]. Peterson's former patient took others for walks [4]. Hollis describes a purpose larger than the ego [3].

Agreement: feel it first. None of them recommend skipping the pain. Eger says write the anger letter [1], Robbins gives grief its time [5], Chödrön says stay with the emotion [2], and Peterson says grieve after betrayal [4].

Where they differ: meaning versus presence. The Robbins, Hollis and Peterson versions are about purpose and tasks: what is this asking of me, what can I build from it [3][4][5]. Chödrön's is less about finding a purpose and more about presence: staying with pain, letting go of the need for certainty, and letting the ego loosen [2]. Her approach doesn't require a story that makes the pain worthwhile; it asks you to stop fighting it.

Where they differ: deadlines and plans. Robbins sets a timeline for grief and moves quickly to a plan [5]. Chödrön's practice is about staying without rushing to fix [2], and Hollis names patience and powerlessness as the hardest lessons of his career [3]. These may suit different moments: acute setbacks you can act on, versus deep losses that can't be fixed.

Where they differ: how hard the path is. Peterson frames it as welcoming maximal burden and treats hope as a moral duty [4]. Eger describes choosing light even in Auschwitz [1]. Hollis is gentler, saying meaning often becomes clear only in hindsight: he saw his depression as beneficent only later [3].

Why It Works

The sources give several explanations, mostly psychological rather than experimental.

Meaning supplies support that circumstances don't. Hollis says work that is meaningful to the psyche supports us through suffering and sacrifice, while work without meaning eventually pathologizes into burnout and depression [3]. The most admired figures in history suffered greatly but were "fed by the purposefulness of it" [3].

Resistance adds a second layer of suffering. Chödrön says our attempts to avoid pain deepen it, and that clinging to solid ground is the root of much anxiety [2]. Robbins frames wishing things were different as suffering [5]. Accepting what happened removes that second layer.

Expressing emotion prevents it from festering. Eger links depression to suppression [1]. Robbins cites UC Irvine research after 9/11 in which early emotional processing predicted faster recovery [5].

Choice restores agency. Eger's distinction between being victimized and being a victim [1], and Frankl's freedom of attitude [5], give people something to do when they can't change events. Robbins adds a concrete plan as a ladder out of despair [5].

Pain can reveal what's missing. Hollis's depression came when his psyche withdrew support from an agenda that was good but incomplete, and it pointed him to a new life [3]. Chödrön says crisis leaves the ego less to cling to, which opens the way to something deeper [2].

Relationships carry people. Peterson credits family and friends with getting him through his illness, and Tammy felt her son's love helped save her [4].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Applies when circumstances can't be changed. Eger in Auschwitz [1], Peterson in chronic pain [4], and Hollis facing aging and mortality [3] all show meaning working when the situation itself didn't improve. That's the core of this approach.

Applies to many kinds of loss. The sources cover genocide, illness, depression, betrayal, breakups, job loss and death [1][2][3][4][5].

Not every depression is a message. Hollis distinguishes intrapsychic depression from reactive and biological depression [3]. Searching for meaning is not a substitute for treating depression with a professional. If you are struggling to function, or thinking about harming yourself, talk to a doctor or mental health professional.

Not a reason to rush or deny pain. Every source insists on feeling the pain first [1][2][4][5]. Meaning-making used to skip grief would contradict all of them. Robbins's deadlines are guides, not rules [5].

Not a claim that suffering is good. Eger calls Auschwitz her best classroom not because of the suffering but because of what she discovered [1]. Chödrön doesn't promise to eliminate suffering [2]. Meaning makes pain bearable; it doesn't make it desirable.

Evidence is mostly experience. Apart from the UC Irvine research Robbins cites [5], the sources rest on clinical experience, religious and philosophical traditions, and personal stories [1][2][3][4].

What To Do With It

1. Say the truth out loud. Name what happened and that it isn't fair, instead of suppressing it [5].
2. Let the feelings out. Cry, rage or write: an anger letter first, then a love letter, as Eger suggests [1].
3. Stay with the feeling instead of escaping. When grief, anger or fear rises, breathe into it and watch it without judgment, rather than reaching for distraction [2].
4. Give grief a time frame. Tell yourself you'll feel it fully but won't live there forever [5].
5. Ask what the suffering is asking of you. Use Hollis's questions: What does this make me do? What does it keep me from doing? What task is here? [3].
6. Separate what happened from who you are. Remind yourself, "I was victimized, but I am not a victim," and that you're not what happened to you [1][3].
7. Choose your response. Even if nothing else changes, decide your attitude, as Frankl did [5].
8. Turn it toward someone else. Ask who you might help because of what you've been through, and practice breathing in others' pain and breathing out compassion [2][5].
9. Make one small plan. Take one concrete step, or find someone who has been through the same thing and learn from them [5].
10. Lean on people and notice ordinary good moments. Let family and friends carry you, and notice moments free of pain, like Peterson in the pharmacy line [4].

Sources

1. Healing, Forgiveness & Finding Freedom with Holocaust Survivor Dr. Edith Eger · The School of Greatness
2. When Things Fall Apart ·
3. Dr. James Hollis: How to Find Your True Purpose & Create Your Best Life · Huberman Lab
4. Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning · Lex Fridman Podcast
5. When Nothing Seems to Be Going Your Way: Here’s Exactly What to Do · The Mel Robbins Podcast