Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

Pain Is Part of the Process
In the 1950s, a Polish psychologist named Kazimierz Dabrowski studied
World War II survivors and how they’d coped with traumatic experiences in
the war. This was Poland, so things had been pretty gruesome. These people
had experienced or witnessed mass starvation, bombings that turned cities to
rubble, the Holocaust, the torture of prisoners of war, and the rape and/or
murder of family members, if not by the Nazis, then a few years later by the
Soviets.
As Dabrowski studied the survivors, he noticed something both
surprising and amazing. A sizable percentage of them believed that the
wartime experiences they’d suffered, although painful and indeed traumatic,
had actually caused them to become better, more responsible, and yes, even
happier people. Many described their lives before the war as if they’d been
different people then: ungrateful for and unappreciative of their loved ones,
lazy and consumed by petty problems, entitled to all they’d been given. After
the war they felt more confident, more sure of themselves, more grateful, and
unfazed by life’s trivialities and petty annoyances.
Obviously, their experiences had been horrific, and these survivors
weren’t happy about having had to experience them. Many of them still
suffered from the emotional scars the lashings of war had left on them. But
some of them had managed to leverage those scars to transform themselves in
positive and powerful ways.
And they aren’t alone in that reversal. For many of us, our proudest
achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity. Our pain often makes
us stronger, more resilient, more grounded. Many cancer survivors, for
example, report feeling stronger and more grateful after winning their battle
to survive. Many military personnel report a mental resilience gained from
withstanding the dangerous environments of being in a war zone.
Dabrowski argued that fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily
always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often
representative of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny
that pain is to deny our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to
build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop
greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion,
and a generally happier life.