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Excerpt from

Living with pain and purpose: How Acceptance and Commitment Therapy realigns our values in the face of change

Resisting discomfort may seem like strength, but often leads to suffering. Learn how shifting your relationship to pain can enhance resilience, presence, and joy.

This post is sponsored by
Excerpt from

Living with pain and purpose: How Acceptance and Commitment Therapy realigns our values in the face of change

Resisting discomfort may seem like strength, but often leads to suffering. Learn how shifting your relationship to pain can enhance resilience, presence, and joy.
This post is sponsored by
Excerpt from

Living with pain and purpose: How Acceptance and Commitment Therapy realigns our values in the face of change

Resisting discomfort may seem like strength, but often leads to suffering. Learn how shifting your relationship to pain can enhance resilience, presence, and joy.
Excerpt from

Living with pain and purpose: How Acceptance and Commitment Therapy realigns our values in the face of change

Resisting discomfort may seem like strength, but often leads to suffering. Learn how shifting your relationship to pain can enhance resilience, presence, and joy.

Living with pain and purpose: How Acceptance and Commitment Therapy realigns our values in the face of change

Resisting discomfort may seem like strength, but often leads to suffering. Learn how shifting your relationship to pain can enhance resilience, presence, and joy.

My current fascination is who advertisers think I am. I’m an avid Toronto Raptors fan, and according to the ads shown during TV timeouts, they assume this means I’m likely addicted to sports gambling, struggling with body aches and pains, and looking to open a high interest e-savings account.

Now two of these ads reflect a North American assumption that all pain is bad and should be avoided. In our pleasure-seeking society, we often assume that pain, whether big or small, can be fixed or at least escaped. 

Sure, there are benefits to this approach of avoiding pain or discomfort — just yesterday I avoided the hassle of driving to the store by having groceries delivered to my door! But when we habitually evade, avoid or numb pain, we actually limit our wellbeing.

As Dr. Russ Harris once said, “Today’s middle class lives better than did the Royalty of not so long ago, and yet humans today don’t seem very happy.”

What kind of life results from a constant avoidance of discomfort? 

And what happens when life, in its unflinching way, includes unavoidable pain?

Pain x Resistance = Suffering. In other words, the more we resist pain, the more we suffer.

Our relationship to pain

This simple formula can assist in answering these questions: Pain x Resistance = Suffering. In other words, the more we resist pain, the more we suffer.

The relationship we have to our pain (or the pain of loved ones) dictates the level of added stress and struggle we can expect to have.

In a counselling setting, this formula can play out something like this: A client enters therapy because of some form of pain; this could be a dire diagnosis that turns life upside down, or the pain may be rooted in the emotional ache of a relationship ending. Often, the pain clients feel is existential: My life hasn’t turned out the way I thought it should. They come to counselling to get rid of these pains.

And we find that clients who can’t accept their pain – who need to quash or subdue it – suffer most. They find others to blame — family, friends, the government — for the pain they now live with. That same struggling group often repeats a familiar refrain in therapy: “Why me? Why now? This shouldn’t be happening.”

Resistance to pain is a normal human reaction. I’ve been kicked, so I will kick back. But remember: Pain x Resistance = Suffering.

When counsellors hint at the idea of “accepting” one’s pain, many clients cite an internal  narrative about ‘not giving up’ or ‘being strong.’ They are terrified to accept their reality, and mask rage. And when fear and anger are in the driver's seat, purviews narrow and reactions become extreme and self-focused.

To paraphrase Robert Frost, when two roads diverge in the wood, the one less travelled by may include intimidating pain and discomfort that leads to personal growth.

A fork in the road

When pain becomes compounded with resistance, we are faced with what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) calls a Choice Point. To paraphrase Robert Frost, when two roads diverge in the wood, the one less travelled by may include intimidating pain and discomfort that leads to personal growth.

In ACT therapy sessions, client and therapist walk that road together to examine the moments within the client’s day where values-based action could replace avoidant choices. Values represent those sturdy pillars of personality and meaning that make up not just who we are, but what we stand for.

Take Sylvia as an example. Her fading eyesight disturbs her greatly. Everyday she is reminded of what she cannot do — like driving and grocery-shopping — tasks she must now relinquish to someone else. Her physical pain is minimal, but key parts of her identity have taken a great hit over the last 5 years since the diagnosis.

Sylvia’s identity has been tied to her productivity and peace-keeping all her life, beginning when she coped with her father’s alcohol binges by tidying the house and reading bedtime stories to her younger siblings before putting them and herself to bed. She finds herself now losing core aspects of how she has defined her worth and purpose. She feels aimless. And mad.

Like many, she confuses goals and values, believing that what matters to her most is the next finish line. “Maybe I’ll be happier when…”

The work of ACT in a situation like Sylvia’s is rooted in helping her identify what values matter most to her. She must search through conditioned interests and seek her sturdy core. Like many, she confuses goals and values, believing that what matters to her most is the next finish line. “Maybe I’ll be happier when…”

With time, Sylvia is able to name her two biggest values: care and generosity.


But she notices it is very hard to take values-informed steps when a Choice Point arises. We must, therefore, check on Sylvia’s ability to be in the present moment — the very place she has avoided her entire life. 

Sylvia’s avoidance of the rage and sadness she feels about her worsening vision keeps her from choosing well. An ACT therapist would incorporate Mindfulness techniques to allow Sylvia’s nervous system to break the habit of avoidant behavior. For example, when faced with a Choice Point, she finds that Netflix is a simpler and more enjoyable momentary fix than stretching her comfort zone. Now, practices like box breathing help Sylvia stay present with Choice Points longer, so that eventually she is able to ground herself and make a decision rooted in her values rather than her reactions.

Her progress looks plain and straightforward to the outsider, but Sylvia’s sense of self-pride skyrockets after she arranges transportation for herself to get across town and attend a volunteer storytelling program for tots and parents. Her inner stockpile of children’s stories has an opportunity to be shared with the next two generations.

The transformation of pain is impossible without first the necessary shift in our perspective toward it.

Stay with it

The transformation of pain is impossible without first the necessary shift in our perspective toward it. By growing our inner capacity to stay with discomfort a little longer, we access greater presence in the moment unfolding before us. If we choose the longest line in the grocery store next time, see what inner prompts (thoughts, feelings, memories) and outer prompts (people-watching, grocery store music) we otherwise would have missed in our rush to leave.

It’s been said that how we do one thing is how we do everything, so tiny experiments like the one above are more important than we’ll ever know. Increasing mindfulness skills lead to greater coping skills and deeper enjoyment of life.

What would you do to change your relationship to pain?

How much momentary discomfort would you face?

How much time and effort would you give?

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This article is part of
Issue 3, Jan-Feb 2025, Change.
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