When I was new, there was a slogan: 'Misery is optional'. I was enraged. My misery did not feel optional. I misread the slogan. I thought they were telling me that I could flick a switch to get well, and I knew I couldn't do that. Over time, I learned that there was a way out, and misery was indeed optional in the long term.
To this day, I'm amazed at the pushback against solutions and the defence of suffering, resentment, anxiety, shame, and depression as inevitable states of unresolvable distress, although I shouldn't be. Solutions are construed as denials that there is a problem in the first place. Basic pillars of the solution (e.g. our responsibility for our beliefs, thinking, and behaviour, for our reactions, perceptions, and interpretations, the fact that the world we see is simply the world we construe) are seen as existential threats.
Why is this?
If the problem is an objective fact out there, I'm off the hook. I'm innocent, I don't have to take action, and I don't have to change. 'Out there' can also mean: my personal history, the past more generally, my family, my environment when I was growing up, society more generally, the weather, the seasons, modernity, agencies, institutions, religion, genetics, capitalism, communism, various aspects of my 'identity', 'them'. 'Out there' means anything but me, even if it's notionally within me but beyond my agency.
The role of innocent hero in a cruel world is enticing. If the drama does not exist, nor does the hero. If I believe I'm the hero of the drama, my existence is literally under threat if someone threatens to pull the plug on the drama. This explains the hostility one regularly encounters to the solution.
The material world of zero-sum, of winners and losers, of victims, perpetrators, and rescuers, of the aggrieved and the demonic, of the heroic struggle, of tragedy, of drama, of melodrama, of retribution, of retaliation, of vindication, of 'justice', this material world may be hellish, but at least it's home, and at least I know who I am in it.
Suffering is an investment. Taking a different path means admitting I've been had and losing the investment.
What if it was all for nothing? What if, although the emotions were felt, the whole shebang were a show put on by the ego, shadows on the wall in Plato's cave? What if the whole charade were a colossal waste of time? What if I am not who I think I am? What if who I think I am is a mirage? What if I've backed a horse that is not even in the race?
It's easier to shove another penny in the slot to pump up the bloated Vegas casino of illusion than to admit you've fallen for the swindle of the century.
No one is denying that these experiential phenomena listed above exist, that they are grave, that they are potentially deadly, that they have physical correlates that might, for a while, require medical management, and that they are going to take a while to resolve.
However, what is likely true for most people is that, whilst you're alive, there is hope, maybe of cure, but certainly of improvement. To go down that path, the following preliminary steps are required:
1. I admit I do not like how I feel.
2. I hope I have been wrong.
3. I hope there is a different way.
4. I concede there may be a different way.
What can I lose by asking?