suffering, specifically the kind that occurs fully in your head, is an interesting thing. it seems to be an acknowledgement that what is going on in the world or in your circumstances is, on some level, not right. at least from your perception. something i've noticed from both experiencing and observing suffering is that no one can take a person's pain and suffering away from them. it is the sufferer who has to journey to a place where they can relinquish it themselves.
not only that, but no one really has the right to ask or to try to force a sufferer to relinquish those things--in that person's mind, it is like asking them to stop acknowledging the wrongness of their situation. trying to force the issue is likely to make the person hold onto their suffering even more tightly--like they are their only defender, and they will defend themselves with the validation of their own suffering. in doing this, ironically, they suffer more intensely, and for longer.
so you cannot, and probably should not try, to make a person give up their suffering, even when you can see that the more tightly they cling to it, the worse it becomes. but maybe the best thing for a suffering person is to journey with them to a place where that suffering is no longer necessary.
(as a side note, this is at the heart of anger vs. forgiveness.)
to be clear, i am not saying that if you are suffering, it is your own fault for having feelings or for being in that state of mind. but i think that it's easy to be so aware of our suffering, to focus on it and worry it, that we don't always give ourselves the best chance to get out of it. awareness of our feelings and assumptions can be helpful, but after a certain point, i'm not sure we really do ourselves any favors by dwelling on it. we reach a point of diminishing returns on the self-awareness.
