Can Hardship Deepen Our Compassion?

What good can come from suffering? For many of us, this question makes us feel uncomfortable because we struggle to see how the words “good” and “suffering” can even be in the same sentence. Perhaps it’s because suffering erodes, constrains, or burdens us in some way, and we typically don’t describe those kinds of experiences as “good.”

Suffering often imposes profound costs on us, but are there other possibilities that could emerge from our experiences of suffering? Recent findings from the Global Flourishing Study provide a glimpse of what this might look like.

Using the first two waves of data from more than 200,000 people across the 23 countries and territories included in the large global study, one recent publication looked at associations between experiencing suffering and more than 50 well-being outcomes measured about one year later. Extending previous findings on the distribution and childhood predictors of suffering, these new results largely confirmed its costs: those with higher suffering tended to report worse well-being at the next follow-up.

Yet this was not the whole story. When results were pooled across the countries, those who endorsed a higher level of suffering had a slightly higher likelihood of subsequently helping a stranger. Such actions might be considered expressions of neighborly love. Although the magnitude of this association was quite small, it resonates with what has been described as altruism born of suffering: the idea that our experiences of suffering can sometimes deepen our empathic concern for others and increase our motivation to help them.

This does not imply that suffering itself is inherently good, necessary, or automatically transformative. Indeed, findings from the Global Flourishing Study and other prior studies underscore the many costs that suffering can impose. However, there may be times when the suffering some of us experience becomes part of a process through which we develop a deeper understanding of the suffering others are facing and a greater capacity to respond to them with compassion.

The freely available TRANSCEND Suffering workbook includes activities that invite people to reflect on possibilities like these. The intention is not to look for a benefit that somehow defends or explains away the suffering we have experienced. Rather, it is an opportunity to consider whether our own encounters with suffering might have enabled us to see someone else who is suffering from a different perspective and meet them with love. Even if this does not always happen, the possibility that it can suggests the costly effects of suffering may not be the end of the story.