Why We Hold Onto Suffering: Trauma, Identity, and the Fear of Healing

Written by Roland Bal

Suffering can be just as self-indulgent as pleasure. When you live with the aftermath of trauma for a long time, the symptoms become a part of you. You adapt — for better or for worse — in order to cope and survive. And in that adaptation, something unexpected happens: the suffering starts to feel like identity.

The Attachment to Suffering as Identity

When you begin working and processing trauma symptoms, you may become aware of the attachment you have to your past — and even to your symptoms. You might notice that they have become part of your character structure and give you a sense of self, ultimately giving you a sense of safety, even when they hurt.

This in itself can feel conflicting at times, as part of you wants to get rid of the suffering, while another part of you wants to hold on to it as a sense of control. This is because the unknown is perceived as possibly more dangerous than your present known state. The suffering is familiar. Familiar pain feels safer

The binding factors that pin this identity down are not the core emotions themselves — fear, anger, sadness — but the secondary layers around them: guilt, blame, self-reproach, embarrassment, shame, regret, jealousy. These are what keep the core emotions locked in place, preventing them from being felt, processed, and released.

Did the Buddha Only Get It Half Right? Desire, Suffering, and Trauma

Buddhism places enormous emphasis on desire as the source of suffering — the wheel of desire, and the steps required to free oneself from it. Coming from a trauma background, I see it the other way around.

Desire is often an outcome once we have gone through suffering. When I have a parent who is overbearing and belittles me constantly, I might develop a pattern of having to prove myself — projecting that into the world as needing the perfect partner, the perfect job, the perfect credentials, to finally feel like somebody. That desire emerges from suffering, not the other way around.

Suffering creates desire, and desire eventually creates more suffering. But the step before desire — the original wound — is what needs addressing first.

This becomes a wheel of its own: suffering creates desire, desire creates more suffering, and the cycle tightens. The habit patterns that form around this cycle — the coping mechanisms, the addictions, the compulsions — become the identity. And that identity, over time, becomes the fixed reality we rely on and believe in.

Podcast: On Desire, Suffering, and Healing

In this conversation, I explore these themes in dialogue — the wheel of desire and suffering, what it means to hold onto pain as safety, and how the body and nervous system hold the key to breaking the cycle.

What Healing Trauma Actually Requires

Constructive trauma work needs to address two parts in order to alleviate suffering:

First, process and work through the emotional residue related to past experiences — the core emotions that have been suppressed or overwhelmed. Second, deal with the attachment to the known by addressing the habit of self-affirmation, which is tied to the need to control.

The habit patterns formed around protective structures take a great deal of work to shift. They are not simply behaviours — they are wired into the nervous system as the body's way of managing an ongoing sense of threat. Guilt, blame, self-reproach, shame — these are the binding factors that keep the core emotions pinned down. Addressing them, one layer at a time, is what gradually creates space for something different.

There is also the matter of intention. The intention to heal must come first — before technique, before insight, before anything else. Without it, the work keeps circling the same ground. With it, even the most deeply entrenched suffering can begin to loosen.

Why Letting Go of Suffering Feels Dangerous

Moving toward healing means moving into the unknown. And the nervous system — which has spent years organising itself around the known, however painful — will resist that movement. Not out of stubbornness, but out of the same survival logic that created the suffering in the first place.

It takes diligent work to resolve this. You must restructure your perspective and examine the need and validity of holding onto control. When you begin to do that — when you start to notice the attachment, the secondary gain, the identity wrapped around the wound — something starts to shift. New possibilities open up. A life no longer based entirely on the past starts to become conceivable.

That is not a small thing. For many people, it is the first genuinely new thing they have felt in years.

Why do you think you might be holding onto suffering? Leave your comment below.