Suffering
People always suffer (psychologically) when they experience themselves as the victim of undesired circumstances, as reactive to external or internal states, and cannot find self-responsible answers. This statement must be strictly differentiated from the unacceptable sentence that everyone is to blame for their own suffering, or that they could alter it themselves or that they can, themselves, control everything. Humans have a fate, and thus cannot control whether good or bad things happen to them. However, people do have the freedom to decide how they respond to their fate, i.e. the external and internal circumstances. Some react to sickness, rejection or dismissal with depression and the loss of all joy in life. Others let go and find new ways of enjoying life. Even such things as the ‘ability to suffer’ or a ‘competence to handle the inevitable’ (G. Boehme), which have fallen out of fashion in our ‘modern’ world, are, at times, a necessary and appropriate response to painful and unfavourable events, and, therefore, they are a part of personal responsibility