“The Two Sources of Pain”
Heinz Kohut, well-known psychology theorist, points to the ‘two sources of pain’: ‘the pain of who you are and the pain of what you are replaced with.’ This is the explanation that human is not ready to settle in this world.
According to Kohut, ‘the first pain enriches us; the second one is the waste of pain.’ The One, who knows who we are says, ‘remember, O human, that you were once not even worth remembering’ [Quran, Chapter Human, 1]. God reckons that those who did not see us as worth mentioning as a ‘thing’ even in our presence, not only in our absence, supposed to have the ability to determine what we would be replaced with. Those are the people who live without taking our absence seriously in those thousands of years of emptiness, where we never existed on earth, where our birth was not expected, where our face was not missed, where our absence was not cared about. Those are the same people, who live without taking our presence seriously now.
While we are so worthless that we cannot even be a ‘thing’ in the eyes of others, the One who sees each of us worth creating from nothing, who is not content with our absence, who sees our absence as a deficiency, who says ‘I can’t do without you!’ determines who we are. Indeed, He gives us the ability and freedom, and bestows the selves upon us, to decide who we should be. Despite everyone. Despite everything.
Let us allow the one who determines who we are, who is not satisfied with us being replaced with anything, to tell us: ‘I chose you; listen now to what I say to you.’ [Chapter TâHâ, 13] Let’s look at whose eyes we will seek our honor in. Otherwise, we will waste the pain.
