When pain and hurt can give us compassion for others

MIND MOVES:The road to recovery can lead into places which we may never have suspected

I HAVE MET a couple of incredibly happy people in recent weeks. People who had come through a prolonged period of feeling lost, and achieved a freedom from oppression.

It is remarkable to see a human being so alive and radiant, particularly when their joy comes from the resolution of conflicts that have beset them for a long time, and is grounded in genuine insight and confident self-determination.

The echo of their different journeys was very much to the forefront of my mind when I encountered someone this week who was troubled, confused and unable to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

Sometimes when we are in a dark place we may just need to let off steam, and have someone listen and not say too much. But this young man was in a very tough place and was earnestly seeking advice and direction.

Should he seek therapy? If so, what would be the best choice? He wanted to get a better handle on his mood which, he confessed, had landed him deep in the territory of suicidal thinking more often than he would have wished.

His own take on his conundrum was that he was deficient in some basic skills that we all need to survive.

But, curiously, he was in every sense a highly talented individual. His CV was marked by achievements in academic and social settings that marked him out as a very capable leader.

But as he spoke, I could hear echoes of loss and loneliness that had dogged him as he climbed the ladder of professional training. Poised at this impasse in his late 20s, he wanted to shake off his ennui and bring his emotional life in line with professional single-mindedness. He had reached a point in his life where he wanted to stop making the same mistakes over and over, and move on with his personal life.

The blow of tragedy, the devastation of loss can for so many of us become a gateway to freedom.

Initially we do everything to dodge our pain. We may run from it until there is no longer anywhere to hide, but at some point we make a choice to either live our lives in denial, or to turn towards our confused inner life and confront it.

When I looked into this young man's eyes, I saw great courage in his commitment to engage with his confusion and distress.

Where he could easily have turned against himself and the world in bitter resentment, he chose instead to acknowledge his helplessness in the face of it and seek support to guide him through it.

I thought of those I had met in a happier place, and of all they had endured to achieve their freedom, and I wondered if he realised what lay ahead. Because psychological growth is not a smooth, linear process where we add on new skills and resources to enhance our happiness.

It is less about addition, and more about subtraction. More about letting go beliefs and patterns of behaviour to which we've been wedded, and stepping into a space where, for a while, we don't know ourselves and feel disoriented.

The road to recovery is not a linear progression, but involves a circling back on the same old territory over and over again until we break free. A good therapist is someone who understands both the geography and the geology of the terrain where we have become stuck.

Someone who can guide us into places that scare us, deep into what we have regarded as "enemy" territory.

Freedom is achieved for most of us when we find the courage to feel some pain we have never fully experienced, and dismantle the many barriers we have erected to protect ourselves against it.

There will be a time to rebuild our world, to discover healthier ways of relating to others and managing our own troubled emotions. But therapy rarely starts in that place. There is inevitably a need to journey back and discover what has prompted us to adopt self-defeating patterns of behaviour in the first place. Making sense of our lives and processing our deepest memories is a critical life skill.

The people I mentioned above who have found a robust happiness are people who have made this journey, and accept that they will continue to struggle with distress from time to time in their lives. What they have achieved is not some kind of human perfection, but a capacity to rest more easily in their own skin and "lighten up".

Their pain has given them a compassion for themselves and for every human being whose pain they share. They carry their vulnerabilities with dignity and genuine self-acceptance and would claim that they have found through them a unique way to belong in the world and contribute to others.

• Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong - the National Centre for Youth Mental Health ( www.headstrong.ie)