The Trouble with Calling It a Gift
For years I have said that the depression I went through after leaving the priesthood was a gift. I have said it to friends, and I have said it on this site. I meant it. The anxiety that turned into depression, the years in a dark place, the long stretch of standing at a threshold I could not seem to cross: looking back, they pushed me toward a second master’s degree, a new confidence, and the life I have now.
But every time I say it, something in me flinches. I did not live those years as a gift. Nobody handed them to me with a bow on top. I named them a gift only later, from a place of relative safety, with an education, a job, friends, and the means to get help. And I have wondered whether my story, told carelessly, turns into a sermon for people still in the dark: your suffering is good for you, and you just haven’t figured out how yet.
That is the tension I want to sit with here. People do grow through painful experiences. I have, and you probably have too. Yet the language of growth through suffering can romanticize harm. It can also quietly hand the job of recovery to the person who was hurt, while the people and arrangements that did the hurting walk away untouched.
To think this through, I want to use a model I built during my doctoral research on humiliation. I call it EIR: Experience, Interpretation, Response. Something happens to us. We make sense of it. We answer it. And how we answer helps shape what we experience next. In this view, the self is not a fixed thing that endures events. It keeps emerging, over and over, through that cycle. The model first showed itself in my humiliation research. Here I am stretching it further, as a way of looking at growth more broadly.
Here is where I have landed. Suffering and humiliation can become occasions for growth, but they do not guarantee it, and they never justify the harm. Whether growth happens depends partly on how we interpret and answer what happened to us. It depends just as much on whether the people and systems around us make new responses possible. Growth also has costs: pain, loss, and worn-down capacity. And some losses are never redeemed.
How Humiliation Narrows the Cycle
My dissertation explored how fat people found meaning in their experiences of humiliation. What stayed with me was that humiliation is not simply a bad feeling. It is an intrusion. Someone with more power, a person or a group, steps into another person’s path and fails to recognize and respect them. The injury does not stay in the moment. It reaches forward into what comes next.
I saw a version of this in my corporate years. I organized a biweekly meeting where the CEO and the president questioned department directors about their numbers in front of some forty people, and yelled when the numbers disappointed. Once, a director left the room in tears. His humiliation did not end when the meeting did. It shaped how he prepared for the next one, what he was willing to say, and what he was willing to risk. Around the table, others learned the same lesson. Many turned to flattery, and a few shaded their numbers. The experience narrowed everyone’s interpretations and everyone’s responses.
Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, describes how oppression can move inside a person. People who are looked down on long enough can come to believe the judgment and start running themselves down. They may come to fear freedom itself, and when they finally gain some power, they may reproduce the very relations that hurt them. Rosi Braidotti makes a related point from a different direction. Humiliation can shrink a person’s capacity to act, to relate, and even to imagine. That shrinking is real. It is not just a mistaken belief that a better attitude could fix.
In EIR terms, an experience of humiliation shapes both interpretation and response. But the cycle does not run on level ground. Some people and institutions have far more power than others to shape the experience in the first place, and to decide what it will cost afterward.
Making Meaning Without Blaming the Person Who Was Hurt
In the EIR cycle, interpretation is the hinge. The meaning we give an experience affects which responses even seem possible.
In “Dignity Is Something We Do,” I wrote about taking my mother to the emergency room. The staff asked her questions, and I answered every one. My answers were correct, and that was the problem. When I noticed the staff kept turning back to her, I read it as a cue to step back. I stopped answering for her, and she spoke for herself. Nothing about the room had changed except how I understood it. A new interpretation led to a new response, and that response gave both of us a different experience.
Freire would call this kind of shift a growing critical awareness. When people learn to read their situation as something history produced, and something that could be changed, it stops looking like a fixed fact or a personal defect. Picture a fat patient who stops hearing a doctor’s contempt as proof of personal failure and starts hearing it as a product of a culture that taught the doctor to look at bodies that way. The contempt still hurts. But the patient now has more room to decide what to do with it.
Braidotti adds that understanding the forces shaping us can increase our capacity to respond to them. She is also careful to say that interpretation does not create reality on its own. Bodies, money, institutions, and laws push back no matter what story we tell about them.
This is the place where EIR could be badly misused, so I want to be plain. The model does not mean people cause their own suffering by interpreting it wrongly, or that they could end it by thinking differently. “Just reframe it” is not my message. Interpretation matters, but the responses actually open to someone are limited by power and circumstance. My mother could speak up only because I got out of the way.
How Growth Through Suffering Actually Happens
We love the triumph story: the moment someone rises from the ashes. EIR tells a slower and truer story. Growth is a process, not a sudden victory. A response creates a new experience. That experience invites another interpretation, and then another response. Change builds a turn at a time.
My own crossing worked that way. For several years after leaving the priesthood, I stood at the threshold despite good friendships at work. What began to move me was not a sudden insight. It was a response: I enrolled in a second master’s degree. That decision put me in new rooms with new people, and those experiences gave me new ways to understand myself. The confidence came later, one turn of the cycle after another.
Freire insists that real change happens through dialogue. People investigate their reality together and then act on what they find. Liberation is something people do with the oppressed, never a gift delivered to them from above. Braidotti’s affirmative ethics points in a similar direction. It does not deny pain or pretend pain is secretly good. It asks whether pain can be reworked into relationships that increase people’s shared capacity to act.
That gives me a test I find useful. A response supports growth when it opens possibilities: for participation, for agency, for connection, or for changed conditions. Adapting to harm is not the same thing. The directors who learned to flatter their way through those meetings adapted. They survived, which mattered. But nothing about their situation, or the system that produced it, had opened up.
From One Person’s Cycle to Everyone’s
So far I have described EIR as something happening inside one life. It never really is. We interpret and respond inside families, workplaces, congregations, communities, and institutions. Our responses then either reinforce those settings or change them.
I made this argument in “The Systems We Build, and the People They Make of Us.” Systems teach people how to read pressure and which responses count as normal. People’s responses then reproduce the system or begin to change it. In my company, a meeting run by fear taught a room full of capable adults that flattery was the safe answer. Under a different president, one who understood the value of the people in the organization, the same building felt different. The people had not changed much. The arrangements had.
Freire describes the walls people run into as “limit-situations.” They look like the edge of the world, but they are historical obstacles, and people acting together can work to get past them. In Pedagogy of Hope, he adds that hope keeps a struggle going but cannot stand in for action. Braidotti reminds us that becoming is always relational and material. People need real support and conditions they can sustain. She also warns that community is not automatically liberating. Any group has to ask whose capacities it supports and whose it holds down.
This is the heart of the matter for me. Growth in a group is not just shared resilience, everyone learning to absorb more. It includes changing the arrangements that produce humiliation and keep people from taking part.
What Growth Through Suffering Costs
Growth stories rarely show the bill. Braidotti is honest about it. Real change can mean losing familiar habits, identities, and positions, and that loss can bring insecurity, fear, and a longing for what was. I know this one personally. After I left the priesthood, each time someone called me Mr. Green or Robert instead of Father Green, I felt a wave of despair. I was losing a self I had loved, not just a title. Braidotti also reminds us that bodies have limits. Exhaustion is not automatically a doorway to something new. Sometimes it is just exhaustion.
Freire, for all his hope, never promised a happy ending. History, as he saw it, is possibility, not a guarantee. Struggle can fail.
EIR helps make these costs visible at every point in the cycle. An experience can leave lasting pain or take some responses off the table for good. An interpretation may have to be revised, and letting go of an old story about ourselves can hurt. A response, such as resisting or speaking out, can carry real risk to a job, a relationship, or physical safety. And the next experience may be just as harmful as the last if the system around a person never changes.
That brings me to the ethical limit I most want to hold onto. Later growth does not make the original harm necessary, beneficial, or deserved. My depression did not happen so that I could grow. I grew, at a cost, and I would not wish those years on anyone. And someone who does not grow, or who cannot respond in a particular way, has not failed.
Worth Is Not a Prize for Recovering
There is a quiet trap in every growth story. If growth is the happy ending, then the people who grow start to look more admirable than the people who don’t. Recovery becomes a test, and anyone who fails it loses a little standing.
The philosopher Daniel Statman once argued that a victim who fights back against an attacker, even when fighting back cannot stop the attack, still protects something: her honor. The philosopher Blake Hereth answered that this puts the burden in the wrong place. If resisting preserves honor, then a victim who does not or cannot resist seems to lose it, and that is an offensive thing to conclude about survivors of rape. Survivors should not have to resist in some approved way to keep their honor or to deserve respect. I agree. A person’s worth to us and how we treat them should not hang on whether they bounced back well.
I have argued on this site that dignity is something we do, given and withheld between people, rather than something sealed inside us. That view makes this point more urgent, not less. If dignity lives in how we treat one another, then the duty to extend it falls on the rest of us. It is not a reward the injured earn by recovering. Harm can damage a person’s capacities and shrink their opportunities. It does not change what the people around them owe.
Freire has a name for help that misses this: false generosity. It is the kind of charity that comforts the person who was hurt while leaving the arrangements that hurt them in place. It keeps people dependent instead of making room for their own participation. A workplace that offers a resilience seminar after a round of public humiliations is practicing false generosity.
Growth Without Compulsory Redemption
Experience, interpretation, and response keep shaping what can happen next. That is the hopeful part of EIR. But the cycle is never a private affair. It runs through bodies, relationships, and institutions, and it runs on uneven ground, where some people hold far more power over the experience than others.
Freire and Braidotti come at this from different worlds, a Brazilian educator working with peasant farmers and a contemporary European philosopher. They meet on one point. People can make new futures, but they need relationships and conditions that support action. No one grows alone, and no one should be asked to.
So I will keep saying that my dark years became a gift, but I will say it more carefully. I grew through them. That does not make them good, necessary, or owed to me. People may grow through suffering. Suffering is not therefore good, and no one owes it to anyone. Our task is not to admire the people who survive harm. It is to change the conditions that cause it, and to make room for response, recovery, refusal, and care.
Has anyone ever told you that your suffering made you stronger? Did it feel like comfort, like a demand, or like something else? I would like to hear from you in the comments, especially if you think I have this wrong.
Sources
Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity Press.
Freire, P. (2014). Pedagogy of hope. Bloomsbury Academic.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.; 30th anniversary ed.). Continuum.
Green, R. K. (2015). Fat persons finding meaning in their experiences of humiliation: An interpretative phenomenological analysis [Doctoral dissertation, Fielding Graduate University].
Hereth, B. (2022). Honorable survivors: A feminist reply to Statman. Public Affairs Quarterly, 36(2), 121–135.
Statman, D. (2008). On the success condition for legitimate self-defense. Ethics, 118(4), 659–686.
